A stupid question, maybe, but:
I assume that if I want to get better at writing, I’ll have to get better at editing and revising.
However, how do I get better at writing if I don’t have anything to say?
Do I — and this task is likely underspecified/underdescribed — spend hours polishing turds?
What’s the causal mechanism behind “read good writing, and you’ll be able to write better”?
I assume I’m already used to reading good writing, and I’m not going to pick up any additional techniques by mere passive osmosis anymore.
400 kg/kg/day
400 kcal/kg/day, right?
If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.
Maybe you're aware of an OOM more accessibility advocates than I am, but I come across all sorts of well-written blog posts explaining this or that bug, which browser/etc. it happens in, and how to work around it. That's most of the bullet points, although it might not be in the bug tracker of choice for the project.
What people aren't doing, as far as I have seen, is starting pooled-funds bug bounties for these things. People pass the collection plate for childhood cancer, especially since I'm told that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but not bugfixing.
This is not insensible: all sorts of people tend to be unwilling to set aside the cost of a new cell phone to fix one bug apiece that, generally speaking, is encountered in one's day job.
And there are a lot of accessibility bugs out there, some of which are quite old. I can only assume that accessibility bugs aren't treated massively more seriously than anything else in the WebKit or Firefox Bugzillas.
While the world would be a better place if bug-bounty collection plates were more popular, I can see why they're not as popular as I'd like.
They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…
You don't even need to describe this as a baptist-and-bootleggers problem to explain most of the lack of actual bug fixing.
A frontend developer who runs into accessibility-related browser bugs all day and gets very good at working around them and publicizing how to work around them is unlikely to be a competent C++ developer who is capable of going into browser-engine codebases and actually fixing the bugs.
While I can imagine why others would want to see this sort of thing, it seems to me that "this will go on your permanent record" would be a strong disincentive to engage seriously with the text or mention anything aloud that you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone in the world, ever, knowing about you.
I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes
You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites' designs over the years and now decades.
and hosting and how to do comments. It’s gonna happen, though. Any day now.
One thing Substack does that you can't get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).
I'd like to second this comment, at least broadly. I've seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I've struggled to put the × 10
in the right place.
One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn't an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.
I can tell that this is a game being shown on ESPN between the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers. I also think that the earlier estimation of winning is 50/50 in the first picture and 61/39 (favoring Milwaukee) in the second picture even though all the numbers around MIL are lower than the numbers around NYM.
I have no idea what to make of the “Live Money Line” part in the first picture.
For those of us who are interested in betting in the abstract but know nearly nothing about sports betting, would you explain what the picture is showing?