An interesting thing that I’ve noticed over the past few years of internetting is how we’ve established conventions around like, favorite, &c. buttons, and how frustrating it is when sites break those conventions. The meaning of such a button is largely determined by its context; saving for later (say bookmarking, or wishlisting) for an e-commerce site, acknowledgement or praise for social media, and somewhere in between those two for blogs and other content consumption platforms. This isn’t a hard rule, obviously. Twitter, for example, has a bookmarking function, but also lets you easily browse through liked tweets. Bookmarking is a more buried option, as its intent isn’t to display praise, and I would guess that because of this intentional design decision, a lot of people simply use likes in lieu of bookmarks.
Iconography is also generally pretty standard, often hearts or stars. This defines context in its own way; users famously had concerns when Twitter moved from stars to hearts. Which makes a lot of sense – slapping a star on the tweet ‘My cat Piddles died this AM, RIP’ has a pretty different vibe than a heart. Since this happened retroactively to everything anyone had ever starred… it was certainly jarring.
Other iconography certainly exists; bookmark-looking things clearly define their intent, pins do the same to a lesser extent, bells indicate notifications1, and sites with voting systems will often use thumbs-up/down or up/down arrows for this tri-state toggle. Medium, notably, went from a straightforward ‘recommend’ (heart) system to ‘claps’, a convoluted variable-praise system represented by a hand. While dunking on Medium is not the purpose of this post, I think it’s worth mentioning that this shift was enough to essentially prevent me from ever reading anything on the site again2. Having to rate any given article from 1-50, and then sit around clicking as I worry about that decision is anxiety-inducing agony, especially when I know it affects authors’ rankings and/or payouts. It also feels incredibly detached from the real-world phenomenon it’s supposed to mimic. Clapping for a performer in an isolated void is a very different experience than reacting in real-time with the rest of an audience. But to get back on track, clapping additionally violates our expectations by no longer being a toggle. It increases, maxes out, and if you want to reset it to zero, you have to hunt for that option.
Which brings me to my point, and my frustration. These things are usually a toggle between a hollow heart or star3 and a filled one: ♡/♥︎ or ☆/★. This is very easy to understand, it mimics the checkboxes and radio buttons we’ve been using on computers for decades. Empty thing off, filled thing on. So long as we know that this icon has meaning, and that meaning brings with it a binary on/off state4, a hollow or filled icon indicates what state the content is in. If a user can’t toggle this (a notification, say), it’s simply an indicator. If a user can, then… well, it’s a toggle, and there’s likely a counter nearby to indicate how many others have smashed that like button.
This is great, and intuitive, and it works very effectively. Which is why it’s extremely frustrating when sites violate this principle. Bandcamp, for example, uses a hollow heart at the top of the page to take you to your ‘collection,’ a library which is a superset of your wishlist. Wishlisting is represented by a separate on/off heart toggle. This toggle, on an individual track/album page, has a text description next to the heart; the collection button at the top of the page does not. This is utterly backward, as the toggle works intuitively, and the button… has no meaning until you click it5. Etsy, on the other hand, uses a hollow heart at the top to bring you to your favorites page. But it does two things right: it has a text label, and it brings you only to things that are directly connected with a matching heart toggle.
GoComics is an equally perplexing mess of filled hearts. A comic itself has both a heart (like) and a pin (save)6. Both are always filled, with the toggle being represented by a slight change in brightness: 88% for off, 68% for on. It’s very subtle and hard to scan. These are actual toggles, however, unlike in their comments section. Their comments also have filled hearts to indicate likes, but they only serve as indicators. To actually like a comment, you must click a text-only link that says ‘Like,’ and isn’t even next to the heart. At this point, the text does the same absurdly-slight brightness shift from #00A8E1 to #0082AE. While it’s difficult to scan the comic’s heart icon’s brightness shift, the comment’s ‘Like’ text’s brightness shift is nearly imperceptible. A comment’s heart icon doesn’t even appear until there’s at least one like, and clicking it just brings up a list of users who have liked it. Suffice it to say, I click this accidentally on a near-daily basis. Humorously, GoComics understands the hollow/filled standard: they use it on their notifications bell icon.
