2024-12-25 05:26:42
Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.
Sponsored by:
2024-12-25 02:31:42
Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament just plain suck. But it’s really pretty fun.
It’s also a good thing I procrastinated on linking to this for two months — it’s improved greatly in the weeks since Snell linked to it. The example code is now JavaScript, not CSS, which is a much better baseline for choosing a programming font. And there are some better font choices now.
I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.
2024-12-24 10:00:00
Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.
If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.
PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.
2024-12-23 02:41:18
My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to check as you await your favorite’s show’s next episode.
Unlike any other anime aggregation site, Jiiiii has a collection of beautiful native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, making it the best way to keep up with anime on Apple devices. They even have a progressive web app in beta, that you can download on almost any other platform to get a similar experience.
The best part? No ads, no tracking, and complete privacy — all the benefits you’d expect from the indie husband-and-wife developers Dimitri and Linh Bouniol. (Dimitri streamed the entire development of Jiiiii to YouTube, and continues to do so every night.)
Catch up on anything you missed from the fall season, and get ready for the winter season’s new anime with Jiiiii, and never miss out on a show again.
2024-12-23 02:32:28
Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski:
I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious sport with abandon. Rickey played a timid sport with flash. Rickey irritated and thrilled and frustrated and dominated and left us all wanting more.
“When we were kids,” his teammate Mike Gallego said, “we played in the backyard emulating Pete Rose’s stance or Joe Morgan’s. I believe Rickey emulated Rickey.”
Yes, Rickey was his own thing, entirely, completely, from the way he crouched at the plate (“he has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart,” Jim Murray famously wrote), to the way he slid headfirst on the bases (he modeled his slide after an airplane landing) to the way he held out virtually every spring (“You have to say Rickey’s consistent,” Don Mattingly said during one of those holdouts, “and that’s what you want from a ballplayer: consistency”) to the way he referred to himself in the third person (“People are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey,’” Rickey said, “but it’s been blown way out of proportion”) to the joyful confidence he exuded every time he stepped out on the diamond from age 20 to age 44.
“You wanna throw me out today?” he would ask catchers the first time he stepped to the plate. “Well, hang tight. Rickey’s gonna give you that chance.”
I don’t want to spoil a single word of the story Posnanski closes his piece with. Just be sure to read through to the very end.
See also:
From ESPN’s obit, by Howard Bryant and Jeff Passan:
He played his last game at 44 years, 268 days old Sept. 19, 2003, for the Dodgers, and his stolen base total remains more than 1,000 ahead of the current active leader.
Here’s the list of career steals leaders among active players, led by Starling Marte with 354 and Jose Altuve with 315. There are only four other active players with more than 200. Rickey had 1,406. Lou Brock is second place on the all-time list with 938 steals. So even if Marte (who is already 36 years old) or Altuve (34 years old) were to steal as many additional bases as Lou Brock did in his entire 19-year career — the guy who is second-place all-time — they’d still be well short of Rickey’s record. In the entire history of Major League Baseball there are only nine players who stole half of Rickey’s career number. But as FanGraphs’s Dan Szymborski observes, “The funny thing with Rickey is that you take away the stolen bases, he’s still easily in the top 10 for LF WAR all time.”
Also from ESPN:
Stories about Henderson were as legendary as his play, such as the true story of him once framing a million-dollar bonus check and hanging it on his wall — without first cashing it.
Last but not least, give a listen to this quick story from Giants great Will Clark, about a preseason game against Rickey’s Oakland A’s when the A’s coaches tried to give him the “don’t steal” sign. You know what Rickey did.
2024-12-22 06:02:09
Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee:
To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.
Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” [...]
In 1980, his first full major league season, Henderson broke Ty Cobb’s 65-year-old American League record for stolen bases by swiping 100 bags to Cobb’s 96. In 1982 he stole 130 bases, breaking Hall of Famer Lou Brock’s all-time single-season record of 118. Henderson’s 130 steals that year stands as the record to this day. He would lead the American League in stolen bases in each of his first seven full seasons and nine of his first ten. He’d lead his league in steals in 12 seasons in all, the last of which came in 1998 when he was 39 years-old.
On May 1, 1991, Henderson broke Brock’s all-time stolen base record with his 939th steal and would go on to steal an astounding 1,406 bases before he retired. No player has come anywhere close to Henderson’s mark in the three decades since he set it and many doubt anyone ever will.
You have to be really good even to have had been on base that many times, to have had the opportunity to steal 1,400+ bases, let alone to have actually swiped them. He was amazing. He’s best known for his career base-stealing record, but Henderson — thanks to his speed, talent, competitiveness, and remarkable longevity — is also the career leader in runs scored. Scoring runs is how you win — you can make the case that no stat is more important in baseball, and Rickey (as everyone called him, including himself) scored more runs than anyone who ever played. Look at the names on the top 10 for career runs scored:
What a player, and character, he was. Rickey was the most exciting player I ever saw.
