Using either Calibri or Times New Roman makes it look like you did not put any thought into your brand and chose the default in Microsoft Word. The State department probably has certain constraints (i.e. they likely have to choose one of the fonts that ships with Microsoft Word, and possibly a subset of that that also ships on macOS), but they could definitely choose better than the default.
I find the narrow serif typefaces such as Century Schoolbook a bit harder to read than ones with more normal spacing, and I think the US government should optimize for legibility and accessibility over style in routine communications. Palatino or Garamond would probably be my choices.
That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word).
But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices.
I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.
Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!
I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.
So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done?
Who should get the least amount of surprise?
Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.
In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.
While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.
It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.
Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.
The first is a preventive maintenance and calibration tracker (https://pmcal.net) that was born out of my day job as an engineer in small business manufacturing.
The second is an AI engine for pulling structured data out of incoming email (either via IMAP on your email server or via SES). If you think of the engine that powers TripIt, they had to write about 10,000 different ingestors for each airline and hotel and travel booking site. With a structured output AI, the need to write specific ingestors goes away.
You can also get structured data out of mailboxes with my project EmailEngine. You can use an API request to fetch message contents, or you can configure EmailEngine to send a webhook for every new email in a structured JSON, for example, like this: https://emailengine.app/webhooks#messageNew
I don't think I was specific enough on what kind of structured data. The idea is that it extracts information from the text/HTML content of emails (e.g. a flight itinerary from an airline booking email or an ingredient list from a recipe) using AI.
Since you already have a method for reaching into folks Microsoft 365 inboxes and such, you could probably train an LLM to extract arbitrary data based on a user's prompt quite quickly though.
I discovered I liked business planning, strategy, and marketing pretty early in my technical career.
I also discovered that one of the thing business people bring to a company are connections, especially if they have already worked in a vertical, and few people want to talk to a bright kid about their problems.
The quality of store management seems to affect a lot when it comes to Walmart. I have been to some Walmart stores where I have never seen any unfolded clothing. I have been to some Walmart stores where I have never seen any folded clothing.
An organization as large as Walmart has the wherewithal to put together an effective charging network if they decide it is a priority. One of the nice things about being first-party is that they will likely have a preventive maintenance program and emergency maintenance program for the chargers, and some of that can be done by the company electrician.
I have a Tesla, and due to various factors (apartment living, other family members with Teslas), I almost exclusively use public chargers. I have some opinions of what amenities I want at a charger (bathroom, cold diet coke), but in general the chargers at gas stations, grocery stores, and Walmarts are the best for me. Restaurants and malls are actually not great amenities because that's often not the mood you are in when you arrive at the charger.
I wrote a small business preventive maintenance and calibration tracker (https://pmcal.net) as a side project.
A few manufacturing companies that I have a close relationship with are using it and love it, but I have kind of hit a wall with other growth avenues (Google Ads, organic promotion on the web).
I have been thinking of marketing directly to ISO 9001 auditors, because “can you get email reminders” is a question they have asked at multiple companies I have worked at. I feel like cold mailing them something branded (e.g. notepads) might work, but I am not sure how much money I want to spend on it if it doesn’t and it’s also a bit nerve-wracking to put myself out there like that.
Thank you. My day job is as an engineer in manufacturing so I felt like I had a unique opportunity to "build what I know" and have seen people use and enjoy.
It's a worthwhile project to build yourself. If nothing else I found out that I definitely do not like the date-fns library in JavaScript. I built it using AWS Amplify, and although I like that it scales to zero, but I think there are too many gotchas to Amplify, and especially DynamoDB, for a startup app that you want to move quickly on. I wrote up one of the major ones after I got really frustrated. [1]
Like I said in my original post, I am trying to figure out how to get it in front of the right people (who are less likely to be on HN). I have kind of decided that the B2C sales experience is not great unless you get a critical mass; my experience doing sales in manufacturing is working the booth at trade shows, talking to people about engineering, and using our process tools to develop a solution to the customer's problem. The more scattered "compete for attention" advertising/promotion sales model doesn't seem great unless you have a lot of money behind it.
I'm rambling, but if anyone likes this or feels it needs a certain feature, feel free to reach out. If you're in Boston / Providence I'll happily grab a drink with you.
I played with OpenHands for a few days (using gpt-4o since I already had an OpenAI account). I found it to be decent at writing new code, but then it had a hard time making changes when there was a lot of repetitive code (in a TypeScript / React project that I had it create with vite).
One of the interesting things about OpenHands is that you can see what the AI is doing in the terminal window where you launched it. Since it can't really load the whole codebase into its context window, it does a lot of greping files, showing 10 lines on either side of the match, and then doing a search and replace based on this. This is pretty similar to what a human might do: attempt to identify the relevant function and change it.
I think I might have better luck with a simpler project, e.g. a Sinatra or Flask app where each route is relatively self-contained. I might give it or Cursor another try in the future when the tech has progressed a bit.
I heard a story of a fishing boat in the eastern US that was "fighting a fish" for miles but could never get any traction. When another fisherman looked at their chart, he noted that they were dragged miles in a straight line towards Europe, and said "You caught a sub". The submariners don't care, they probably find it funny.
I built a computer vision device that used the top-down area of a penny as a calibration standard. Coins are useful, easy-to-get items that have relatively tight manufacturing tolerances.
Ever since coin clipping got out of hand in the 1700s most coins feature milled edges or edge inscriptions. They make the edges more resistant to wear and make any wear easy to spot.
Of course there's a limit to the precision you can get from coins, but considering the scale of their production and the account of handling they see they are surprisingly good
Our area measurement application did not require that tight a tolerance (we were estimating yield on broken material). If I needed that tight a tolerance, I could have gotten proof coins from the mint, or potentially switched to using a real calibration standard like a gauge block.
I have often, though I suspect not enough to make a significant difference to someone who is already OK with the slight variance between un-worn coins.
Depends on what your tolerances are. If you only need to be within a mm a coin is going to beat that by an order of magnitude.
We use a pack of cigarettes as a gauge for one of the jobs we do. Quick, (not so) cheap, and readily available. May have to standardize on a vape though in the near future.
Generally in order to ticket an itinerary, there needs to be at least one flight marketed (e.g. with the airline's flight number) by the "plating carrier" whose ticket stock the flights are issued on.
I can't buy an itinerary consisting of just BA238 on aa.com but I can buy AA6981 which is its codeshare. I can also buy an itinerary where I fly AA on BOS-JFK and connect to BA JFK-LHR, because there's at least one AA-marketed flight on the ticket.
The marketing carrier also can affect how the operating carrier gets paid -- codeshares can have different inventory which allows airlines that are partners but not super close to hold back inventory for themselves.
> I can also buy an itinerary where I fly AA on BOS-JFK and connect to BA JFK-LHR, because there's at least one AA-marketed flight on the ticket.
Dunno if that’s a requirement that AA has, but I’ve totally bought 100% Air France metal tickets that don’t even touch US soil on Delta because Delta sold the same itinerary for way less.
You bought them on their DL#### codeshare flight number (what [AA or DL]-marketed means in GP's comment).
I fly a lot of "Delta" flights that are entirely KLM or Republic metal, often buying the Republic flights with Delta points earned on the KLM flights. (NB: the Republic airplanes say “Delta” on the side, while the KLM ones say KLM.)
I find the narrow serif typefaces such as Century Schoolbook a bit harder to read than ones with more normal spacing, and I think the US government should optimize for legibility and accessibility over style in routine communications. Palatino or Garamond would probably be my choices.