These are just two examples in a sea of designs that prioritize aesthetics over intuition and ease of use. Medium tacks a filled star on after the read-time estimate for no apparent reason. Lex has both a functional heart and star toggle on every post, but no immediate explanation as to what differentiates them. Amazon seemingly has a heart toggle on its mobile app, but not its website, and it’s unclear what differentiates this from the regular wishlist. Ultimately, I don’t think this is a space that needs innovation (like, arguably, Medium’s claps), or one that merits subtle aesthetics. Folks have largely realized the perils of excessively abstracting ordinary checkboxes and radio buttons, and this relatively new breed of binary toggle should intuitively work in exactly the same way.
Unicode 13 is coming, and bringing with it a handful of exciting things. Particular to my interests is a new Legacy Computing section with characters like seven-segment display numerals and graphics characters like those found on the Commodore 64 and other machines of the era. Of course, new emoji are coming as well, including among other things a magic wand, a beaver, and the trans pride flag (finally!). Unicode is doing a lot of necessary language work behind the scenes as well; the 12.
2021-02 update: Because the turds at Viacom have removed all of the cross-posts of Garfield comics from Garfield.com, I have changed the link to the Garfield comic in the birds section to point to GoComics. This is bullshit.
I’ve never really used iOS’s automatic thing-detection for photo categories before, but I was looking for a specific picture of a dog from my ~8 years worth of photos, so I gave it a shot.
The 231 photos my phone thinks are of cats include:
A human eye
A squirrel
Three different dogs
A highly stylized, deco-esque painting of a cat
A cat-silhouette-shaped wooden door-topper
The owl from Reigns: Her Majesty
Amaterasu from Ōkami
Plenty of actual cats
The 214 photos my phone thinks are of dogs include:
Four different cats, and these make up ~7% of the results
One of the dogs from Overland
A grebe
Myself
Plenty of actual dogs
The 76 photos my phone thinks are of birds include:
Moths
A cat
A terrible drawing of a goose that I made
A terrible drawing of an owl that I made
A terrible drawing of a pig that I made
A terrible drawing of a t-rex that I made
A terrible drawing of Krampus that I made
A terrible drawing of… a fox, maybe? that I made
A terrible drawing of a talking harp that I made
A terrible drawing of that time that my friend’s beagle tried to chase a great blue heron and the heron noped out with like two flaps of its wings (that I made)
A digital illustration of a pigeon singing “No Scrubs” that I made
A statue of two hedgehogs that I obtained after its original owner retired
Two different cats
Some ice-covered trees (sans birds)
A beer bottle with a sloth on it in front of a beer glass with Totoro on it
Myself in a bird-print dress
An Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp screenshot containing two lawn flamingoes
A Pokémon Go screenshot containing two tiny Pidgeys
A Neopet that is basically a penguin with stars upon thars
A text message from my landlord saying ‘I’ll / l / B m’
In case anyone reading this isn’t up to speed, the .org Top-Level Domain (TLD) is apparently being sold to a private equity firm. The post link goes out to a good summary on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site. This is bad, and it should be fairly obvious why it’s bad, but beyond that… the whole thing really just feels like one more large step in the inevitable decline of the internet as we know it. I’ve been expecting this to happen at any time, except with like… a novelty TLD. Like, Donuts gets tired of owning the .exposed TLD and sells it off and now everyone with a domain under that TLD has doubled rates. I didn’t see it coming (yet) with one of the Big Ones.
Is it a huge stretch to think that ICANN could, in so many decades, ceases to function or shift to a profit-driven model? There’s a sense of stability with a .com domain, but is it more fragile than we think? What if your email is tied to a domain you can no longer afford; how many services tie your identity so strongly to your email that it’s difficult or impossible to change it? Thinking in terms of decades is a bit absurd; there will be sea changes in the internet through that time. I just worry that most of those changes will be for the worse, that independence and openness will continue to be threatened, and that archival gaps will continue to increase.
