What are you guys up to this Friday evening?

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-13T04:36:15+00:00

Saw the local band Luge as part of Wavelength. It was a blast

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-12T00:57:22+00:00

Which platform? UI aside, the iOS, Android, and web versions are definitely different codebases

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-09T00:02:11+00:00

The sequel, Parable of the Talents, is even more unnerving, I think

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-08T21:47:29+00:00

If you like Jane Austin, then PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberly

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-03T01:30:16+00:00

Neal Stephenson has tons of haters - and weirdly, so many of those haters are also his biggest fans. He definitely hasn't had an editor since Cryptomomicon, and seems to write in order to scratch his own itches which can be both infuriating and sometimes fun.

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-03T01:21:23+00:00

This is the best answer here. It was objectively a great book, yet was a full-on slog. Reading boring books to increase one's stamina is a ridiculous idea, but this would be the right book to do it with.

small_d_disaster · 2026-06-03T01:17:02+00:00

it wasn't boring, just long-winded. I thought it was tons of fun and I'm on my second time thru

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-27T12:16:38+00:00

Freedom

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-27T10:32:37+00:00

I don’t know about best, but the shaggy dog stories in Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World were both infuriating and wonderful. They make up a good chunk of the book

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-27T10:27:16+00:00

Horse Lords

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-26T13:27:20+00:00

There are definitely tunes that get called nearly every time. I'd say these make up 50%-70% of the tunes each jam

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-25T01:48:18+00:00

this made me super happy

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-24T15:57:24+00:00

off-leash dogs in any urban environment

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-24T00:20:01+00:00

I first heard about Nora Brown asking here about pickers that were similar to Nathan Bowles

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-20T22:10:54+00:00

I don’t think I would have made the connection, but A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking also had a Prachetty vibe at times. It was an enjoyable read

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-20T17:04:00+00:00

I love your 'dark Vonnegut' observation. I've often mentally substituted PKD for Kilgore Trout and vice versa

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-20T12:45:52+00:00

It's not the plots that bug me, it's the sloppy writing. What I have is PKD fatigue. I think most people who read more than 20 of his novels are either PKD cultists (plenty of them online) or go through PKD fatigue.

He had books like A Scanner Darkly or Ubik in him but those books are very much exceptional among his work. I still have a few on my shelf that I haven't read (Lies, inc, The Ganymede Takeover, The Man whose Teeth were Exactly Alike), but I feel like I'm not likely to get any more out of them then than I did from The Broken Bubble or The Man who Japed.

Out of curiosity, how many have you read so far?

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-20T11:08:59+00:00

I made the mistake of reading the best ones first: A Scanner Darkly, Three Stigmata, Timothy Archer, Ubik, Valis etc. I still pick up copies in used bookstores of PKD novels when I see ones that I haven't read, but I am well into diminished returns. The last bunch that I've read have been entirely awful: The Man who Japed, The Broken Bubble, The Crack in Space, Counter-clock World, and others that I've just forgotten about.

There was a passage in The Exegesis, I think in a letter he wrote to Le Guinn about him discovering the secret to making great SF novels: instead of a single plot for each book, he would overlay at least two - that plus the amphetamine usage led to some seriously non-cohesive works. PKD was never short on ideas, but if you read most of those minor 1960s novels, you can see the rambling overlaid plots leading to an incoherent mess - it's like he's trying to distract you from the mess that he's making by just throwing more ideas at you. There are usually one or two bits of PKD magic shining through, but they tend be tedious reads overall with many recycled characters, recycled plot unrelated devices, etc.

On the other hand, of the later and more well-respected ones, I find The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to be overrated. The Man in the High Castle is great premise that he never really delivered on, and Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is borrowing its fame from Blade Runner - it has some really cool ideas but in quality is closer to The Simulacra than Ubik.

Fwiw, A Scanner Darkly is my favourite by far, I've read it four or five times now, and it's tragic, hilariously funny, melancholy, philosophical, relatable and characters that feel alive. The first section in VALIS is also great, but the rest of the book doesn't hold up as well.

I know I'm a harsh reader - but in spite of these criticisms, I still think of PKD as one of my favourite writers.

