I like making transit maps in my spare time.

I got into tech by liking data visualization, information design, and aesthetics in frontend. It turns out transit maps and wayfinding is one of the earliest modern attempts at information design that is standardized and legible. And it’s fun to revisit because there’s no objective truth about what kind of map is best.

You can do this pretty simply with hooks and reducers, where the reducer/dispatch are the model/controller.

Class components have their own pitfalls when you start messing around with componentDidUpdate, which was part of the motivation behind functional components IIRC.

Not everyone likes hooks. Class components may have issues, but if hooks are the solution I'll stay with class components, thank you very much!

I will say that I used to really not like hooks and that’s because I think the migration documentation and messaging was handled pretty poorly.

That being said, if you’ve worked with state management like Redux, I would argue that hooks are pretty similar to how you hook up that kind of data store.

Yeah, Redux is another big mistake I stayed away from. "Line after line of throat clearing and pseduostructure", as one developer put it [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342764

The Big Mac Index has the fatal flaw in that it assumes the value of Big Mac is consistent over time; McDonald’s has been at the forefront of fast food attempting to break into a more high income market segment.

Accurately aiming inflation as a central bank is like trying to keep a deflating balloon the same size using a harmonica. 2.6% isn’t bad, I don’t know that many if any central banks have managed a tighter band.

There are actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.

Solution: rotate your monitor 90 degrees, and inform your OS that you have done so. Now your monitor is 1080x1920. You'll actually be amazed how much more of a document fits on screen without sacrificing readability.

Preach. I have 4 monitors and one is a vertical 1440x2560. Massive productivity boost - terminals running claude code, reading docs, IDE panes, anything with lots of scrolling. Highly recommend it!

I can resize my window easily if I wanted shorter text. Or used ctrl-shift-m on Firefox. But I can't easily make the text longer without userscripts or addons.

> actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read

That may apply to most people, but not to everyone.

afaict it applies to literally everyone. there's a variable "sweet spot" of course, but once you get out to "extremely wide" it's reliably worse for everyone, and there are LOADS of computer monitors that qualify for that label.

margins to control the width of large blocks of text have a ton of research in their favor, it's not just "more whitespace = more gooder" UI design madness. there's some of that of course, but there's a sane core underneath it all.

The studies go back way earlier than that; there's a reason why they call them "newspaper columns"

Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.

ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.

no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.

* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles

* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album

* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely

* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for

Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...

The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.

Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”

It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.

That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.

Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.

Not even just for their category. "NYT bestsellers" has been manipulated like this since inception.

NYT bestsellers is also not a sales volume chart, there is an editorial lens to it as well

Likely not a bad way to clean money.

People do it with Steam games, too.

Depending on your standards and what company is making it you could even have “cruelty free.”

The problem is that AGI fantasy aside, CTOs at companies are expected to deliver results today and tomorrow. Better to let somebody else hold the bag and train models, then once it finally works as advertised you can ease on the brakes.

Humans are still in the loop as the final signoff responsible for liability, and to do an audit you’ll need someone who knows what they’re looking at.

Liabilty will be waived in the terms of use.

Terms of use are not a legal “get of out jail” free card.