Jul 08

Whatcha

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It’s funny when people tell me I can’t see differences in font drawing and on-screen text that I can easily see.

Just because your eyes are broken don’t mean mine are. Fucking hell, people, I used to be a proofreader for a living (for a little while, anyway) so I can tell when there’s an em-dash vs. an en-dash and when people have used a backtick vs. a single opening quote mark.

Also, stupids, I don’t care if the removal of sub-pixel anti-aliasing means the glyphs look “truer” to their actual shape.

I CARE ABOUT HOW GOOD IT LOOKS ON THE SCREEN MOTHERFUCKERS

And removing sub-pixel AA means it looks worse on the screen — which should be anyone’s true consideration when it comes to the average user experience.

Jul 07

Smartphone Hatred

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One of the reasons I utterly detest smartphones is that if smartphones didn’t exist, my screen would not now be ruined, and I would not have to attempt to offload thousands and thousands of dollars of now-useless Apple hardware.

The only reason Apple is removing sub-pixel anti-aliasing is that it is not supported in iOS, and they are bringing in a bunch of iOS code to MacOS. Thus, they have to kill the only reason many people even use MacOS.

Unbelievable. I cannot believe the only real reason I stay on MacOS is now gone.

Jul 07

Push It

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Wow, it turns out that I can do a lot more pushups when I am extremely, extremely angry.

Hulking out works, my friends.

Jul 07

All the Time

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It really sucks that everything in the computing world is getting worse all the time.

Since there is no chance that Apple will go back on this destructive font change, I’ve decided to get rid of all my Apple equipment while it still has the most value. I will be selling it all soon since there is no point of having it with its major advantage (excellent fonts) being removed.

I will likely never buy another piece of Apple hardware again due to this.

Jul 07

Mojave

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I installed the Mojave beta on my Macbook Pro as some user on Hacker News claimed that the destructive font change as implemented in Mojave was “not the same” as toggling this setting in High Sierra.

Like most people on Hacker News, he (?) was wrong and the fonts appear identically atrocious and foul in Mojave as toggling that setting in High Sierra.

Damn, it is going to bite ass selling all this crap.

Jul 07

Pub

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Indeed. Before there were other sources, I emailed quite a few scientists and researchers asking for copies of papers in the late 1990s up until 2010 or so. Every single one sent me a copy that I otherwise would’ve had to spend $35+ to read.

Jul 07

Not a Good Night

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Apple just totally fucked me over.

This means that fonts will look atrocious even on Retina displays. What the fuck. Why would they do this? This makes me so fucking angry considering how much money I’ve spent on Apple hardware over the last few years. Fuck me. This removes the entire reason to even have a 5K display, which still requires sub-pixel anti-aliasing to look good.

By the way, yes I know how it will look as this is the same change as going to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available.

I am not sure what this means for me exactly as far my computing environment goes. In the short term, I just won’t upgrade to Mojave. In the medium term, it means that I will eventually get rid of all my Apple hardware and move either to Linux (most likely) or Windows just because it’s also shitty but much cheaper to run.

I am indescribably angry right now. That’s about $15,000 down the fucking toilet.

Fuck you, Apple. Fuck you very much.

(In the medium term, I will be selling three 5K iMacs and an older (late 2013) MacBook Pro within the next year or so, if anyone is interested.)

Jul 06

Not so clever either

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I really loathe smartphones with the sort of deep and ample hatred that usually only accompanies revenge scenes in movies.

There’s a show called Counterpart where our world splits, and one side of this cosmic divide does not have smartphones. Can I go live there?

Jul 06

All flavor, no substance

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Why I Don’t Love Gödel, Escher, Bach.

This person merely doesn’t love it. I, however, detest that turd of a book. I read it once and read parts of it again because I couldn’t believe anyone could treat such lightweight twaddle so reverentially.

The book is written like I would’ve written a similar book when I was 9, and with about the same intellectual heft. It’s a pamphlet that ballooned into a doorstop.

This also particularly bothered me about the work.

This sort of cursory engagement with the cultural features of the book ends up undermining one of the book’s major selling points: I had originally seen it as the work of a polymath effortlessly weaving fields together into a multifaceted but uniform whole, but in reality, areas that are more than a step or two outside Hofstadter’s areas of expertise (computer science, formal logic, some of the more mathematically rigorous bits of cognitive science) are at best shallow, and at worst are “…heaping scorn…” on things Hofstadter doesn’t understand and doesn’t appear to want to understand.

Hofstadter reminds me of people who aren’t really all that smart but drop “well, actually” into every conversation. In terms of one of my favorite movies, Hof is a Caleb who thinks he is a Nathan. He was also a precursor to and a progenitor of people like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell, and that is bad enough in itself.

Jul 06

Numericity

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Empiricists assure us that the world can be solved with math. But you can’t even solve math with math.

That’s being a little unfair as Gödel’s findings have little to no consequence for the real world. But all the goobers spouting about how philosophy is unnecessary and then go on to build an algorithm that they didn’t “mean to” discriminate against black people but does show just why philosophy is necessary.