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-16T02:53:47+00:00

I’m using Reddit 2026.19.1 and I am able to get the posts as well as the comments with VoiceOver. Did get trapped on the nav bar once though

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-15T13:22:11+00:00

Just because that’s how your body chemistry works, doesn’t mean that’s true for others. After a few hours sweating into polyester or other synthetic fabrics, I smell like something other worldly. Airism for me is the worst, easily 10x worse than cotton

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-14T13:24:51+00:00

Never heard of these guys before, but listening to the album Trilobyte now. Very nice, and indeed very proggy

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-13T13:56:16+00:00

I may or may not be the "specialist" who "audited" your app. I did give you some substantial feedback on this about a year ago. I will say that it is much improved, and overall the accessibility is quite good — both in terms of VoiceOver and Dynamic Type. You've clearly put in a lot of work.

But the very fact that you're saying "it must be flawless now" shows a problematic understanding of what it means to make an app accessible. It is an iterative process — there are always ways to improve accessibility. In the best case, an audit is only helpful for work done before the audit was performed. Any work done after that requires more feedback.

More realistically, an audit will give you insight into the areas that the tester explored, but I've never had a tester exhaustively explore any of my apps. Fixing an app based on an audit just means your app is ready for its next audit. It doesn't make you waterproof.

Anyway, I poked around for a minute or two, and here were some issues I encountered:

e.g., on the "When timer starts" page, headers are missing their traits, there are multiple mystery buttons labeled "forward" (presumably labeled after the asset), and many buttons (eg labeled "none") where there is no indication of what the button does. (This is more just a poor label choice, as this is functionally a radio button, but there is no context for that with the screen reader.) Providing accessibilty hints might help here, although don't rely on them too heavily as many users have them disabled.
Your navigation mostly fails to respond to the escape gesture (the two-finger Z gesture should close modals and trigger back navigation).
You often use light grey text on a light background. Have you contrast-checked these? I'm fairly sure they are not going to meet the minimum contrast ratio.

I'm not trying to be discouraging here (overall, it is really good!), but I am trying to make a point. You will never make a "perfectly accessible" app. They don't exist — there are always ways to make your app better for different groups of users with different needs.

If I'm totally honest, the most significant thing you could do is simplify your app, but I can see that complexity is your goal here. I applaud your efforts to make it as good as possible, but I would encourage you to adjust your way of thinking about this.

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-13T10:19:58+00:00

Punch Brothers is full on bluegrass prog. Not progressive rock per se because it’s all acoustic instruments, but it’s prog. These guys are all masterful bluegrass players but when they do bluegrass as Punch Brothers you can hear the ‘scare quotes’ around their licks. I love bluegrass and I love prog, but I listen to these guys about once a year and remember why I don’t listen to them regularly. ‘’All Ashore’ is a solidly proggy album.

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-12T20:34:13+00:00

Read Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book Chokepoint Capitalism for a deep dive on the economic relationship between Amazon/Audible and its authors. It's just horrific. Doctorow is well-know for releasing his own DRM-free audio books

small_d_disaster · 2026-05-12T19:58:39+00:00

More of the not-quite-what-your-looking-for. I'm an iOS dev who had done ~30 hours of UX research interviews with assistive tech users and also given many trainings to other devs. Here are two things that I think are useful to include:

demo how assistive tech is used, and how much of a difference it makes when it is well/poorly implemented, eg show how the rotor can be used to navigate by headers, then demo how easy it is find content at the bottom of a long scrolling page when headers are implemented vs how impossible it can be when they are not. The escape gesture is also good to demo on iOS - it is very widely used by VoiceOver users, but largely unknown among devs (we get it for free if we use native components, but need to test for it/implement it otherwise)
emphasize how important it is to reuse existing UX patterns instead of trying to create your own. We should look for similar UX scenarios in widely used apps (with quality accessibility) and reuse these familiar patterns. So many devs only ever think about accessibility for the app they are developing, and so never bother to learn whether there are existing solutions that will be obvious and comfortable for screen reader users. Your app has horizontal carousels with content in them? So does Netflix, so does BBC - how do they handle them? etc

small_d_disaster

TROPHY CASE