“Sorry, there was an error: The request is not allowed by the user agent or the platform in the current context, possibly because the user denied permission.”
I think the quality will keep improving, because humans will keep curating the training data to compete for best results. The downside is that "quality" is conflated with "performs best for a particular audience and platform" which could just as easily mean re-ingesting junk and spitting it back out... because that's what people respond to.
I see lots of “google is evil” narrative here… in reality they could add a feature to collect spam flags and still disregard user preferences. It’s just that the data will probably not help them, since adversaries are much more motivated to manipulate it for SEO profit than the average user who is unlikely to repeat that search
I was a Pivot - this article rings true. When I first joined people would often describe with joy how exhausted they were every single day for months when they first joined, as though it was evidence of learning and growth. That’s only true sometimes. What I realized is that it doesn’t actually stop being exhausting, people just adapt. There is a difference between being tired because I applied myself, did something meaningful and useful, and learned something new, compared to just being tired from navigating personal interactions all day every day.
Google can't say this directly; forcing people to use your upsell for preferential treatment is likely anti-competitive. Instead, Google ranks on page speed (among many many factors), and then offer a proprietary tool (AMP) that promises to help.
It's similarly easy to make your website slower than it would be with AMP. Absent a performance advocate in the development team, the features that reduce performance are much more apparent and valuable to most businesses.
That program is a Rorschach test for how people’s brains work. It’s either delightfully clunky and you totally get how it’s going to function, or is the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever touched and it is confusing why anyone would recommend it. I am highly skeptical there is much middle ground.
Illustrator has a lot of this too despite many different UI decisions. I tend to describe it as “designed for aliens and people who think like aliens”.
Which includes me, it’s been my main art tool for twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of people scream about how terrible it is that it doesn’t work like Photoshop.
So really I think that “a serious vector editor” is just gonna be hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.
It's also interesting that the two editors seem to work for different people. I learned with Illustrator many years ago and can still use it decently well, though I rarely do so. At work I've attempted to use Inkscape, not having an Illustrator license, and completely failed every time I try.
You'd think one lightly-used (so no deep muscle memory, etc.) vector graphics program would be much the same as another... nope.
> Illustrator has a lot of this too despite many different UI decisions... I’ve seen a lot of people scream about how terrible it is that it doesn’t work like Photoshop.
> It’s either delightfully clunky and you totally get how it’s going to function, or is the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever touched and it is confusing why anyone would recommend it.
It is merely a domain-specific program and requires specific training to use effectively.
This is true of Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, Illustrator, AutoCAD, Altium, etc.
I taught myself photoshop, GIMP, autocad, solidworks, and Altium, all to reasonable proficiency. Personally couldn’t figure the first thing out with Inkscape.
Another comment nailed it, they made literally alien UI choices.
As someone prone to the same failings I don't think they made alien UI choices, I think they made programmer UI choices where the programmers were struggling to make a reasonable UI choice, like the programmer's initial idea is to just make a text box and write a value but then they realize that is bad so they need to make some sort of interface to do it and they don't really have any taste about how any of the stuff should be laid out but they have looked at other graphical editors of course so they have sort of an idea of what is wanted.
It does not feel designed, it feels laid out by a programmer mimicking some other graphical editor from memory on an ad hoc basis.
I last used Inkscape in anger about 4 years ago. I had gotten pretty effective with it. Lately I’ve found it to have slowed down dramatically. I can’t understand why they would’ve allowed its performance to regress so dramatically. It’s become unbearable to use for seemingly no difference in functionality.
Having said all that, it still makes sense to me, for the most part. I watched a lot of tutorials when I learned it back in the day, however.
Are there ways to make inkscape work more... symbolically/logically?
I tried making an SVG manually, using real basic integer coordinates.
Then I wondered if inkscape could do better, and imported it.
It took my nice shapes, like a rectangle from 0,0 to 50,100 and mangled all the coordinates into floating point numbers like 0.0123,0.00456 49.9998,100.00123 (not exactly, but you get the idea)
I work in inkscape a lot, and aesthetically like to keep things aligned on integers where possible. Makes it easier to edit by hand if needed, keeps things aligned, and keeps files small.
You have to be careful about when you move, scale, group, ungroup, etc. But I have found it pretty reasonable to stay on nice round numbers with inkscape. I feel like inkspace is BETTER for that than say illustrator.
Worst case you can export as "Optimized SVG" and reduce the number of decimals. Make sure you check it after though since it can change the design when rounding.
Inkscape includes the border width in the displayed object size and position. So an SVG file with a 100 units square and a 1 unit border will be a 101 units square in Inkscape. And if you change the stroke width the object size changes. This causes the coordinate mangling you saw.
Consequently, I find it impossible to do precise CAD style diagrams in Inkscape. Of course, it's not designed for that.
Since it's "just SVG" the beauty of it is you can use any XML tool or just a text editor.
Inkscape needs some getting used to for sure but still is a very capable vector graphics editor and I'm glad it exists. Not sure we'd be able to put in the effort into a new tool of this depth if we were to start today (same with GIMP).
I noticed some regression on Ubuntu 18/20 though: the integrated XML editor crashed, and the weird property dialog sometimes doesn't pan into view. Don't know if that has something to do with Ubuntu or gtk/gnome specifically, but Ubuntu Studio appears to have moved to KDE (or alternatively XFCE) recently. And switching to a KDE-based distro such as OpenSuse or Manjaro (or Studio) is what I'm planning to do anyway.
I want judges to be safe. I also want to understand the motivations of this attacker. Their actions weren't justified, but having a long-running court case that can decide the course of your life can cause many new problems. What level of desperation would cause someone to lash out like this? There will always be unreasonable people, but I wonder if this outcome would have been different if courts did indeed process cases in a timely way. We know it is especially cruel to people who have nothing to defend themselves with.
An openly misogynistic lawyer who is believed to have killed the son of a female federal judge in New Jersey had a list of more than a dozen other possible targets, including three other judges and two doctors, three people with knowledge of the matter said. ...
While his precise motive for making the list remains unclear, Mr. Den Hollander had received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and F.B.I. agents earlier this week were exploring whether that news set him off on a mission of revenge against those he believed were his enemies.
... Mr. Den Hollander described himself as an anti-feminist and had made a career out of filing lawsuits, some of them frivolous, alleging discrimination against men. He also published blog posts in 2006 arguing women were inferior to men and advocating physical violence against them. In one post, he said women should be strapped to missiles and dropped in the Middle East.
The article explains his motivations. Apparently he was driven by his ideology rather than personal desperation. From the article:
Roy Den Hollander, a New York lawyer who had filed a suit against the male-only military draft, harbored deadly grudges. On July 11, 2020, he killed a lawyer in California. Eight days later, he came to our door and killed Daniel. Too late, I learned that he had often described himself as “anti-feminist.” In a self-published memoir, he described me as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama.”
