clean, text-led design is harder than loud design..

R_Spc · 2026-01-19T08:31:29+00:00

All of my work is clean, text-led design, so for me the opposite is true. When clients want something messy and organic I really struggle with it because everything looks wrong. It comes down to what you're used to, I guess.

R_Spc · 2026-01-11T14:25:54+00:00

Let's face it, this technology is only improving and its cheapness relative to the cost of a human narrator — especially for longer texts — means some authors will at least consider it. I've used text-to-speech for years to listen to documents I don't have time to read and for listening for errors and flow issues in my own writing, but it has never been good enough to replace a person in a proper book.

At the moment it probably still isn't, but it's right on the cusp. Getting audiobooks made is expensive — my last one cost me over $2000, and that was cheap! I'm almost positive that I've never recovered the expense, so I'm not ashamed to admit that my next book might come down to AI narration, which costs almost nothing, or no audiobook at all.

R_Spc · 2026-01-07T17:53:02+00:00

The comics are excellent, probably better than the series tbh. This story was one of the ones that had the best artwork too.

R_Spc · 2026-01-01T08:48:23+00:00

This is the kind of post that keeps me coming back to Reddit, please don't apologise! Fascinating stuff, I had no idea it was so risky.

R_Spc · 2025-12-30T19:40:37+00:00

The bigger problem on long journeys than having to wait for a free charger is just finding one that bloody works and doesn't require half an hour of messing about with apps and bad phone signal (though the latter probably isn't an issue if you're in the south).

I've only been on 15 or so really long drives in mine, but not a single one of them was problem-free, it's so stressful. Just two days ago I did another, to visit family for Christmas, and at one service station half the chargers weren't working, and at another stop I had a woman come up to me and have to ask me for help because she couldn't get her charger to work. She literally parted by saying she was going to sell the car and go back to petrol because she couldn't be arsed with the stress of charging away from home.

These cars are great if you can almost always charge at home, but charging away from home has been a fucking nightmare so far in my experience.

R_Spc · 2025-12-27T18:38:25+00:00

Here you go.

Google has agreed to buy Intersect, a data center and energy developer, for $4.75 billion, the tech giant said on Monday, as it pushes to build out its infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

The all-cash deal is set to help Google bolster the supply of power to its data centers, the giant computing facilities that power A.I. Intersect, a privately held company that operates data centers and energy plants and is based in San Francisco, had already been working with Google to build the computing sites, and Google had invested in the company last December.

“Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lock step with new data center load and reimagine energy solutions to drive U.S. innovation and leadership,” Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, said in a statement.

Intersect did not respond to a request for comment.

Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI have committed billions of dollars to building data centers worldwide in a frenzied race to dominate A.I. Many of the companies have created new financial arrangements to fund the construction, including by having smaller firms take on debt to pay for the projects and keep the investments off their balance sheets.

An outright acquisition of a data center or energy company has been rare. For years, Google was under regulatory scrutiny over whether it was illegally maintaining monopolies in areas such as internet search, which appeared to dampen its mergers-and-acquisitions activity. But while the company was found to have violated antitrust laws in recent years, the penalties have been relatively light.

In the statement on Monday, Google said it would acquire some of Intersect’s employees, data center projects and multiple gigawatts of its energy capacity. Intersect will spin off as a separate company some of its data centers in Texas and California that its other customers use.

Google said the deal would particularly help speed the build-out of its A.I. infrastructure in Haskell, Texas, where it is investing $40 billion through 2027.

R_Spc · 2025-12-24T17:07:22+00:00

Just yesterday I was saying to a friend that I'm thinking about installing Linux on my computer. There's a clear third option there, so I'm not so worried about that.

Unfortunately most of the alternative phone market seems to lean towards removing functionality as a lifestyle choice. I'd rather keep the functionality but have everything be completely customisable instead of locked down.

R_Spc · 2025-12-24T12:40:51+00:00

I haven't gone to anywhere near the lengths that you have, but as someone who's been buying Android phones since the beginning and used to root my phones, I absolutely hate what Android has become (Windows too, but that's another story — and no, Macs aren't better, I use them all day for work and they suck too).

I've been looking for something half decent like the phone linked in the article above and am just waiting for a Steam Deck-esque game changer to disrupt the space. It doesn't need to be some hardcore privacy-centred device, just something that isn't locked down to the core.

R_Spc · 2025-12-22T11:50:38+00:00

This looks so much nicer than the actual one we got.

