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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • I agree that Mimi is being a dick in this comic and that anyone acting like that in real life is a dick.

    That being said, dropping the plastic bottle in the generic trash hole is something I could ignore. (And if your area has a bottle deposit I damn well expect you to put the bottle beside the trash can so less fortunate people can at least get your deposit – of course a gleefully evil person wouldn’t do it in this case.)


  • Though, to be honest, plastic recycling is mostly a myth in in the first place. For most plastics, the “recycling” procedure consists of paying some impoverished country to let you dump them there.

    Basically, every plastic bottle can be assumed to contribute to microplastics contamination sooner or later. Glass and aluminum bottles are better (as are cans); both of those are economically feasible to recycle.



  • Honestly, I’m still very much in the “classes define what a tag represents, CSS defines how it looks” camp. While the old semantic web was never truly feasible, assigning semantic meaning to a page’s structure very much is. A well-designed layout won’t create too much trouble and allows for fairly easy consistency without constant repetition.

    Inline styles are essentially tag soup. They work like a print designer thinks: This element has a margin on the right. Why does it have that margin? Who cares, I just want a margin here. That’s acceptable if all you build are one-off pages but requires manual bookkeeping for sitewide consistency. It also bloats pages and while I’m aware that modern web design assumes unmetered connections with infinite bandwidth and mobile devices with infinitely big batteries, I’m oldschool enough to consider it rude to waste the user’s resources like that. I also consider it hard to maintain so I’d only use it for throwaway pages that never need to be maintained.

    CSS frameworks are like inline styles but with the styles moved to classes and with some default styling provided. They’re not comically bad like inline styles but still not great. A class like gap-2 still carries no structural meaning, still doesn’t create a reusable component, and barely saves any bandwidth over inline CSS since it’s usually accompanied by several other classes. At least some frameworks can strip out unused framework code to help with the latter.

    I don’t use SCSS much (most of its best functionality being covered by vanilla CSS these days) but it might actually be useful to bridge the gap between semantically useful CSS classes and prefabricated framework styles: Just fill your semantic classes entirely with @include statements. And even SCSS won’t be needed once native mixins are finished and reach mainstream adoption.

    Note: All of this assumes static pages. JS-driven animations will usually need inline styles, of course.




  • “Legally required”, so they’re seeing it in the local laws. Some countries require websites to disclose who operates them.

    For example, in Germany, websites are subject to the DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, “digital services law”). Under this law they are subject to the same disclosure requirements as print media. At a minimum, this includes the full name, address, and email address. Websites updated operated by companies or for certain purposes can need much more stuff in there.

    Your website must have a complete imprint that can easily and obviously be reached from any part of the website and is explicitly called “imprint”.

    These rules are meaningless to someone hosting a website in Kenya, Australia, or Canada. But if you run a website in Germany you’d better familiarize yourself with them.


  • I work for a publicly traded company.

    We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

    I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

    And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.






  • My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

    Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)


  • Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience

    Also, there’s not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it’s heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is.

    Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn’t necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that’s how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless.

    My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn’t exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was very modest.

    The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn’t inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don’t want to pay big money to compromise it even further.

    If someone asked me about what GPU to get I’d tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn’t worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn’t spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.