So, it’s a bit of a recurring theme that this administration makes some horrifying attack on some marginalized group and I feel the need to make some brief post here angrily tossing out organizations worth donating to. Of course, the topic this week is a series of actions threatening trans people1 and hearkening back to the 1933 burning of the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. I’m personally feeling less and less in control of how I’m handling the erosion of civil liberties, and part of me right now needs to write, beyond a brief scream into the ether. So here’s what this post is: if anything on this site has ever had any value to you, please just roll 1D10 and donate to:
…and with that out of the way, for the sake of my own mental health, I’m going to quasi-continue my last post with a bit of binary-level explanation of text file encodings, with emphasis on the Unicode Transformation Formats (UTFs).
Apple recently stirred up a bit of controversy when they revealed that their bagel emoji lacked cream cheese. Which is a ridiculous thing to get salty over, but ultimately they relented and added cream cheese to their bagel. Which should be the end of this post, and then I should delete this post, because none of that matters. But it isn’t the end, because I saw a lot of comments pop up following the redesign that reminded me: people really don’t seem to get how emoji work. Specifically, I saw a lot of things like ‘Apple can fix the bagel, but we still don’t have a trans flag’ or ‘Great to see Apple put cream cheese on the bagel, now let’s get more disability emoji’. Both of those things would, in fact, be great1, but they have nothing to do with Apple’s bagel suddenly becoming more edible.
Unicode is, in its own words, “a single universal character encoding [with] extensive descriptions, and a vast amount of data about how characters function.” It maps out characters to code points, and allows me to look up the division sign on a table, find that its code point is 00F7, and insert this into my document: ÷. Transformation formats take on the job of mapping raw bytes into these standardized code points – this blog is written and rendered in the transformation format UTF-8. Emoji are not pictures sent back and forth any more than the letter ‘A’ or the division sign are – they are Unicode code points also, rendered out in a font2 like any other character. This is why if I go ahead and insert 1F9E5 (🧥), the resulting coat will be wildly different depending upon what system you’re on. If I didn’t specify a primary font for my site, the overall look of this place would be different for different users also, as the browser/OS would have its own idea of a default serif font.
This links to a much more complete article from the SWLing Post, but unlike most of my external-link posts, I have quite a bit to say about this. The gist is that there’s a pair of antenna arrays in Colorado broadcasting an analog and digital signal on 60kHz. The proposed FY19 PresBud proposes shutting this radio transmitter down. I’m a radio nerd, and an analog nerd, and I’m always lamenting over technological shifts and shutdowns that nobody else cares about. Like, say digital transmissions on the AM band. But this is different. Part of NIST, WWVB broadcasts an incredibly accurate time signal across the U.S. If you have a clock or watch that describes itself as ‘atomic’, it maintains its accuracy because of this radio transmission.
WWVB sits next to WWV, which started its life in Washington, DC1 in 1920. For nearly a century, we have had an official radio broadcast of the time. In 1983, Heathkit released the GC-1000 clock which automatically synched with WWV. It was quite possibly the first clock for consumers to receive radio direction for impeccable accuracy, and one of the only radios to use WWV before WWVB went online. These clocks still routinely sell for upwards of $200, with an unbuilt kit selling on eBay this month for $810. I’m sad to see AM going digital, SW dying out partly because of such a rich legacy of receivers out in the wild. To an extent, this is no different – be it WWV, WWVH (on shortwave, similar to WWV but in Hawai’i), or WWVB, millions of devices seemingly magically pull an impossibly accurate (and official) time standard out of the air.