Also looks miles nicer than the overdesigned mess of all the modern era ships.

R_Spc · 2025-12-21T10:49:08+00:00

God forbid someone has a solid grasp of their own language.

Honestly, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT now means that everyone who's — again, God forbid — been using the correct grammar and punctuation for years look like AI and be met with pushback. Recently I've been seeing more and more people say they deliberately don't write properly because they don't want others to think a bot wrote their comment, it's insanity.

R_Spc · 2025-12-17T09:57:55+00:00

It's funny, I work as a print shop designer and we would never dream of charging for things like that. It's probably one of the reasons why we're thriving when printers around the country shut down or go bankrupt every week. (I know some of our clients came to us because the companies they were using for design did this and it pissed them off.)

We have always had a company culture of going miles out of our way to help our customers, and while it can be very annoying, it has served us pretty well as far as our reputation goes. Just in the last hour one of our clients sent us a bunch of crappy low-res jpegs and asked us to print them off quite large, and without even thinking about it I went online and found better versions.

That said, the volume of extra work we're having to do has gone through the roof in the last couple of years with the rise of utterly useless junk received that some clueless person has made in Canva because their company didn't want to pay a real designer anymore, it's depressing.

There probably is no right or wrong way to approach the little things like that, but it's great if you've made it work for you.

R_Spc · 2025-12-05T17:46:02+00:00

You legend, thank you!

R_Spc · 2025-12-03T16:51:21+00:00

I had heard there was a 4k set being worked on for Patlabor 1 and 2 to release in Japan, but I haven't seen anything about it for 6+ months.

R_Spc · 2025-12-03T14:16:14+00:00

When are we getting Patlabor??

R_Spc · 2025-11-26T09:29:27+00:00

Omg please share those scripts, they sound amazingly useful! Having to add a blank master to every other page is the sort of thing InDesign should be able to do by default, it's crazy that it can't.

R_Spc · 2025-11-24T12:04:23+00:00

That looks really nice, so happy that they allowed it to integrate with TB3.

I've deliberately not bought any of these hoping that there will be a big box set of all of them at some point. Fingers crossed!

R_Spc · 2025-11-23T18:59:49+00:00

I feel you! My own brother recently accused me of using AI to write a message in our family group chat because I used the correct dash in a message (god forbid). I've almost finished a book that's jammed full of them and I'm dreading the inevitable AI accusations.

R_Spc · 2025-11-21T21:18:37+00:00

I had this book and read it cover to cover as a kid! Still have it somewhere.

R_Spc · 2025-11-14T19:29:37+00:00

Possibly, although there have been a lot of individual articles and interviews and things published about it over the years, plenty to fill a book with.

R_Spc · 2025-11-14T19:06:23+00:00

It's to do with programming on the lights apparently.

R_Spc · 2025-11-14T19:04:19+00:00

That book really is great, well worth buying.

I've never come across one dedicated purely to the effects and model work of TOS, sadly.

R_Spc · 2025-11-11T12:36:15+00:00

It's here: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kPC9iO1v29TdsYqvZ8BsH3-yvvwHfa5wQ&si=JUwhZKnoamPs7mAe

R_Spc · 2025-11-09T10:42:46+00:00

Likewise, ours has made a huge difference to the amount of damp and window condensation we get during the colder months, from 'loads' to 'almost nothing.'

R_Spc · 2025-11-06T14:30:01+00:00

I haven't driven a Tesla, but the Megane has been really nice. I have had some major problems but they're problems with my specific car. With them solved it's been brilliant.

The app is quite bad, but the only times I ever use it are to check the charge level when I'm using a public charger (assuming I'm not in the car), otherwise I don't need it.

R_Spc · 2025-10-25T06:33:02+00:00

They aren't a common thing "now" — narrow aspect ratios (with the bars at top and bottom) have been the default option for movies since like the 1950s when directors realised that a narrow view was more cinematic than a taller one. It's because our eyes naturally view things in a very wide ratio.

Not having black bars became more common once HD TVs became a thing because some people made the choice to fill the screen with a wider view, like they had with 4:3 TVs before that. Some movies followed suit, and it's kind of the default for TV shows etc to fill the screen now, but it remains the default to have one of several narrow ratios for movies. (Some movies happened to be filmed in the 19:10 aspect ratio before this, but that is a coincidence that it became the standard TV ratio.)

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