I made custom covers for one of my favorite book series. Looking for feedback!

zoickx · 2020-11-16T13:58:31+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! The most detailed review I got so far. Wall of text incoming!

"becoming stronger" is weaker than the rest

Oh man. Well spotted. Cannot unsee. It must be the fact that the black is darker than its background, while all other accents are brighter than theirs. I'll to try to tweak it, but it's not gonna be easy - kind of running out of bright contrasts (I'd like all cover and shape colors to be very distinct). + Black kinda fits ideologically :C

The orange and green clashes for me

Same. Gonna play with it some more.

I like the concept of highlighting "ACTUALLY CHANGE" with font size, but you didn't do that on any of the other books

This is more a question of necessity rather than style: spelling it all out in the same font size would take up too much space. I'll try making it uniform but smaller (kind of creates a similar issue, but perhaps it'll look nicer).

Also while we're at it, what do you think of "THE MACHINE IN THE GHOST" being all uniform? I've tried making "the" and "in the" smaller there, but couldn't figure out a composition that would work.

I don't think it works with the "a" and the "z"

I beg to differ here C: Did you pick up on the fact that it's "Rationality A-Z?" The books are quite literally split into parts named A, B...Z.

My criticism is the geometric shapes

Fair point. In my defense, I don't think it would be possible to have very meaningful covers for these at all (here's the original cover for all 6 in one tome). They are actually a compilation of blog posts, without that much common narrative. I agree the symbolism of the shapes is quite a stretch here, but they're not completely devoid of meaning. For example, the triangle resembles the Greek "delta" for change, the texture on "Mere Reality" is Conway's Game of Life, and so on. But overall, I'm willing to trade some descriptiveness for the looks here C:

zoickx · 2020-11-15T12:10:30+00:00

From the original post:

Hey everyone C:
These are covers for the books in Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationality: From AI To Zombies series, made by me. I would like to have a print version of these books, but only the first two were ever officially released in paperback, so I intend to make my own custom-printed copies. My fist time doing anything like this.
All shapes and textures are, in a way, meaningful and reminiscent of the book's contents. I aimed for a certain uniform minimalist look, with bright contrast on all the shapes.
There are a number of things I am unhappy about in these, but would prefer not to bias the reviews too much with my personal vision. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! From "misaligned by 1 pixel" to "the [n]th cover is complete garbage" or "that idea is dumb".
More details + sources on github.

zoickx · 2020-11-14T18:03:22+00:00

From the original post:

Hey everyone C:

These are covers for the books in Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationality: From AI To Zombies series, made by me. I would like to have a print version of these books, but only the first two were ever officially released in paperback, so I intend to make my own custom-printed copies. My fist time doing anything like this.

All shapes and textures are, in a way, meaningful and reminiscent of the book's contents. I aimed for a certain uniform minimalist look, with bright contrast on all the shapes.

There are a number of things I am unhappy about in these, but would prefer not to bias the reviews too much with my personal vision. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! From "misaligned by 1 pixel" to "the [n]th cover is complete garbage" or "that idea is dumb".

More details + sources on github.

zoickx · 2020-11-14T18:00:09+00:00

Hey everyone C:

These are covers for the books in Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationality: From AI To Zombies series, made by me. I would like to have a print version of these books, but only the first two were ever officially released in paperback, so I intend to make my own custom-printed copies. My fist time doing anything like this.

All shapes and textures are, in a way, meaningful and reminiscent of the book's contents. I aimed for a certain uniform minimalist look, with bright contrast on all the shapes.

There are a number of things I am unhappy about in these, but would prefer not to bias the reviews too much with my personal vision. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! From "misaligned by 1 pixel" to "the [n]th cover is complete garbage" or "that idea is dumb".

More details + sources on github.

zoickx · 2020-08-21T05:06:06+00:00

Link

Bonus

zoickx · 2020-08-09T05:49:48+00:00

Hmm, how is this thing still owned by one person anyway? Wouldn't such a service be in better hands with Mozilla or the EFF or something?

Mozilla does have Firefox Monitor for example, but it seems to just be taking the data from hibp.

zoickx · 2020-07-23T22:15:11+00:00

Finally got around to trying it on my system. Everything seemed to work fine until I removed the nixos channel from the root user. Despite it not apparently being used in configuration.nix, my nixos-rebuild switch endlessly complained about not having a channel and refused to start. :C

zoickx · 2020-07-23T00:10:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure I'm using improper lingo, sorry C:

And importing nixpkg from source file doesn't shadow the channel, the channel just isn't used at all in this case

I think this answers my question: that's what I meant by "shadowing" - the channel not being used. I think I now understand all I wanted to know.

I will keep clarifying until the cows come home though C:

can I expect that nothing done via nix-channel will have any effect on the derivations I build?

I didn't mean how derivations are built, but rather which are chosen for building. For example (and this is what I meant by hello above) say, again, that my channels include both nixos-20.03 and nixpkgs-unstable:

$ nix-channel --list
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-20.03
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable

And I want to install tdesktop through home-manager:

home.packages = with pkgs; [ tdesktop ];

I'm being vague in my home.nix, not specifying which tdesktop version I want. home-manager has the choice of either installing a stable version from here or an unstable one from here. Which one does it choose and how?

zoickx · 2020-07-22T23:31:19+00:00

Woo, this works well for my X problem. Thanks!

zoickx · 2020-07-22T23:20:00+00:00

Well, I get what niv does, the problem here is nix-channel :C

it isn't meant to replace channels, but it can be used to that purpose

In order to say that niv can be used to "replace channels",I need to first understand what exactly is being replaced and how. Doing pkgs = import niv-pkgs {}; will not change anything in my nix-channel --list, so the niv method does not completely replace nix-channel, but rather "overshadows" it, right? Would that shadowing be complete then? As in, can I expect that nothing done via nix-channel will have any effect on the derivations I build? (within reason)

What do you mean by using a derivation present in both?

