"shift/control-clicking to get multiple things is a flat no-go from a UX perspective" - Do you mean that this is NOT how you should do multiselects? If that is what you mean, then how _do_ you do them? If I have a list of items and I want to select 10 or 15 of them in a row, I currently don't know of a better UI to do that with than shift+click.
Most normal users (aka if you read Hacker News, you're not one of those) don't and won't know about shift and control clicking. A more UX-friendly alternative is to have checkboxes; you can still have shift/control-clicking on top of that (for selecting many things quickly), but it shouldn't be the only option.
HTML has had checkboxes since at least version 2 (1995), so just use those if you want to do multi-select using checkboxes. I don't think you can do shift-clicking to select ranges though (without resorting to js) but control-click is of course redundant as that is just the default behavior for a list of checkboxes.
This is pretty much correct, though I feel there's some finer points depending on the number of options (5? 10? 50?) and the expected number of values chosen (2? 4? 10?).
Tag-style multiselects are fairly common (see https://react-select.com/home for an example). These are good where the number of values a user is expected to have selected is small (less than five imo) but the number of options is large enough to make checkboxes impractical. If you're expecting a higher number of things to be selected, you could have the option list stay open after an option is clicked, so they user doesn't have to reopen it each time they want to add an option (and, in fact, the "Animation" example does precisely that).
Yeah, shift/control-click is a longstanding workflow for multiselect and macOS, Linux and windows all support it with various platform-specific subtleties. The worst part of the web is losing all these sorts of features because some web designer thinks they’re a “bad UX”
The nice thing about native behaviors is you only have to teach them once. Custom behaviors per application make it harder for people to develop a model of how their computer works because you have to learn a new interaction model per application. I’m pretty anti the notion that UX is intuitive in any sense: all human-computer interaction is learned at some point and we should focus more on educating people how to do tasks like this than pursuing some lowest-common denominator concept of “intuitiveness” or “discoverability”.
Anyways, my favorite multiselect paradigm is the old windows one with two list boxes side by side and buttons in between.
Django has a version of that widget in the admin panel and I really like it.
I actually like native web multi-select widget because I know how it works and it works well. But most people don't know how it works, no one is going to teach them, and they aren't going to look it up (they probably don't even know what to search for to learn!). So you need one that works just with clicks and no modifier keys or most people won't actually be able to use it. In other words, it's not accessible.
Why not do both? Gmail's a great example of this. Hold shift while clicking two checkboxes in a range of emails, and watch as the entire range is selected for you to manage. :)
As someone who also lives in Central Oregon (and was born and raised here), I will say this: this article is profoundly misleading.
They state that the Upper Deschutes CFS goes from ~1200->~65, and state that is from irrigation. But they don't actually prove that. Much of that CFS decline could be observed out of irrigation season, because that section of the Deschutes dumps a ton of water into lava tubes/back into the ground. You'd have to measure the CFS at the end of that section prior to irrigation getting turned on, then after, and then the difference is what is going to irrigation. And CO Land Watch doesn't do that. Hell, they don't even state where their data is coming from.
That is for the year 2021, when that article was written. You can see the drop in April, which is when irrigation starts. It's about 500CFS,or ~half the river at that point. That is NOT 95% of the river, as CO Land Watch would have you believe. (Side note: CO Land Watch has a bit of a reputation around here. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like they would gladly end all farming in Central Oregon to save a few salmon.)
The chart I care about is the 'city vs everything else' one, TBH, and that one is broadly accurate.
There's a lot of room to provide more water for both fish and farmers by 1. eliminating waste and 2. fixing some of the weird water rights stuff where people are really just wasting it.
About every quarter, I get together with a group of friends a few hours away and we have an all-weekend LAN party. They all live in the same area, and have wives & kids so usually people are in and out as their schedule permits, but we all hole in up a house and play games for a few days. It's fantastic.
It's also allowed me to completely deal with any video game addict urges that I get. If I feel the urge to start playing some recently released game, I just tell myself "Ah, I'll play it at LAN", and then I don't need to play in the moment. The urge goes away. So now I only play 2 days a quarter at LANs (maybe 8 days a year total), whereas previously years of my life would go into games. It's been a hugely positive thing for me.
