elondaits

Because there are consonants that change their sound before an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) should be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse. So that's why some people prefer the neutral to be written with an x.

Linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm explaining how things work in practice, not how they're supposed to be according to the wishes or mandates of some foreign institution and its followers.

Judging something and understanding something are different processes. The RAE creates guidelines, but people often speak and write without following them, and that's still worthy of examination.

The X in Spanish is sometimes used to “neutralize” the gender of a word. An alternative is the @, as in “latin@“. Visually the x is more harmonic, because of its smaller size, and the fact that there are lower and uppercase versions.

That x is generally pronounced as an “e” in Spanish (i.e. “latine”, not “latin eks” or “latinks” and most certainly not “latinj”, as the j sound of x is only before a vowel, e.g. xavier = javier).

But why write an x and not an e? Because there are consonants that change their sound with an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) would be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse.

This is how it works. I don’t care to enter a discussion of whether this is nice or not, good or bad. I’ll just leave with the anecdote that I once participated in a project that involved a big survey written in the traditional “neutral” form, which consists of writing “chicos/as” to covers both binary genders. That form quickly becomes very hard to read… “Los chicos/as están sentados/as con sus nuevos/as compañeros/as”. Use of the x has a lot of pushback from some people, but all in all, it’s easier to adapt to.

Flash, IE5, MS Word

I think this is an instance of the trolley problem. So, don't expect to find a correct answer.

I hate it when it realizes something that was contextually obvious to me, and then treats it like a precious nugget of wisdom, including it in the README, the comments, and the commit message. Even worse when it’s a hypothetical situation. “Even if the raw chicken is bagged and refrigerated, we want to avoid a leaky bag.”

Normalization means adjusting the waveform’s amplitude to some level. That’s a precisely defined operation, an objective measure. But “loudness” is a different and perceptual thing. It’s a measure of “how loud” something feels to us, and I understand it depends on the overall dynamics and frequencies, and you can attempt to measure it through different algorithms / heuristics.

The loudness war wasn’t about normalizing to 0db vs -3db, but rather about dynamic compression which is a process that raises the volume of softer sounds without affecting the loudest ones as much (or at all). It’s what you use to make the breathiness of a singer’s voice, or a drum kit’s hi hat, more present in a recording.

Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.

Well, yes, of course. At some point, the availability of AI might result in people that have all the planning, communication and constraint management skills of a graphic designer but don't need to define the layout themselves. Something akin to programming beats on a drum machine vs performance on an actual drum set.

... but I'm not too bullish on an AI having "taste" because the reason people have taste and a POV is because they're living life. Artistic choices are the consequences of past experiences and associations we make unconsciously, which result in a patchwork that holds meaning. A "great AI" would need to imitate that, and maybe they someday will, but we're talking about imitating embodied experience and thousands of sensory impressions that we normally don't even bother verbalizing, or writing, but as humans are able to transform and share.

I agree that these examples are "better than the default" but still suffer from many AI-design bad smells. In terms of design, "style" (as in "Bauhaus" vs "Japanese" vs "Faux kid drawing") is less important than readability, economy and communication:

- The main issue with AI posters and flyers is almost uniform information density. They read as "too crowded". Posters should, like photographs or paintings, have a rhythm where some areas are high density and others act as negative space, and provide a more restful transition between information areas.

- The icons as bullet-points are a big AI cliche, and for the most part useless. Nobody needs an icon of a cupcake to understand what "cake" means and most of the other icons have no clear interpretation. Icons are only useful when, by themselves, communicate the idea (like the typical toilet icon). It's telling that every poster includes them.

- AI is not brave enough, or wise enough, to leave some blank space. Blank space is the #1 design resource.

- Font and visual style should not be arbitrary aesthetic choices, but rather motivated ones. They could relate to the event or the place through its history, culture, biome, or through the utopian vision of what the organizer is trying to bring to life. There should almost never be a legitimate choice between "Should we use Japanese, Punk or Kid-drawing style?"

- Being honest, earnest, truthful, is better than being cool.

- If a poster for an event calls your attention you can scan for the date, time and place. They will be there somewhere. But before you get there, there'll be important questions: "who organizes this?" "who is this for?" "what's the vibe going to be like?". Only a few of the posters try to partially provide this information through very small sentences (e.g., "A day of music, making and family fun")... but it's hardly enough. In my opinion this is what 80% of the time designing the poster should be spent on... looking nice and "professional" won't inspire trust or create commitment.

IANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch. That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.

My static sites are built on the server (Github pages or Cloudflare Pages). They rebuild each time there are new commit on the repo, and that way I don’t need to version built artifacts.

I built locally for many many years and I’m much happier with this model since the commit log is a much better reflection of what changed and there are no inconsistencies as whenever you’d commit source and built artifacts that don’t match.

… It demands some extra care in terms of making sure the server can pull the dependencies and run the build scripts, but that also means my colleagues (or me in the future recovering the project from the repo) would be able to build with what was commited and nothing more… which is a requirement in my case.

Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.