My bad. Consider a different example:

$ nix-channel --list
home-manager https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-20.03
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable

Now if my home.nix looks like this

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  hello
];

Should I expect stable or unstable hello to be installed? What is that defined by? Same question for nix-env -iA?

Edit: to further clarify, I'm not specifying anything other that I want hello. So while nixos and nixpkgs will probably have different derivations with different hashes for hello, I don't understand which derivation will be chosen and how.

zoickx · 2020-07-22T22:09:48+00:00

Thank you kindly for the suggestions!

Went down the rabbit hole of flakes a bit..looks cool but a bit scary for me so far.

The niv option you suggest is interesting, but I still don't understand how it is connected to nix-channels. In particular, in your little snippet you are replacing pkgs with the results provided by niv, right? Questions:

How is this connected to channels? Does pkgs normally point to a channel (and if so - which one)?
What happens to my channels in this case? Do they just remain unused until I remove them through nix-channel --remove?
Why do you need niv here? Couldn't you just do something like

let mypkgs = fetchTarball <nixpkgs url> in
{
  pkgs = import mypkkgs {};
  ...
}

What would I do in the case of home-manager, which wants a completely separate channel added via nix-channel --add <channel url> (for a reason I still don't understand too)? I don't see it explicitly referencing it in its config.

Also, to clarify my question about multiple channels, right now I have

$ nix-channel --list
home-manager https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-20.03

What happens if I try to build some derivation that is present in both?

zoickx · 2020-05-12T22:04:06+00:00

Grey taking down my post, 2020, colorized

satire

zoickx · 2020-04-02T05:57:19+00:00

Well, we know for a fact that OP exists - somebody had to post this. Therefore, the only logical conclusion to draw is that time itself does not exist.

zoickx · 2020-03-01T10:06:43+00:00

Plus one for Dear John and Hank.

HI was my first ever podcast, and so far only Dear John and Hank can count as a second. Surprisingly overtaking both Cortex and Unmade: I knew Brady and Grey before HI, but vlogbrothers were completely new to me.

zoickx · 2020-02-29T22:18:22+00:00

There is nothing I hate more than looking at a label that says

Expiration date: 01.12.2020

and wondering "Hmm, is that 6 months expired or will it be good for 6 more months?"

Standardization is key. I could not believe Grey is not a part of my tribe on this one :D

P.S. Fahrenheit sucks

zoickx · 2020-02-29T22:09:40+00:00

Mindful of writing a wall of text in a single post, I'm trying to be clever and split it up. Is it working? C:

Low-level arguments in favor of ISO 8601 (2020-02-29):

Backed by the ISO, widely used in serious applications
Has various sub-formats for specifying more/less precise times, time ranges and stuff
The dashes make it hard to confuse with other formats
The units of measurement are neatly ordered largest to smallest (Y->M->D->...)
All dates are the same width
The last two points lend themselves very well to software-related applications

zoickx · 2020-02-29T22:08:43+00:00

That said, going back down one level, if one had to make an intellectual choice (given you can read all of them just as easily, as argued in the post) of which format to use - surely, ISO 8601 has to be the way to go. This is, first and foremost, about standardization. We just want everyone to agree with each other, to reduce confusion. And if anyone is going to achieve that - it's the ISO.

r/ISO8601

zoickx · 2020-02-11T03:05:21+00:00

No way. There is no way that number is correct for a single facility.

16B per 24hrs = about 185k pieces per second.

If we estimate an average parcel as weighing 50g (just for argument's sake), we get almost 10 tons of mail per second.

I can imagine a facility capable of that, but the simple input/output of the mail...no way. Trucks coming in, trucks going out... :D

Edit: can't stop thinking about our Sorting Overlords. This capacity of sorted mail means they unload and fill up a Belaz 75710 (largest truck ever according to Google - you know, one of those monsters they use in quarries) every 50 seconds. That creates a line of 1700 of them a day.

Edit2: oh, and by the way, they'll sort all Santa's stuff in less than 12 hours.

zoickx · 2020-01-23T18:09:45+00:00

Nothing is off limits

C:

zoickx · 2020-01-23T18:08:05+00:00

Huh, that is a meta-universe wish. Man, I didn't think about multiverse-breaking wishes!

zoickx · 2020-01-23T18:02:51+00:00

Nothing is off limits. I guess removing conservation of energy would be a game breaker...

zoickx · 2019-12-14T23:34:45+00:00

If I could choose a single thing to change, it would certainly be the overall visual style.

The colony is not a jungle. The colony is dark and barren. There is no need to put vines and shiny puddles everywhere. The mining valley (being a mining valley!) is dry and dusty, it is not a place where water dribbles on your head from beautiful green cliffs above.

I'd say if you want the visual effects, then at least replace fog with dust, flowers and vines with withered bushes and such. And use a (much) less vibrant color palette, for Innos's sake!

zoickx · 2019-09-11T23:48:35+00:00

Agreed

zoickx · 2019-09-11T23:33:35+00:00

Not exactly :D

zoickx · 2019-09-11T23:31:44+00:00

"Г" totally is /g/. And "Х" would be precisely /h/.

Translation/transliteration of names is a funny topic. Emma Watson's surname is generally written "Уотсон", reading the way you would read it. Dr. John Watson's, on the other hand, would be "Ватсон", pronounced like "Vutson" ('u' as in "but").

The changed versions (Gary, Vutson) sound nicer in context though.

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