As the linked post mentions, most people likely have no idea how their ‘atomic clocks’ work. A lot of people seem to think that anything that happens automatically is just the internet at work. Time signals are also by necessity provided by GPS. But a ubiquitous (stateside) terrestrial signal that is easily interpreted and worked into signals… it’s obvious why that caught on (again, with millions of clocks out there in the wild). It’s incredibly disheartening to think that an open, official time broadcast will just disappear… but it’s far beyond disheartening to think about how that will affect millions of clueless users.
The array (originally built in the 1960s) has been upgraded and refurbished several times over the years, and in fact within the past decade. The bottom line is that an official standard is available to the entire nation via an easily received and decoded signal. This standard is time itself. This may seem trivial, but it’s important. Though from a budgetary standpoint it truly is trivial. This administration cuts every tiny thing it feels it can mock while lining the pockets of defense contractors and other private-industry capitalists. If you’re reading this, and you care about the free spread of information… things like WWVB are the prototypical information age. Contact your representatives, and let it be known that this is an unacceptable cut.
I’ve been increasingly interested in QR codes as of late, for reasons that Glenn Fleishman articulated far better than I could. I also just find them rather fascinating as a format. There’s a lot of redundancy to account for errors and damage (wonderfully demonstrated here), and a handful of possible masks that overlay all of the data means that the exact same data will have myriad possible representations. I’ve also been curious as to the most efficient ways to store and present the data (GIFs and 1 bit/pixel PNGs done at the pixel-level and then scaled up seem pretty good1), and got to wondering if Unicode Block Elements (2580-259F) would work. As above, they seem to, albeit with the entire block scaled to 60% vertical height and the line-height condensed. Also, Hack (the monospace font I use on this site) seems to render 2588, FULL BLOCK, as a quarter-sized block centered in the space that it should be filling up all of. So I substituted 2593, DARK SHADE, which works. Also, the squareness and contiguousness of the thing seems to be crucial for recognition, far more so than the integrity of the actual data within.
This was a truly pointless exercise, but hey, it’s a thing that can be done.
How we’re presented with data skews how we interpret that data. Anyone who has read a lick of Tufte (or simply tried to make sense of a chart in USA Today) knows this. Many such commonly-encountered misrepresentations tend to relate to scaling. Volatility in a trend line minimized by a reduction in scale, perspective distortion in a 3D pie chart, a pictograph being scaled in two dimensions such that its visual weight becomes disproportionate – technically, the graphic may accurately line up with the values to be conveyed, but visually the message is lost.
In taking mandatory domestic violence training at work recently, I was thrown completely off by a statistic and accompanying graphic. The graphic (albeit using masculine and feminine silhouette images) resembled:
♀♀♀♀
♂♂♂♂♂♂♂
…with the corresponding statistic that one in every four women and one in every seven men has experienced domestic violence. While the numbers made sense to me, it took me a while to grasp them, because the graphic was simply showing more men than women. It’s something akin to a scale problem, our brains are going to see the obvious numbers – four and seven – instead of readily converting the graphics into their respective percentages. How to fix this, then?
♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀
♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂♂
If we simply repeat our graphics such that the total number in either set is a common multiple, now it’s much simpler to process the information that we’re supposed to process. We might not immediately recognize that seven in twenty-four is the same as one in four, nor that four in twenty-four is the same as one in seven, but we do know that seven is greater than four (which caused the problem in the first place earlier), and now we’re not dealing with mentally constructing percentages from a simple visual.
My line of work involves a lot of mushing around of the requirements of customers who don’t know the Agency’s style requirements, best practices for web, and CMS limitations into something that comfortably adheres to the preceding rules while still pleasing (or at least appeasing) said customer. Often, folks inexplicably want a handful of tiny, near-zero content pages, when typically we try to present the content together, broken up by headers with IDs. I have to go through quite a few layers to communicate how their requirements will actually manifest, and the technical knowledge is reduced each step of the way.
The term ‘anchors’ comes up in these instances, a lot. I understand that the term makes sense as far as relating something concrete to a structural abstraction – the ‘anchor’ is cast somewhere on the page, and you can just follow the corresponding line (link) to it. I also understand how this came to be from a historical tech perspective – as I understand it, Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a far more bidirectional system of linking, so our <a> (anchor) element would represent something more nodelike, an exit point and an entrance point.
