RSS Bilingual Reader

There are two smartphone features that I consider sacred and believe they must never fail: phone calling and the alarm. There is an unspoken contract between users and vendors. Sure, innovate away, change the UX at will, whatever. But you can't fail at making phone calls and sounding the alarm. I missed the alarm for the first time in many years last weekend. I have an iPhone 13 Pro, with the latest iOS. There was no sound. When I woke up, the phone was still in "alarm mode", with ...

When I'm searching for docs, 95% of the time a single example would suffice. Yet, 95% of the time I can't find one in any official source. It seems that by default formal technical documentation is targeted towards someone who's deeply immersed in the ecosystem. But many developers have to juggle a lot of "worlds" in their heads daily. When jumping between projects, languages and frameworks, it takes a considerable amount of mental energy to restore the context and understa...

Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple's first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids ...

Some folks have gone all-in on AI-assisted coding. I've seen some tweets (not sure if sarcastic or real, to be honest) expressing disgust about the prospects of ever writing code by hand anymore. The common argument I hear is that this is just another step in the long history of programming breakthroughs. We moved from machine code to assembly, from assembly to C, and from C to high-level languages like Python. Each step was a new layer of abstraction, hiding the messy details of the underly...

In anthropology there is a notion of high-context and low-context cultures. A high-context culture is a culture or society that communicates dominantly through the use of contextual elements, such as specific forms of body language, the status of an individual, and the tone of voice employed during speech. Rules are not directly or explicitly written or stated. By contrast, a low-context culture enjoys communications that take place most often through written or spoken (verbal) speech and rules ...

Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this: What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same year that Sweden's King Gustav IV Adolf declared war on France? But ChatGPT got the correct answer in a few seconds. Flag of Dominica features the Sisserou parrot, which is only found in Dominica. Great Britain established a small colony on the island in 1805....

Over the past few years, Google has done a surprisingly great job of making YouTube less interesting and engaging — and in turn, less addictive. Maybe they've got some ethical guidelines in the top management now? If so, well done, Google. Back in the day, when YouTube was mostly about your subscriptions, it was mildly addictive. You’d watch a C++ talk, and the sidebar would actually show you other useful C++ videos. It was relevant, and it kept you watching without feeling like you were dro...

People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed before—but cars also existed before the Ford Model T). But sometimes, I really want a faster horse. Netflix in 2012 was a super fast horse. It had a simple but massive catalog of movies a...

Half Life and Half Life 2 are my favorite games. I've played them through multiple times. I played Half Life 1 for the first time in 1999 or 2000, can't remember. My computer at the time could barely run it. Nowadays, it's a struggle to play older PC games on a Mac. There are two fundamental issues: A while ago macOS had dropped support for 32-bit applications. Recently, Apple hardware migrated from Intel x86 to Arm architecture. My machine is Mac Studio 2023 M2 Max 64GB RAM, running...

I made a little puzzle game called Knight Ride. You can play it here: knightride.rakhim.org . A few months ago, I started learning game development with Godot and began building a chess-inspired game. Game development is new and unintuitive to me, so for some quick 'build-n-ship' dopamine, I took one mechanic from that project and turned it into a simple browser game. The idea is simple: you have one knight on a chess board with a few random enemy pieces and the target square. You have t...

Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its consequences. Any large company that creates products, whether software or physical, is responsible for how its design choices shape the broader perception of design itself. Google is a prime example because millions use its products, often treating them as standards...

Sublime Merge is a fantastic Git client. I’ve been using it for years, even after switching from Sublime Text to VS Code. VS Code has excellent built-in Git support, but I still prefer a dedicated app for staging files. Even when I used Neovim or Emacs (which has Magit , arguably the best Git client), I stuck with a separate tool for this step. Why? Staging files is the last significant step in preparing a meaningful commit. It’s a moment for a preliminary self-review, an opportunity to catch is...

Computers are precise machines. You can give a computer a precise command using an inhumane language, and it should perfome the command. It's not a human, and there is no point of treating it as one. The goal of humanizing user experience isn't to create an illusion of human interaction - it's to make these mechanical commands more accessible while preserving their precise, deterministic nature. UX designers and product managers of tech companies did a lot of damange to people's ...

I've added a new feature to Exotext which converts YouTube links into embeds (when a link is on its own line and surrounded by newlines). To test things out, here are some cool YouTube videos I've watched this month.

Sometimes you need to make a change to an SQLite table which is not possible with a simple ALTER command. For example, today I realized that email_verifications table in my DB references users with a foreign key, but does not have ON DELETE CASCADE (I simply forgot to put it in). This makes it impossible to delete a record from users table if there are corresponding records in email_verifications . There is a hacky way to achieve this, but I prefer this: Create a new table with the correct struc...

I discover and curate dozens of blogs every day while working on Minifeed . The blogging is far from dead, there are SO many blogs out there! Sadly, lots of blogs don't have RSS. What's surprising is that the "techiest" of blogs usually don't have RSS. Quite often, I come across a beautiful blog, handcrafter with love by a passionate programmer, usually built with some modern frontend stack like React/Vue/Svelte, with Tailwind or Astro or what have you; there's a comple...

While developing Textpod (a simple note-taking app written in Rust), I needed to automate building and publishing on Github. This article (or the corresponding set of YAML-files ) describes the setup which performs the following: Build binaries for Windows and Linux Build binaries for x86 Macs (Intel) and ARM Macs (arm64, M-chip) Add the files to the latest Github release, along with checksums Publish to crates.io Build a lean Docker image for amd64 and arm64 platforms Publish Docker images to D...

I had a "woah" moment once when one programmer got genuinely baffled about the fact that a website somehow "erases" the history of requests from the Network tab of Chrome DevTools. He was wondering what magic method was used to hide the communication. He hadn't realized the app was not a single-page JS application (SPA), and he actually wasn't aware there is another way to make web apps. The idea that each click actually makes the browser fetch a completely new page, ...

Lots of scientific Python libraries are often used within Jupyter notebooks. At work, we develop and maintain plenty of such libraries for quantum computing, and some more higher-level ones include extensive user guides in form of Jupyter notebooks. Recently, I've been involved in building a new library, and it ended up containing a half dozen notebooks, covering everything from a quick start guide to niche applications and configuration examples. It being a completely new product, we wanted...

I love science fiction in all forms, and I can't resist watching almost any sci-fi movie. So, I watch a lot of them. It's a bit annoying how "sci-fi and fantasy" became the standard pairing. In my eyes, these genres are exactly opposite. It's like grouping movies about horses with movies about cars. Anyway, here are some lesser-known science fiction movies that I recommend. The Man From Earth Can a bunch of people sitting in a room, talking, be great science fiction? Yes. (...