baxter.sh

The Reform Party, despite having only 5 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, have been featured in 25% of recent BBC’s recent 10pm news bulletins.

Which reminds me of this study: Does Media Coverage Drive Public Support for UKIP or Does Public Support for UKIP Drive Media Coverage?

Some have argued that extensive media coverage of UKIP is justified due to public support for the party. The findings here, however, are mostly inconsistent with this argument: the extraordinary media coverage that has been given to UKIP cannot be explained or defended on grounds of public opinion dynamics as measured by polls. We find that media coverage has no reliable relationship to public opinion polls in the one month, two months or three months before a particular month of coverage. Indeed, we find that coverage may have independently and uniquely driven some of the very public support that media regulators would later point to as their justification for the extraordinary coverage given to UKIP.

I was recommended a post by Reddit’s algorithm, and this comment by /u/leros stood out to me:

We had some gender issues in a growing organization I used to work at. Women were complaining that they were getting too harsh feedback and not enough support. At first people were thinking of this as a “how to treat women better” problem, but what we actually realized is that the men were just used to being treated poorly. Things like harsh feedback, minimal support, etc. Addressing these issues not only resolved the issues the women were complaining about but improved morale among the men as well.

I was setting up my new Mac and decided to try something different to my usual monospace font of choice, MonoLisa.

I was aiming to find a typeface reminiscent of the early Apple keyboards, like the one used on the Apple Extended Keyboard II (which was apparently a form of Univers 57 Oblique), but instead I stumbled across the beautiful Maple Mono.

I’ve been using it in iTerm and VS Code consistently for a few weeks now and I really like it. I especially like using the italic variant for type hints in Rust, which you can enable by adding this to your settings.json in VS Code.

{
  "editor.inlayHints.fontFamily": "MapleMono-NF-ThinItalic"
}

This actually took me a while to figure out, so hopefully that is helpful to someone!

I’ve been saving bookmarks for a long time.

I started saving bookmarks to del.icio.us a long time ago, and then when del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo, I started saving them to Pinboard.

My oldest bookmark is for A List Apart, saved in July 2005!

But recently I’ve been feeling the urge to write more, and I’ve also been feeling like I could do more with the bookmarks that I save. So I’m going to start trying to use this site for bookmarks. Maybe not instead of Pinboard, but as well as pinboard.

I’ve been obsessed with these tiny clamps for a while now. I never really do any soldering or anything so I have no real use for them, but I just think they’re great.

Omnifixo

I enjoyed this short post on OKLCH colours by Jakub Krehel.

If you are on a display that supports Display-P3, you will see the right colors more vivid than the left ones. If you are on a display that only supports sRGB, the colors should look nearly identical, as the browser maps the out of gamut color back inside the sRGB gamut.

I also enjoyed playing with the tool Jakub built to explore OKLCH.

git add .

My biggest problem (actually, not my biggest problem). Amongst my biggest problems is the problem that I would rather spend days messing around with the code that powers a blog than actually writing blog posts. I literally spent several minutes today wondering how I would show related posts. A problem that will definitely not rear its head until I have more than one blog post.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Some classic Donald Knuth Truth for you there.

So in the interest of postponed optimization, here is a blog post.

I don’t know if RSS works yet. I don’t know if anything works yet. The design is a work in progress, roughly inspired by the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann. It doesn’t work on mobile yet. Maybe soon.

Wish me luck.