But links don’t work that way on the internet as we know it. The <a> element is probably the least logically named element in modern HTML. But for a while, even though <a> elements still didn’t work that way, we had kind of a hack in place that accomplished the same goal. The HTML 3.2 specification tells us that “[Anchors] are used to define hypertext links and also to define named locations for use as targets for hypertext links”, with the distinction coming from whether an <a> element has an href or a name attribute. It wasn’t until HTML 4.0 that we even had an id attribute to use.
The two uses of the anchor element, while compatible in conjunction with one another (<a href="www.example.com" name="here">) in line with Berners-Lee’s vision, are still semantically very different functions. HTML 4.0 still encouraged the dual-usage, but at least acknowledged these were fundamentally different things, “The A element may define an anchor, a link, or both.” It no longer actually calls <a> anchor, and instead states that the element has two distinct usages. Obviously this is not great as far as semantics are concerned, but more trouble comes when one starts to introduce styling.
HTML 4.0 brought with it the big push for stylesheets, the separation of structure and content. Of course, if you’re styling <a> to look like a link, all of your <a> elements being used as anchors now just appear to be nonfunctional links. The solution wrecked any sense of structural connection between the anchor and the text it represents – simply use an empty <a name="headline"> element in front of your text. This is clearly awful, and with the id attribute now present and sharing namespace with name, entirely unnecessary.
HTML5 still supports this behavior, though recommends against it. Anyone who cares at all about semantics, about accessibility should recommend against it. The CMS I use at work has finally done away with it. And I think that as we slowly come to our senses about this, we should probably just do away with the term ‘anchor’ as well. The attribute is id, the hash in the URL denotes a ‘fragment identifier’. They’re a bit more jargonistic, but these are the terms I always try to use. There’s still a legacy connection between the word ‘anchor’ and the <a> element. And when dealing with folks who occasionally wind up changing things that they don’t really have the background to be changing, legacy language can lead to legacy behavior, as well as making it more difficult to search for help they may need.
When I was in elementary school, I learned much of my foundation in computing on the Commodore 64. It was a great system to learn on, with lots of tools available and easy ways to get ‘down to the wire’, so to speak. Though it was hard to see just how limited the machines were compared with what the future held, some programs really stood out for how completely impossible they seemed1. One such program was S.A.M. – the Software Automated Mouth, my first experience with synthesized speech2.
Speech synthesis has come a long way since. It’s built into current operating systems, it can be had in IC form for under $9, and it’s becoming increasingly present in day-to-day life. I routinely use Windows’ built in speech synthesizer along with NVDA as part of my accessibility checking regimen. But I’m also increasingly becoming dismayed by the egregious use of speech synthesis when natural human speech would not only suffice but be better in every regard. Synthesis has the advantage of being able to (theoretically) say anything while not paying a person to do the job. I’m seeing more and more instances where this doesn’t pan out, and the robot is truly bad at its job to boot.
Three examples, all train-related (I suppose I spend a lot of time on trains): the new 7000 series DC Metro cars, the new MARC IV series coach cars, and the announcements at DC’s Union Station. None of these need to be synthesized. They’re all essentially announcing destinations – they have very limited vocabularies and don’t make use of the theoretical ability to say anything. Union Station’s robot occasionally announces delays and the like, but often announcements beyond the norm revert to a human. Metro and MARC trains only announce stops and have demonstrated no capacity for supplemental speech. Where old and new cars are paired, conductors/operators still need to make their own station stop announcements.
So these synthesizers don’t seem to have a compelling reason to exist. It could be argued that human labor is now potentially freed up, but given the robots’ limited vocabularies and grammars, the same thing could be accomplished with human voice recordings. I can’t imagine that the cost of hiring a voice actor with software to patch the speech together into meaningful grammar would be appreciably more expensive than the robot. In fact, before the 7000 series Metro cars, WMATA used recordings to announce door openings and closings; they replaced these recordings in 2006, and the voice actor was rewarded with a $10 fare card3.
