I keep wondering about the focal depth problem. It feels potentially solvable, but I have no idea how. I keep wondering if it could be as simple as a Magic Eye Autostereogram sort of thing, but I don't think that's it.

There have been a few attempts at solving this, but I assume that for some optical reason actual lenses need to be adjusted and it can't just be a change in the image? Meta had "Varifocal HMDs" being shown off for a bit, which I think literally moved the screen back and forth. There were a couple of "Multifocal" attempts with multiple stacked displays, but that seemed crazy. Computer Generated Holography sounded very promising, but I don't know if a good one has ever been built. A startup called Creal claimed to be able to use "digital light fields", which basically project stuff right onto the retina, which sounds kinda hogwashy to me but maybe it works?

Fingerprinting. There are a few reasons you'd do it:

1. Bot prevention. If the bots don't know that you're doing this, you might have a reliable bot detector for a while. The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all, or even better specific exact combination they always use. Noticing bots means you can block them from scraping your site or spamming your users. If you wanna be very fancy, you could provide fake data or quietly ignore the stuff they create on the site.

2. Spamming/misuse evasion. Imagine an extension called "Send Messages to everybody with a given job role at this company." LinkedIn would prefer not to allow that, probably because they'd want to sell that feature.

3. User tracking.

> The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all

I imagine most users will also not have extensions at all, so this would not be a reliable metric to track bots. Maybe it might be hard to imagine for someone whose first thing to do after installing a web browser is to install some extensions that they absolutely can't live without (ublock origin, privacy badger, dark mode reader, noscript, vimium c, whatever). But I imagine the majority of casual users do not install any extensions or even know of its existence (Maybe besides some people using something like Grammarly, or Honey, since they aggressively advertise on Youtube).

I do agree with the rest of your reasons though, like if bots used a specific exact combinations of extensions, or if there was an extension specifically for linkedin scraping/automation they want to detect, and of course, user tracking.

Wasn't it obvious? One of Amazon's founding focuses was "make it stupidly easy to pay us." They went overboard to make it easy to buy things. The most obvious is their infamously patented "one click" purchasing, but there were lots of other things. For example, in the early days, they would let you create as many accounts with the same email address as you wanted because "sorry, an account with that email already exists" was an error that might keep you from purchasing.

The Amazon stores were the ultimate physical expression of this ideal. Walk into a store, pick up what you want, wave your hand vaguely at a scanner, leave. If they could have reliably gotten your ID without your involvement at all, they would've done that instead, but the hand scanner was the closest they could come.

There's nothing malicious about it. They just want you to be able to consume as easily as possible with as little friction or opportunities for second thoughts as possible.

Yeah, the books are formulaic, but it's a good formula. "Act 1: Okay, here's a neat magic system with well defined rules. Act 4: surprise, there was an extra rule you didn't know about! Act 5: we killed God with the surprise, extra rule."

It's hard for me to fault Mistborn. It has the tightest ending to a fantasy trilogy I've ever seen. And then, as an afterthought, Sanderson somehow managed to end the Wheel of Time, which frankly I don't think Robert Jordan could have managed to do.

The thing that make the formula click to me is that it is written as a thriller.

By the last 10% of the book/serie he has created a problem you are 100% sure is insurmountable but by the last 5% you realise how small hints through the story could be composed to create a solution.

I think your summary of act 4 is uncharitable. Every book of Sanderson's I've read has been about showing unexpected ways the rules could be combined, not surprise new rules.

Mistborn left me breathless at the end. During the last couple of chapters of the third book I uttered many a "holy shit" and "no way" under my breath. Much to my wife's pleasure, who bought the books for me on a whim.

The whole earring thing blew my mind, and it was so obvious from book 3 onwards.

The ending of the Mistborn series is indeed, incredibly tight. The whole series had a roundedness to it that I have not encountered before, every word, theme, event and character has a place in the Bigger Scheme. I think this is because he wrote all 3 books together, so he would regularly go back to book one to make edits based on new things he thought of in book 3.

It was pretty much guaranteed to happen at some point. This is the author whose kickstarter for four ebooks that made $40 million.

Plus the universe just begs for an arbitrarily large number of seasons and spin-offs. There's something for everybody. You almost certainly start with multiple series of Mistborn. From there, you can go in dozens of directions. And there's a built in huge audience. It practically begs for high budget TV adaptation.

"Hey, you know how everybody's complaining about AI making up totally fake science shit? Like, fake citations, garbage content, fake numbers, etc?"

"Sure, yes, it comes up all the time in circles that talk about AI all the time, and those are the only circles worth joining."

"Well, what if we made a product entirely focused on having AI generate papers? Like, every step of the paper writing, we give the AI lots of chances to do stuff. Drafting, revisions, preparing to publish, all of it."

"I dunno, does anybody want that?"

"Who cares, we're fucked in about two years if we don't figure out a way to beat the competitors. They have actual profits, they can ride out AI as long as they want."

"Yeah, I guess you're right, let's do your scientific paper generation thing."

"WD-40 Multi-Use Product is a...blend of lubricants"

How does the author of that fun facts page know this for sure? I just heard that only executives get to see the ingredient list. Is this fun fact author an executive?

I'd love to know what a sufficiently high precision plumb bob is like. Is it very tall? How on Earth does one calibrate it?

Broadly speaking, you want it as tall as possible, usually we're talking a few stories high, so 20m or so.

Without the attracting masses on either side you can set it swinging and measure the period, which lets you compute the restoring force in the wire.

I love how this information is produced. Succinct, excellent and simple visuals, clear argument, and a solid amount of sarcasm and cynicism to keep us entertained and to provide an air of senior technical person.

MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.

All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.

Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.

Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.

That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.

> All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick

Is there evidence of this?

At a meta level, good design is a very useful tool for discussions about good design!

"I downloaded a separate application to make resizing windows easier" is not a point in favor of MacOS's window resizing decisions.

True, but macos x has never had good window resizing decisions.

I never said macOS has good window management.