4 ms·

You have no idea how much joy it brings me to have something written to me, from you :) Your site does such an amazing job of capturing a particular way of thin

by 1dom 2y ago

You have no idea how much joy it brings me to have something written to me, from you :) Your site does such an amazing job of capturing a particular way of thinking and interacting with the world. I can't articulate what that way is exactly, but it's been an immense comfort and an inspiration to me personally in so many ways since around 2010. I identify as a bit of an overthinker, and I see your site as a testament to what an overthinker can produce if they can wrangle their thoughts into a coherent personal website structure. I'll try not gush too much, but you are someone I have respected and followed on and off for most of my adult life, thank you, please have some warm fuzzy feelings of being appreciated by a random internet stranger. Anyway, back on topic... I think it depends what you define as breaking. I'm a simple, nerdy, backend/infra kinda person, so CSS issues don't really bother me too much - I like your "what gets used, works" thought, if I can read the text, I'll live with it. But I've met stereotypical designer-type web devs who make the 1px gap in Chrome 123 at least sound like a major burden. I don't know Said, but I assume they sit slightly closer towards the "1px gap _is_ broken" side than you or me, even if they're not a full blown designer-type. Regarding changing expectations, and the mobile example, I find it really interesting to read your thoughts on that. I feel like your website is an exception to normal expectations, at least for me. If I find myself on your site on mobile, I just e-mail the link to myself and pick it up on desktop. The information is so dense, stimulating and interlinked that consuming it on a tiny mobile feels like listening to Mozart over a tin can and some string. I think the physical mobile form factor is not good for long form or cerebral content, but maybe that's my own DeSkToP iS BeStToP bias. Have you done any analysis on bounce rates based on first visit device? I would guess a slightly higher return rate for people who visit on desktop first, as - to me at least - the archetypal gwern.net desktop website experience is a big part of the charm. > But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. I think some of this also depends on motivations for having a website too. If it's to get notes out there, then as long as it can be read it's fine. But if it's to stay up to date and be associated with the latest and greatest web experiences and technologies (or at least be perceived to) you're destined to a life of new-shiny chasing and tech churn. I do wonder how much of that ability to identify "sensible and plain JS" comes from shiny-chasing 10 - 20 years ago and just using the bits that still work from then. What will be the "sensible and plain JS" in 20 years time? A lot of this I guess is also specific to being a dev for a personal site, rather than pro web designer: part of being a modern business is keeping a modern front, so whilst "browsers breaking because of old stuff" is far down the list "having to switch to new shiny framework because of business decision to 'refresh' things" is a lot higher. But to try bring to some sort of conclusion, on a technical/presentation level, HTML/CSS/browser breaking stuff are - or will be - problem for a lot of people getting started with personal websites, because even experienced nerds can struggle to identify which tech will be around in 5 years time. You probably don't see it as that much of a problem, because you've solved it with a combination of the 2 options I gave: your site feels like a stylistic ally to motherfuckingwebsite.com (minimalism), and effort has been put in to maintain it over the years (e.g. UI update efforts via Said). To tie this back to OP about blogs vs wikis, that's a slightly different problem the author faces IMO. Not quite bit rot, but something higher level, an anxiety around content structure matching the shape of thought of the individual author, and the perception of that (blog vs wiki vs garden vs pkm buzzword) rather than technical (React vs Angular vs js/css buzzword).