Aside from simply not being necessary, the robots aren’t good at their job. This is, of course, bad programming – human error. But it feels like the people in charge of the voices are so far detached from the final product that they don’t realize how much they’re failing. The MARC IV coaches are acceptable, but their grammar is bizarre. When the train is coming to a station stop, an acceptable thing to announce might be ‘arriving at Dickerson’, which is in fact what the conductors tend to say. The train, instead, says ‘this train stops at Dickerson’, which at face value says nothing beyond that the train will in fact stop there at some point. It’s bad information, communicated poorly. Union Station’s robot has acceptable grammar, but she pronounces the names of stations completely wrong. Speech synthesizers generally have two components: the synthesizer that knows how to make phonemes (the sounds that make up our speech), and a layer that translates the words in a given language to these phonemes. My old buddy S.A.M. had the S.A.M. speech core, and Reciter which looked up word parts in a table to convert to phonemes. This all had to fit into considerably less than 64K, so it wasn’t perfect, and (if memory serves), one could override Reciter with direct phonemes for mispronounced words. Apple’s say command (well, their Speech Synthesis API) allows on-the-fly switching between text and phoneme input using [[inpt TEXT]] and [[inpt PHON]] within a speech string4. So again, given just how limited the robot’s vocabulary is (none of these trains are adding station stops with any regularity), someone should have been able to review what the robot says and suggest overrides. Half the time, this robot gets so confused that she sounds like GLaDOS in her death throes.
Which brings me to my final point – the robots simply aren’t human. Even when they are pronouncing things well, they can be hard to understand. On the flipside, the DC Metro robot sounds realistic enough that she creeps me the hell out, which I can only assume is the auditory equivalent of the uncanny valley. I suppose a synthesized voice could have neutrality as an advantage – a grumpy human is probably more off-putting than a lifeless machine. But again, this is solvable with human recordings. I cannot imagine any robot being more comforting than a reasonably calm human.
Generally speaking, we’re reducing the workforce more and more, replacing the workforce with automation, machinery. It’s a necessary progression, though I’m not sure we’re prepared to deal with the unemployment consequences. It’s easy to imagine speech synthesis as a readily available extension of this concept – is talking a necessary job? But human speech is seemingly being replaced in instances where the speaking does not actually replace a human’s job and/or a human recording would easily suffice. In some instances, speaking being replaced is a mere component of another job being replaced – take self-checkout machines (which tend to be human recordings despite the fact that grocery store inventories are far more volatile than train routes, hence ‘place your… object… in the bag’). But I feel like I’m seeing more and more instances that seem to use speech synthesis which is demonstrably worse than a human voice, and seemingly serves no purpose (presumably beyond lining someone’s pockets).
By now we all know that Twitter has killed off Vine, or is slowly killing off Vine, or has killed off part of Vine and will kill off the rest of it in the future. My initial reaction to this was pure joy, for I have long hated Vine. That enthusiasm was tempered by promptly hearing from source after source how Vine was a huge creative outlet for oft-ignored black youth. That my experiences never crossed paths with this version of Vine is purely a failing on my part, plain and simple. A wake-up call to attempt to be less complacent and lazy in my media consumption.
If I were left to my own personal experiences with Vine, however, I would still be delighted with the news. This is because, put simply, I have never watched a Vine and felt like I got anything out of the video that I did not get out of the screencap. This is not a problem unique to Vine by any means, it seems that increasingly we live in a world where video is considered the most captivating medium, thus all content should be video. Rather than letting a creative work dictate its own medium and leaving the excitement factor as the responsibility of the creator, video checks off that box from the get-go. I guess if audiences are largely eating it up, then that’s true enough and fair enough. But I wonder just how many people clicked Vine after Vine and felt that they weren’t getting an appropriate return on their time investment.