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There are actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.


I can resize my window easily if I wanted shorter text. Or used ctrl-shift-m on Firefox. But I can't easily make the text longer without userscripts or addons.

> actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read

That may apply to most people, but not to everyone.


afaict it applies to literally everyone. there's a variable "sweet spot" of course, but once you get out to "extremely wide" it's reliably worse for everyone, and there are LOADS of computer monitors that qualify for that label.

margins to control the width of large blocks of text have a ton of research in their favor, it's not just "more whitespace = more gooder" UI design madness. there's some of that of course, but there's a sane core underneath it all.


Solution: rotate your monitor 90 degrees, and inform your OS that you have done so. Now your monitor is 1080x1920. You'll actually be amazed how much more of a document fits on screen without sacrificing readability.

Preach. I have 4 monitors and one is a vertical 1440x2560. Massive productivity boost - terminals running claude code, reading docs, IDE panes, anything with lots of scrolling. Highly recommend it!

Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.

Does it really matter since pop albums were/are (almost?) always "collections of singles + fillers"?

ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.

no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.

* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles

* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album

* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely

* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for

Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...


The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.

Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”

It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.

That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.


Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.

Likely not a bad way to clean money.

Depending on your standards and what company is making it you could even have “cruelty free.”

The problem is that AGI fantasy aside, CTOs at companies are expected to deliver results today and tomorrow. Better to let somebody else hold the bag and train models, then once it finally works as advertised you can ease on the brakes.

Humans are still in the loop as the final signoff responsible for liability, and to do an audit you’ll need someone who knows what they’re looking at.

Liabilty will be waived in the terms of use.

Terms of use are not a legal “get of out jail” free card.

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.

I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.

[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.


I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM from Oracle if they can avoid it.

The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.

Most languages I write are ahead of time compiled with pretty good startup time so it's not really a need I have that I feel GraalVM solves?

Yes but Java has historically had pretty long startup times. If you want to write Java specifically then GraalVM is probably still the best option for AOT.

OpenJDK is from Oracle as well.

HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.

Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.


> Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.


They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon Corretto)

They surely like the work Oracle employees provide to OpenJDK.

If they let you when you want to.

One big thing that has prevented CNY from becoming a reserve currency is that China has explicitly said it wants to preserve its ability to heavily and suddenly restrict capital flows in and out of China. If all of a sudden you can't redeem CNY outside of China inside it that makes it a very poor storage of value.



To be clear cnh is a convention while cny is the iso standard.

There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)

The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms.

While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.


I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.

While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.

> I wish Mac had the same ability natively

Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)


You can also long-click the button instead of hovering. Also, see the menu bar entries related to window management, which replicates these same functions but can be bound to keys in the system settings.

Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.

> Hover over the green button in the top left of the window.

Weirdly it still doesn't quite do what I want. It leaves a gap around the edge of the window for some reason.


Damn. Never knew that. TIL

I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts - Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try `c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.

[flagged]


Don't be a child

Vulgarity aside, I can sympathize. For years I've been told by designers that discoverability and intuitive interacting patterns are so important, yet every aspect of modern design focuses so much on minimizing "distractions" that features go undiscovered. We get forced into suboptimal workflows and usage patterns because everything gets over-fitted to the lowest common denominator.

This is the biggest reason I love Linux. I can choose my own desktop, or even forsake the desktop entirely for a simpler window manager, without changing operating systems. Some are hyper focused on a tailored experience (gnome) while others let you configure to your heart's content (kde).

There's sacrifices to be made, of course, but not having to live under the oppression of Apple's beneficiary dictator designers is absolutely worth it for me.


This, exactly.

Every MacOS app has a menu item explicitly made for this exact thing. It's often the third item in the menu:

    File    Edit   View

But they refuse to put these viewing options under the View menu item. Why? Why would you not put these really great viewing options under View?

It's under the Window menu?

I’m pretty sure it does? I haven’t installed anything and it has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the window menu and snapping IIRC

I can't speak to the quarters but you absolutely can snap windows to the left and right halves in MacOS.

i do quarters all the time. it used to be with third party apps. iu think its native now

You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)

I'm pretty sure Tahoe added that behavior natively. I personally use Magnet on Sequoia, however, so I am not 100% certain.

This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe. Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a decade and has a few more options.

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