gwern 2y ago
I am flattered to hear all that. I think Said is a lot closer to the '1px is broken' than me, but also that it's not really that important. How many websites have dropcaps at all? They are fun to have, but very optional. And so if you find the maintenance to be a burden, you can simply not do that. And then the core CSS/JS basically never breaks. (All of your problems will come from churn elsewhere, like SSL certificates - a major source of feature creep is the demand that everything be HTTPS now - or OS upgrades or SaaS bitcreep.) So my point is that a simple website is as close to zero-maintenance as makes no difference. It's much more complex than plain text files, but that complexity is widely implemented and is stable. I too am biased towards desktop and have to force myself to make any use of the mobile version, and check for regressions or friction. I find mobile to be incredibly stultifying for any kind of complex work or thinking. Nevertheless! There are a lot of mobile readers (including many people I respect and would like to keep as readers). So, mobile's gotta be good. At least I think we have managed to create about as realistically good a reading experience on mobile as feasible, and serve as a design showcase there too, to shame everyone else. That sounds plausible, but I haven't attempted to link visitors across devices. I am not sure if Google Analytics even allows that. (The new one is so confusing and hard to use I've largely stopped looking at traffic statistics.) I think it might be hard to interpret such an interaction, though, because mobile users bounce so fast and clearly so distracted & thoughtless & crippled (eg. because they are killing time on a bus), while desktop readers are much more mindful and 'high-quality time', so they are different in many ways beyond what version of the website they see. Do very many people actually want to claim to show off the latest web dev gimmick? I'd say not. Almost no one is doing that. Even web devs often have quite plain personal websites or blogs which are not trying to show off their mastery of the latest Nodebuzz.js (best viewed in Chrome 234) feature. When people write about their new Proton static site which uses Netlify to cross-compile from Github pages through AWS Lambdafront functions called on demand with a Kafka load balancer to prerender pages for the wasm.js shim and it only costs $100/month after optimization to host their blog with 50 pages and 50 views/day (aside from that time they accidentally created 10MB of logs and it cost $1,000 but don't worry, AWS was willing to forgive it), I am pretty sure they are not going through that to impress an employer! They are going through that because it's a lot of gizmos and puzzles to play with and 'number go up', and the end-result is irrelevant. They are doing it to watch the gears of the new toy go round, as Norbert Wiener said of the atom bomb makers. Which is fine, as long as you're just getting experience (and also not making a new atomic bomb), but may have side-effects in naive people thinking that any of that is a good idea, much less necessary. Managers & designers, on the other hand, do need churn to justify their existence. Look at the hilarious trends of companies commissioning new fonts where you can't see the difference with some Helvetica-like even overlaying the fonts, accompanied by thousand-word manifestos rhapsodizing over the design process inspired by the cliffs of California and the sensual humanism of Bauhaus (with a cheeky node to Swiss Modernism, and a dangerously daring serif on the 'g'). Oh, I think I would disagree there. As I was saying, browsers are actually amazingly good at backwards compatibility (perhaps too good). Which makes it easy to decide what browser features to use: if it's Chrome-only, sure, it may be gone in 5 years, but you don't have to be a genius to know "maybe I shouldn't make any major use of a Chrome feature that no other browser wants to support, and I should wait and see". I may have mentioned that we have a rule of thumb: we can use anything with >95% global support on CanIUse.com, and anything else must be backwards compatible/polyfilled or not used at all. We've hit a handful of things where the browsers betrayed us (I'm lookg at you, `<srcset>` and `ping` attribute), which you can find on https://gwern.net/design-graveyard https://gwern.net/design-graveyard but you know, even mid-1990s `<blink>`, which was never standardized to begin with, worked until 2013! So I'll put it this way: I don't think you can name 3 examples of reasonably widespread features, which were standardized and had >95% CanIUse.com support as of 5 years ago (2020), which are now either broken or rapidly being removed and have fallen <95%. (The only examples I can find are still exotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 , browser FTP support, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push 2 of them would have been bad ideas to use in new code in almost any circumstance, and I suppose for personal websites you could've in theory used the cache for an offline browseable website... maybe. I doubt many people ever did.) I think there's some degree of anxiety around perfectionism, but also around the aversion of writing (some people find any kind of writing to be very difficult, even when they have just written an essay by talking to you in a chat client), and the fear of pseudonyms being broken or being canceled. (Zoomers & Alphas seem particularly terrified of 'the dark forest'.)

