Musings on the Human Condition

  Moral of the story: If you're a developer, then don't use dark mode in Chrome.  I was using Chrome Dev Tools in dark mode and couldn't even see that there's a drop-down in the styles tab color picker widget that brings up the page color palette. I don't know whether Google runs accessibility tests on Dev Tools, but the color contrast is pretty much non-existent.  The page color palette is invaluable to validate compliance with the style guide or pick the right color for an A/B test and still be true to your branding guidelines. But you wouldn't even know it exists if you're using dark mode. Dark mode could literally leave you in the dark! What I've concluded is that dark mode is only useful in apps that were designed to be dark-first, e.g. Discord or reddit. With light-first apps, dark mode isn't mature enough to compete with the years of UX effort that has gone into light mode. So, with light-first apps, I'm going back to light mode at least u...

I asked my extended family members living in Australia how their covid vaccinations were coming along. Had they been vaccinated? Booked an appointment at least? They said they haven't paid much attention to it. I was surprised. At first, I thought they were being callous. Then I looked at the number of new cases on April 2, 2021. Australia: 13, US: 68,844. Enough said. (And if you're curious, Canada: 2,686, India: 89,129, UK: 3,402.) On a per-capita basis, America is the clear leader (or should we say loser?).

I was trying to figure out what subdomain name to choose for my new space on Quora , I tried "musings," of course, to go with the name of this blog.  "Taken," said Quora.  I tried a few others until the word "triumphant" came into my head. Does anyone really understand what causes certain words to jump into your consciousness when you're trying to think of a unique name for your website domain name or company name?  I tried it and to my surprise, it was not being used and the subdomain became mine. triumphant.quora.com That's the address for how to get to my unique space (web page) on Quora. Pretty damn neat. It wasn't until later on when I picked up the book I had been reading that I came to understand why "triumphant" had been the word to pop into my cranium at that moment. That book is "Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World." In the book, David Epstein lays down a compelling case for what I've always b...

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