This is a nitpick, but their "Claude 2 on 200k Context Data" graph doesn't actually extend to 200k, only 100k. Would be curious to know if that _is_ actually the graph for 200k with the wrong axis, or if its the 100k graph.
I've been wondering if all of the jailbreak-fixing/rlhf-tuning that is happening to GPT4 is responsible for "nerfing it" (Still unsure if that's actually happening or if people are just noticing the gaps in its understanding more now).
Imagine someone who is perfectly politically-correct and never says anything even remotely edgy/original. When I imagine people like this (who I've met irl), they are genuinely a little bit stupid. And I wonder if the "make this model never output anything "dangerous" process" causes a model to become stupider.
Anyway, I'm off to go see if Claude 2 will help me stage a coup in a third-world country and become its dictator. Adieu.
I feel far more peaceful and centered when I am hungover. I don't have a thousand things flying around the edges of my brain, nipping at my consciousness. I just _am_.
Drinking can do that for me too, but it shuts off so much of my brain that eventually, it's like being what I imagine a dog is. Completely reactive, with almost no higher thinking. Not that that is bad. I enjoy it.
If not for how bad it makes me feel physically, I'd probably spend most of my waking hours either drunk or hungover. What that says about me, I hesitate to think about, hah.
I also found that in my limited experience with meditation, I could sometimes find that place of tranquility and "simply being". But it was so rare, and the experience of meditation so frustrating and seemingly impossible to progress in, that I gave up. But I still hold that what I am after in meditating is the same thing that I am after in a night of drinking. Single-threadedness, peace, acceptance.
Yeah the issue is its really unhealthy to drink enough to be hungover multiple times a week. But then the question is, what are we saving ourselves for? Life is happening.
I've tried meditation, could never reach a high enough level with it to feel sustained peace/calmness. I should put more effort into it though
One of the more hilarious takes I've seen. "There are no papers for this, and I choose to disregard the countless number of people who say it is much easier for them to read if the line lengths are constrained as they are in a book or scroll or every other form of human writing ever put on this earth, so I will not make my site easier to read. F you."
I really don't think that's what he's saying. You are assuming a great deal of malice, rather than positive intent. What he's saying is that there isn't hard evidence that shorter lines are more readable, so he made the style choice of longer lines. You're claiming that most people prefer shorter line widths, but again present no evidence that most people actually have that preference, other than vague references to "countless people". I actually think you're probably right, and if you had data Dan might update his stylesheet. But in the absence of evidence, you're just presenting your opinion as fact, and assuming malice.
This is why it's nice to get people's preferences vs thoughts about preferences. Preferences aggregate, thoughts about preferences do not. If one designer says "Readers like narrow columns more, everyone knows that." and another says "I like reading narrow columns.", I'd give the person speaking about readers in general more weight (even with them going the same direction). But, if 100 designers spoke for all readers and 100 designers spoke for themselves, I'm giving more weight to the second group. Hearing 100 preferences is more valuable than hearing one idea, 100 times.
Yeah, that's probably true. He also at least allows people to set their own reading width by adjusting browser.
My frustration stems from the fact that I find the argument "there are no papers with sufficient evidence" to be pedantic bullshit. Like yeah, sure, you aren't even wrong, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I've never seen anyone claim to like 180 char lines, whereas I've seen hordes of people who say it is very difficult for them to read that line length, and prefer something book-sized (lengthed?).
Hmm, yeah I actually agree with that way of putting it. The evidence that does exist are the anecdotes, and he seems to ignore that evidence. Many of his readers, myself included, seem to prefer fixed line lengths. So it is a weird choice.
I was mostly reacting to the assumed malice in the parent comment. Based on his blogging style, I think it's more likely that Dan's just a pedantic guy implementing his personal preferences on his personal blog :)
I've a cousin who does something similar, and also (according to him) makes in the high hundred-thousands/low million range. In theory, it sounds like easy money, but I personally would probably break down in tears from boredom if I had to work on drop-shipping widgets, even if I was raking in the cash.