by 1dom 2y ago

gwern 2y ago

I am flattered to hear all that. I think Said is a lot closer to the '1px is broken' than me, but also that it's not really that important. How many websites have dropcaps at all? They are fun to have, but very optional. And so if you find the maintenance to be a burden, you can simply not do that. And then the core CSS/JS basically never breaks. (All of your problems will come from churn elsewhere, like SSL certificates - a major source of feature creep is the demand that everything be HTTPS now - or OS upgrades or SaaS bitcreep.) So my point is that a simple website is as close to zero-maintenance as makes no difference. It's much more complex than plain text files, but that complexity is widely implemented and is stable. I too am biased towards desktop and have to force myself to make any use of the mobile version, and check for regressions or friction. I find mobile to be incredibly stultifying for any kind of complex work or thinking. Nevertheless! There are a lot of mobile readers (including many people I respect and would like to keep as readers). So, mobile's gotta be good. At least I think we have managed to create about as realistically good a reading experience on mobile as feasible, and serve as a design showcase there too, to shame everyone else. That sounds plausible, but I haven't attempted to link visitors across devices. I am not sure if Google Analytics even allows that. (The new one is so confusing and hard to use I've largely stopped looking at traffic statistics.) I think it might be hard to interpret such an interaction, though, because mobile users bounce so fast and clearly so distracted & thoughtless & crippled (eg. because they are killing time on a bus), while desktop readers are much more mindful and 'high-quality time', so they are different in many ways beyond what version of the website they see. Do very many people actually want to claim to show off the latest web dev gimmick? I'd say not. Almost no one is doing that. Even web devs often have quite plain personal websites or blogs which are not trying to show off their mastery of the latest Nodebuzz.js (best viewed in Chrome 234) feature. When people write about their new Proton static site which uses Netlify to cross-compile from Github pages through AWS Lambdafront functions called on demand with a Kafka load balancer to prerender pages for the wasm.js shim and it only costs $100/month after optimization to host their blog with 50 pages and 50 views/day (aside from that time they accidentally created 10MB of logs and it cost $1,000 but don't worry, AWS was willing to forgive it), I am pretty sure they are not going through that to impress an employer! They are going through that because it's a lot of gizmos and puzzles to play with and 'number go up', and the end-result is irrelevant. They are doing it to watch the gears of the new toy go round, as Norbert Wiener said of the atom bomb makers. Which is fine, as long as you're just getting experience (and also not making a new atomic bomb), but may have side-effects in naive people thinking that any of that is a good idea, much less necessary. Managers & designers, on the other hand, do need churn to justify their existence. Look at the hilarious trends of companies commissioning new fonts where you can't see the difference with some Helvetica-like even overlaying the fonts, accompanied by thousand-word manifestos rhapsodizing over the design process inspired by the cliffs of California and the sensual humanism of Bauhaus (with a cheeky node to Swiss Modernism, and a dangerously daring serif on the 'g'). Oh, I think I would disagree there. As I was saying, browsers are actually amazingly good at backwards compatibility (perhaps too good). Which makes it easy to decide what browser features to use: if it's Chrome-only, sure, it may be gone in 5 years, but you don't have to be a genius to know "maybe I shouldn't make any major use of a Chrome feature that no other browser wants to support, and I should wait and see". I may have mentioned that we have a rule of thumb: we can use anything with >95% global support on CanIUse.com, and anything else must be backwards compatible/polyfilled or not used at all. We've hit a handful of things where the browsers betrayed us (I'm lookg at you, `<srcset>` and `ping` attribute), which you can find on https://gwern.net/design-graveyard https://gwern.net/design-graveyard but you know, even mid-1990s `<blink>`, which was never standardized to begin with, worked until 2013! So I'll put it this way: I don't think you can name 3 examples of reasonably widespread features, which were standardized and had >95% CanIUse.com support as of 5 years ago (2020), which are now either broken or rapidly being removed and have fallen <95%. (The only examples I can find are still exotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 , browser FTP support, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2_Server_Push 2 of them would have been bad ideas to use in new code in almost any circumstance, and I suppose for personal websites you could've in theory used the cache for an offline browseable website... maybe. I doubt many people ever did.) I think there's some degree of anxiety around perfectionism, but also around the aversion of writing (some people find any kind of writing to be very difficult, even when they have just written an essay by talking to you in a chat client), and the fear of pseudonyms being broken or being canceled. (Zoomers & Alphas seem particularly terrified of 'the dark forest'.)