Gwern

Nice article, the comments here are kind of amazing for a nominally technical audience. It is almost as if people have no idea how difficult automatic page layout and formatting is. There are literally PhD thesis topics on it[1]. And to expect that complexity to be abstracted away into some sort of simple "do-what-I-mean" expression? That just isn't going to happen.

Go look at Gwern Branwen's web site[2]. That is art. But the trick is decide how you want the site to look and then constraining your written material to be expressible in that style.

I've been looking at web page layout since 1995 when I joined a startup that was doing the "first magazine on the web about Golf!"[3] When the Zen Garden folks did their web site and started the 'A List Apart' mailing list which is now a website[4] it really helped me understand just what one was up against if you wanted to produce web content that rendered nicely on a wide variety of projections. And yes, the term projection is intentional because the function of going from semantic content to presentation on a screen or paper or other flat surface of finite size, is a mapping (or projection) from a native space into the rule set of the destination space. That rule set consists of both physical constraints (pixels per inch, total pixels horizonally and vertically, color capability) and software constraints (how much of the underlying capability can the browser software that is currently running express). Not to mention that every…

I'd written my own variant on this theme (based on the original and the Better Motherfucking Website), which applies some but generally minimal styling (14 CSS rules) to achieve a balance of minimalism, legibility, and functionality:

<https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/12/broadcom_ca_technologies/>

(Let me know if you're having issues reading that, I myself get a message "Referred from Pen Edward Morbius's motherfucking website" viewing under Firefox.)

What most strikes me is that with ever so slightly more advanced browser defaults the Web could be ever so much more readable. What I'd like to see is a standard set of default page layouts ("article", "overview", "lighttable", "catalogue", "discussion", say) along with a few more primitive elements (notes, equations, interactive tables with some basic spreadsheet functionality,[1] and threaded discussions most principally) which could address a huge chunk of what's now highly-styled, and often unreadable, Web designs.

The one thing I find not entirely universally suitable from my design is that the off-white / off-black background/text are not ideal for e-ink devices, though the overall effect remains generally readable.

Gwern's own website (<https://gwern.net/>) strikes me as one of the absolute best highly-styled websites, and absolutely stands out amongst that class.

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Notes:

1. The ability to sort by specific columns, summarize quantitative columns by total and some univariate…

> There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet?

This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.”

Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for.

> That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same.

On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example.

In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites.

Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find.

Self-published home pages like this are still cool:

https://www.gwern.net/

This one uses a kind of ethical advertising:

https://slatestarcodex.com/about/

Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup…

As someone working on making these health & wellness strategies and protocols more data-driven and evidence based through more structured experiments (see https://mementolabs.io), I'm very much pro on pushing for more people trying these "fringe" strategies in a more informed manner, so take my following thoughts with a grain of salt:

- Many of our current, preexisting beliefs about food and nutrition are proving to be extremely flawed and contrived, having essentially been pushed by big-food to drive more consumption of sugar and carbs in our meals as opposed to actually being research-based (just look at the USDA Food pyramid, that puts carbs, almost all simple, as a staple). The emerging research around restricted eating, fasting, and autophagy (research that won a Nobel Prize in 2016) is extremely promising albeit still developing.

- There's real value to proper self-experimentation for helping you discover and build better individual habits and determining what uniquely works for improving your health and wellness, as well as challenge your thinking on your existing beliefs, particularly around nutrition & dieting that tend to be ingrained in you during development. [See gwern's self experiments for some interesting ones](https://gwern.net).

- IMO, the core issue at the root of this rise of the "cult-like influencer" is a lack of accessible academic research (i.e the average person will opt to read blogs over a long, hugely technical research paper) which creates…

A friend of mine has used this before and they did alternating low ~30mg doses that same someone had previously used a similar dose Adderall in highschool and early college and preferred the feeling of Modafinil.

They told me they had read multiple studies before hand as well as personal accounts (such as from the venerable https://www.gwern.net/).

That person told me that the feeling was less intense but enough to keep the significantly longer periods of focus without feeling complete lock-in like you might experience on other similar drugs. That said, they also did say the dehydration was heavy and to keep that in mind.

They said the reason they alternated was they had found that given the longer 15 hour-ish half-life they felt effects strong enough the following day that if they dosed again it started making them feel uncomfortable. That said they are typically very sensitive to most substances. They also felt that you should do your dose early enough, 7-8am, so that by the time 1am or so rolls around you can still get mostly a normal sleep.

They also told me that one time they had done multiple consecutive doses and the come down depressive like symptoms were just as bad as the same symptoms from coming off consecutive doses of Adderall. They thought that if you're prone to dangerous depression this one might not be for you.

They did not endorse doing this but to each their own.

I was reading this thinking "that's a great analysis" and then read _who_ posted it. OP, this is the author of https://gwern.net, which has been very influential in the design of many technical blogs / personal sites and has some very inventive and fantastic ideas. Ie, the author knows what they're talking about.

My site uses CSS to respect light/dark theme, so has no manual toggle. It requires Javascript and I have a personal goal to have a JS-free site, just pure HTML and CSS. I also think that a site should respect the user's own light/dark settings, and so a toggle, if one ever exists for a site, should really be a browser setting on the browser toolbar.

/u/gwern, in case you read this, your design along with Tufte.css were one of the influences of my own site: https://daveon.design/ . (Also present is inspiration from older-style publishing and manuscripts, and personal preferences. But your site was the first one -- a key influence -- I saw that inspired me with what a modern, clean personal website could be and how it could look, as well as what it might contain. It's a real honour to see you here and reply!)