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pikelet's comments

pikelet | 4 months ago | on: Migrating from AWS to Hetzner

Not everyone is on a US tech salary (no idea about the company in question – just saying that this doesn't apply universally).

pikelet | 5 months ago | on: Meta exposé author faces $50k fine per breach of non-disparagement agreement

Yeah, like… exactly what she's doing? People here are so willing to assume that she's doing all this out of self interest, because of what? A $500,000 book deal? Compared to what she stands to lose? She isn't stupid, she knows the risk. As a New Zealander myself I'm not sure if there's just some cultural difference at play here with the tendency to assume the worst in people but it seems kind of sad.

pikelet | 6 months ago | on: Pico CSS – Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML

Looking at the CSS variables page it seems that this is because they scale up the base font size at various breakpoints, starting at 106.25% at 576px, and going all the way up to 131.25% at 1536px. It definitely feels too heavy handed to me. The first time I viewed the website on mobile it seemed fine (because it's actually at or close to the browser's standard font size) so I wasn't sure what the problem was until I viewed it on my desktop. I can kind of see what they're going for as it keeps the layout fairly consistent, but I don't think it's the right approach.

pikelet | 8 months ago | on: Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds

I think that if people are trying to avoid plastics but unknowingly using them anyway due to misleading design or greenwashing then their heart is in the right place and we shouldn't sneer at them. At least they're conscious of the problems and trying to do better. Call out the companies who are doing this. Don't blame people for being confused by something designed to be as confusing as possible.

pikelet | 8 months ago | on: Rocknix is an immutable Linux distribution for handheld gaming devices

The whole point of my retro handhelds are to be an escape from this kind of complexity. I just want to sit down without any connection to the wider world and jump into some simple games like I did in my childhood. No distractions. They're for the times I want to escape 'productive work' for awhile.

pikelet | 9 months ago | on: Zod 4

The next step is to click the project logo in the top left.

pikelet | 11 months ago | on: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

This is exactly my experience, every time! If I offer it the slightest bit of context it will say 'Ah! I understand now! Yes, that is your problem, …' and proceed to spit out some non-existent function, sometimes the same one it has just suggested a few prompts ago which we already decided doesn't exist/work. And it just goes on and on giving me 'solutions' until I finally realise it doesn't have the answer (which it will never admit unless you specifically ask it to – forever looking to please) and give up.

pikelet | 1 year ago | on: Sid Meier's Civilization VII

It's boring, grey, and flat. It takes up too much space on the screen for very little reason (and I'm a fan of whitespace used well). It's generally unpolished with various elements misaligned, squashed together, lacking padding, or in other cases randomly too much padding/margin. It's just a big mess... IMO. I think the actual game underneath the UI looks great at least. I really like VI, and V has plenty of character too.

pikelet | 1 year ago | on: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.

I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.

pikelet | 1 year ago | on: Plain Text Accounting (PTA)

I'm self employed and use it (Beancount, as I like the more strict approach) for my business accounts and also for my stock portfolio. Fava, the web UI, is very handy for reporting and visualising things, though I also have a few scripts to automate certain processes like importing transactions from Wise and tracking exchange rates. I really don't have the discipline to use it for daily personal expenses or budgeting though.

pikelet | 2 years ago | on: Shein Files for U.S. IPO

They steal designs from independent fashion designers (because designing their own clothes would cost too much I guess). It's also the volume with Shein. They produce so much crap at such low prices and it's all just dumped into an already struggling environment. Shein is far from the only one, but it's the most obvious and well known example.

pikelet | 2 years ago | on: Unix Time reaches 1.7 billion

These are important typographical features and I'm fairly sure this is handled by font rendering libraries, not the browser (other than handling the CSS rules), so I can't imagine it's that difficult to implement? Correct me if I'm wrong!
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