I print books myself at home and have a lot of Amazon books lying around. What usually is the problem with Amazon printed books is that the author didn’t put in the extra time to get everything right. Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper. Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans. Furthermore, many Amazon books are just poorly formatted. Text too big, margins too wide, cover misaligned with spine, text not justified properly, and things like that.
> Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters
This is simply an artefact of offset printing.
> Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans.
Text printed by an industrial laser printer on cream (or Natural Shade as it's called in the industry) paper looks discernibly crisper than what an offset printer produces.
I was reading your comment and thought you were a bit too extreme, but then I thought about it and was like "Hmmm. Yes. Sounds pretty accurate actually." So yes I agree.
> Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic
Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking that ads are "natural" search results. To include an extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for your own exact company and product names so competitors don't get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would have been all over them for this many years ago, besides which they'd long ago have been broken up into several separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions they've performed.
If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?
There is "engineering, the discipline", "engineering, the process", "engineering, the vocation, the career path, the learning process" (and many more). Each hat an engineer wears (based on age and context (has its peculiar aspects which might appear to be contradictory with other phases and not all people walked and thrived through all the phases.
In most cases, I just add a blog post for such things.
For example, Syncthing on Debian notes [1] or using Spleeter AI to remove background sound from a long audio track [2]. This is why I switched back from static site to a Wordpress-like site [3], so that I can quickly publish notes from my phone.
To replace uses where you would use Matlab or R probably. I prefer Julia over Matlab or R. So data science. For production code however, it's not great since it has no static typing. Imagine having your production code crash mid-execution with the error "Function foo not found". Only dynamic languages can do that to you.
I broadly agree that it can be hard to nail down Julia's behaviour but it does have static typing and I think it is more subtle. Function arguments and variables can be concrete types e.g. if you were implementing an approximation for sin, you could restrict arguments to Float32 if you knew it was only suitably accurate for that type.
> it does have static typing and I think it is more subtle.
Yes sure Julia isn't fully dynamically typed, but that doesn't change the fact that it isn't fully static typed. If it was, it should be pretty easy to create static binaries and find bugs like "func not defined" at compilation time.
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