In the same spirit, we should once a year spend a day with ourselves blindfolded, or use a wheelchair to understand what is like to be a disabled person.
"I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people." - Richard Feynmann
This article reminds me of my father. After my mother died, he's living alone in my home town. He spend most of his days without talking to anyone, but I know he's keeping a diary. And I'm sure he has a lot of story to tell, but the problem is how. As a shy Japanese man who's born in 1940s' he isn't a very talkative type, especially to his son. I think I should go back seeing him occassionaly, but I might still miss the opportunity of listening. I'm just writing here to remind myself. I should do something about it. Probably.
My father & mother divorce since I was 5, and I live with my mom since. One day we have to go to funeral of our relative, and my father is there. We are complete stranger by now, but also father and son. So imagine when I have to talk to him, for the first time after 30 years later. It's awkward as hell, but I'm glad I decide to do it because that might be the last time I have a chance to speak to my father. It's small talk and nothing more, yet I can feel something heavy lift out of my chest, like, he's just an old man now, and whatever bad things he's done in his past is now long gone — it's like I'm reconcile with him in some way.
That being said, I don't have answer for you, but if you think you should do something about it, then do it!
This. I'm always amazed by a skilled taxi driver maneuvering their car at a busy street in Tokyo with bustling pedestrians and bikes, some of them are old and slow and others ignoring traffic lights, just passing them by centimeters. It's like as if the car is a part of their body and they're threading though a crowd. They have to anticipate everyone else's move. The cars really look like people here and others treat them as ones.
Aside from jQuery, I'm just amazed at how good the gov.uk is. They're comprehensive and accessible. Isn't this the pinnacle of government websites? I only wish that our government site (Japan) is half as good.
Hate to be negative, but this new site design of IEEE Spectrum is just abhorrent. It's ad-ridden and there's an infinite scrolling thing. I use reader mode, but I miss the old design. Sigh
It's interesting that it's moved to single-file libraries for format support, because I think those libraries have effectively replaced it already. Having a single interface supporting multiple formats is a nice thing, though.
There are some disadvantages to these single header libraries, though they may very well be a non-issue for SDL_sound. As an example: I believe stb vorbis doesn’t support “gapless” playback that trims padded silence necessitated by lapped MDCT compression, and IIRC it also does not have sample-accurate fast seeking. This would make it challenging to implement loop points in streaming music using stb vorbis; even if you decode the entire stream into memory to get sample accurate seeking, you still need to compensate for the padded silence.
Truly depends on one’s use case and desired trade-offs.
I'm curious of the eventual consequence of emoji development. Early Chinese characters were pretty much like pictograms. They have developed into a highly sophisticated abstract language / writing system, but its emoji-like aspects still remain today. The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. It's interesting that the world is basically reinventing the same thing a few millenniums later.
To me it seems like we haven't reinvented the same thing, but semi-adapted an existing process of communication to the technology available. It's almost like emoji's are the next step of pictograms, however they're mostly used to provide (extra) context to the existing form of commucation.
It's a bit like doing this:
"It was a very sunny day." <- regular sentence
"It was a very [sun emoji] day." <- same thing
"It was a very sunny day. [happy face emoji]" <- v3 pictos that (implicitly?) communicate extra context
"It was a very sunny day. [高兴]" <- same thing, but v1 pictos
In the western context they evolved from the attempt to convey emotion in text form. Writing systems are mostly meant to convey facts, while the emotion that we encode in intonation is completely lost. That lead to problems in pure text communication, so we invented emotes to convey the difference between
"It was a very sunny day :)"
"It was a very sunny day :\"
"It was a very sunny day ;)"
Some web forums started replacing them with images which lead to designers inventing more emojis, and due to Japanese carriers wanting the same for SMS those got incorporated in character encodings.
What seems strange to me is that most emoji that exist are completely useless for the purpose of conveying emotion, or encoding any useful information that can't be expressed in a word. It's like some designer had to fulfill a quota or someone wanted to just "have more emojis". Yet the most popular emojis are clearly still used to convey emotion [1].
There's actually a chat system / social network called iConji that tries to create a new language based on emoji-like symbols. I'm not sure how many users (if any) it has, but as an experiment it's interesting.
I wish instead of emojis they just included a “sixel” strip codepage with one character for every combination of 1x6 pixel strip (this only needs 64 code points.) You could draw your emojis and the editor would then compose these strips to send them. People do it with Braille now but this would make the images much smaller and get rid of the space between the pixels.
I feel that the study is dated. Nowadays (at least on iOS) VoiceOver is pretty good: they can read almost all parts of the contents, maps, and even texts on pictures. Not sure how much of it is designed with illiterate people in mind, but wouldn't be surprised if they are. Mobile phones are truly becoming a device of empowerment now.
