I've been thinking a lot about dark mode lately, now that macOS and Windows 10 both officially offer some implementation of it. I think dark modes make a compelling case for eye strain prevention, but the dealbreaker for me is revealed when switching between apps and one of them isn't dark. That jarring flash of bright light completely ruins whatever gentleness the dark environment provided in the first place. So despite my curiosity I've kept everything in light mode for years, tempered by f.lux to keep myself sane after sundown.

Anyway, now that there's official OS support I'm reconsidering. I think there's a growing pro-dark movement that was just waiting for that formal recognition. Today the programs I use most all offer dark modes so I'm taking an experimental plunge. My goal: 90% elimination of white flashes while in my normal workflow.

The biggest obstacle is, not surprisingly, the web. There are some beautiful dark browser themes available but that really only affects the UI elements around the page, not the page itself. I want to darken the web too. I have a few thoughts about this:

• Plugins like this one try to automate a dark mode for every site you visit. This is hit-or-miss, resulting in ugly color combinations, sometimes unreadable text. Some methods just invert the page colors, which can lead to all sort of other visual wonkiness. I haven't found a plugin like this that isn't fiddly and annoying.
• This plugin looks interesting. From what I can tell, it uses some kind of server-side heuristics to determine the optimal way to darken every page you visit. I haven't actually tried it because I'm concerned about the privacy/security implications of sending all my web activity to this unknown third party. Or what kind of performance hit that would involve. Also, they bury this information on their site, but this is a paid service with an annual subscription.
• I'm aware of Stylish and its huge library of user-maintained custom site styles. This seemed like a good approach, except that following a recent acquisition, the new owners of Stylish betrayed their users' trust in a very shady way so I'm afraid to go near it now. If there's a credible alternative with a decent style library I'd love to know about it. Especially if there's a way to automate style application so I don't have to manually activate it for every site I visit.
• Tangentially, the W3C is having an interesting conversation about adding CSS media query support for recognizing user dark-mode preferences. This could absolutely be the future of the web(!!), but I suspect it won't because it puts the responsibility on designers to basically double the amount of work they have to do. Speaking as someone in that field, I would not want to have to add this to my already-long list of design considerations.

Are there any other good web darkening methods I've overlooked? How do you deal with the white flash problem? Should I just give up and go back to black-on-white? Interested in any and all thoughts on the matter.

Is anyone here familiar with his work? Perhaps you could recommend a starting point for someone more inclined towards exploring darker urban / sociopolitical realist "fantasy"; not so interested in escapism for the sake of escapism. LeGuin over Tolkien, etc.

I wished to set aside some threads to read on my Kindle. I use the Kindle Chrome extension for that, but on Tildes it only captures the main topic, not the comments. I tried saving the page locally but the Kindle app still didn't work. My only option on Chrome seems to be printing to PDF, but that's a subpar solution. I was able to convert the offline page to mobi using Calibre, though, but this is not very practical and the result was not that good.

maybe I should have written conversion friendly, because printing to paper/PDF is working fine

There was a recent thread on ~talk about which linguistics habits people find annoying, and much to my horror, I have most of those which were mentioned. After thinking about it a little more, I realized that a lot of these habits were picked up from the media I consume and the people I interact with. I also feel that this problem is exacerbated by my poor knowledge of English grammar.

While I was taught grammar at an elementary level in school, I didn't quite grok it back then, and mostly relied on my instinct, as to what "sounded" right. I have since forgotten most of what I had learnt, and my instinct is failing me - my grammar is atrocious, my punctuation is terrible and I only have auto-correct to thank for my spelling.

I understand that English, like other languages, is constantly evolving. What is wrong now might be right tomorrow. However, I believe that this is no excuse for my shortcomings as there is merit speaking and writing in accordance with what is considered correct in the present day.

I would like to learn English from "first principles", and would greatly appreciate if some users could suggest some books/resources which could help me (bonus points for resources pertaining to British English). Any other suggestions would also be great.

Thanks, and have a nice day.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Please also tell me if you think this is too frequent, in which case I can switch to doing this once a month instead of every other week. I'll edit the post text to append the decision. Have a nice weekend!

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3

Prompted by the comment just left by @Adams on the first post, I thought I'd make a topic for the next episode!

So what did people think? For those of you who weren't particularly into the first episode, did this one work better for you? (If not, no hard feelings, I'm just curious why/why not~)

I'll stick my thoughts in a comment again.

post-mortem: holy actual beans dudes this is my most popular post by far! what'd you cats like about it so much?

i swear to god my brain and body work in tandom to make sure i never actually do anything productive.

i came to starbucks exclusively to work on some backend stuff for a project i've got, and i've spent the last hour sipping coffee, watching Joji music videos, and writing this lmao.

i wish there was something like cocaine that wasn't, well, cocaine, that you could take and then you'd be like "hey maybe i should clean my room. hey it's a nice day out i should take a walk. ya know if i get work done now, i can actually take a break without feeling like lazy trash later on!"

actually

that sounds like weed.

i need to move to a legal state lmao.

but in order to do that i gotta get better at programming so i can actually get a car (ya fucked up, bishop) and get a new place.

catch-22's are like so literally my favorite thing (:

anyway this isn't even the poem lmao i'm just sober ranting at the internet.

esskeetiiiiiit

there's this
black hole lingers
'round every corner.

obscure sounds
dark haze,
and no borders

it looms near,
strikes fear
when it's closer

heart runs,
hands shake,
i get colder.

/

sometimes
i get close
take a peek in

low growl
sounds loud
gotta feed it

audrey
she's hungry
when you're bleeding

jumped in-
to my blood
i'm her beacon

/

now i can't shake
this damned desire, god
i think i gotta call her

am i safer when she's
gone? she's in my dreams
do i still love her?

my best friend is
mad, the shit i do
only appalls her.

the pit, it's in my
stomach, god i
feel it getting stronger.

/

audrey

audrey

keep the peace, please.

audrey

audrey

play my heart strings.

you told me to

obey you baby,

you control me.

audrey

lay me

to rest in peace

bishop

(p.s. i noticed that there always seems to be a vote on my post like the second after i post my poetry shit. whoever you are you're cute af and i love you ok)

It's time for another programming challenge!

Given a list of coordinate pairs on a 2D plane that describe the vertices of a polygon, determine whether the polygon is concave or convex.

Since a polygon could potentially be any shape if we don't specify which vertices connect to which, we'll assume that the coordinates are given in strict order such that adjacent coordinates in the list are connected. Specifically, if we call the list V[1, n] and say that V[i] <-> V[j] means "vertex i and vertex j are connected", then for each arbitrary V[i] we have V[i-1] <-> V[i] <-> V[i+1]. Moreover, since V[1] and V[n] are at the ends of the list, V[1] <-> V[n] holds (i.e. the list "wraps around").

Finally, for simplicity we can assume that all coordinates are unique, that all polygon descriptions generate valid polygons with 3 or more non-overlapping sides, and that, yes, we're working with coordinates that exist in the set of real numbers only. Don't over-complicate it :)

For those who want an even greater challenge, extend this out to work with 3D space!