Last time, my friend said CSS stands for
"Custom Sexy Styles" (dig into my older rants)

This time, he said
"Centering Somewhat Sucks"

Now he knows the deal.

Backend engineer doing frontend. The eternal struggle of centering an object.

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

Oke so this just happened...

Spent 30 minutes figuring out why the f**k a div was vertically centered within another one.

Apparently margin:auto within a display: flex not only centers horizontally but also vertically.

I remember the days when i spent hours vertically centering sh*t. What universe are we in?

Centering.

To all you devs still wet behind the ears ranting about css - you have no clue just how good you have it.

Most designs used to be table based (table-ception) and to give something a border with round corners or a "drop shadow" you would literally create a table to hold you content with an border of cells containing a background image of a corner / border.

Now you use border-radius or box-shadow as a 1 liner. Stop bitching about centering things and figure out how to hack it like we did.

If you remember this whats your least missed 20th century hack?

Little victories in css

It's 2017.

Why is vertically centering a div still so stinkin hard?

Yeah yeah ik what you will tell me, "use flexbox".
Well guess what,. I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FOR THE PAST 6 FUCKING HOURS!

I've gone as far as to copy code from 20+ different websites advertising working solutions. My tab bar looks like the fucking rockey mountains!

My main problem is that flexbox on chrome is not accepting ANY % values.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill myself. YAY! 🤗

I mean <br> spam is TECHNICALLY vertical centering

Flexbox.. Where have you been all these years?!

When I initially started learning web development I remember thinking 'someone didn't quite think this through..' about centering block elements etc in the dom. Those days are now over, I still believe in miracles.

Our IT-Class project: Mathematics trainer in Java
Day 1 (was monday)

TL;DR we didn't save.

So we formed groups and I landed in the UI team with, let's call him Mage and let's call her Goth.

We had an eclipse project folder on our desktop (they said it only works when put on desktop) Btw they didn't even want to use a cloud or something (I wish we'd use git and I'd finally learn it). We should take the changes by USB from computer to computer.

So me, Mage an Goth are making a basic GUI for this Mathematic-Training App. We use this thing from Eclipse but I forgot the name. It has not enough functionality on surface and I hate things that break complex things up to ease things but leave away so much.

So after a productive hour of building a GUI and centering shit by calculating the top and bottom distance and use margins (hurts me really but Mage was designing, Goth intensively calculating on paper), the bell rings.

Mage wants to save the project on my USB-Stick and bamm💥
A black screen.
I don't know how it happened but it sure had something to do with the USB-port looking like you fucked it with a way to huge🍆. It looked damn broken.

So because we have a nice App called HD-Guard, which fucking wipes the desktop on startup and resets all but the documents/images/videos/music folder —

It's all's gone. Today is day 2 of this project so let's see how today turns out.

The whole CSS "centering" thing is so funny because that problem is easy per se but it can pop up in ways you've never seen before and you have to learn how to center your stuff for 9832 different situations

centering

Protip: proposing a "simple yet beautiful" login form on Bootsnip with absolutely no knowledge of Bootstrap whatsoever, making it not responsive and centering it with hardwritten margins (such as: 'margin-left: 170px'), AND THEN proudly display "theme developed by WhoGives AShit" at the bottom won't make you any publicity at best. At worst, I'm gonna travel to India and won't leave before I erased the code you wrote by smashing your face on the "erase" key.

Everybody keeps complaining about people who center content (expecially in websites) not appropriately.

So I'm just watching the WWDC 2018 (never watched one before and don't own any iDevice) and see the new aproach on Apple News.

So, "centering is ugly" is out and instead "gorgeous".

Have to admit, that this does indeed look nice. Just funny when centering content often embodies bad design choices.

Considering that I'm the designer on most projects and work mostly frontend... Well yeah I'm a bad experience for myself from times to times 🤔 but at least I know my tools and web limitations (haven read others rants about ignorant designers).. so.. that's something 🎉

The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.

The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.

Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.

Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.

Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.

Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.

In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.

I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.

5 hours for 6 lines of code. Math is awesome and stuff, but translating matlab code into python and then extending it without knowing what it does (so you have to understand it first), well, is sometimes exhausting.

But after all this time I am so happy that it works and that I fully understand all the math behind it. And now I have to compare it to the other 6 methods I created for this task.. Yay.

Just spent 30 mins vertically centering a damn image in a two-column Bootstrap row. Yeah, flexbox is great unless you want to stack the columns at mobile screen size like they do with Bootstrap normally. Then everything breaks and the original ugly hack just gets replaced by a slightly lesser evil.

I really hope that we sort this out somehow before colonising Mars.

CSS.... vertical centering back around 2000 before flexbox and frameworks

HTML- before we head css frameworks looked bootstrap. I am done make things pretty ..I make them functional

Why the *fuck* does everyone think every single paragraph should be centered? Yeah, sure, components, icons, things that are presentation, sure most of the time you want that centered. But not *every* time. And, especially, never when the content is body copy text. That shit is hard to read, dammit! And yet I swear every single non-technical person and marketer I've known wants everything to be centered.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Ok Google, learn to center stuff properly.

having a hard time centering buttons children because firefox does not support flexbox in button element. :/

tests boy
- balding in his late twenties
- thinks that React is a framework
- favorite book is either 1984 or fight club
- came to IT to make an impact but obviously lacks determination to do so. Prefers not to think about it
- doesn’t know why and for what he wakes up every morning. Stopped thinking about it 7 years ago
- has a girlfriend that doesn’t allow him to penetrate her, only hugs and cunnilingus
- already forgot how does a blowjob feel like
- when it’s too hot in his room when he tries to sleep, he gets up and opens the window, and after that he doesn’t want to sleep anymore, and tomorrow is a yet another working day
- unexpected slack message sound he hears when not at the office triggers his fight or flight response
- still salty about CSS vertical-align: middle not instantly centering the element vertically
- just like 5 years ago, every day he thinks that after he learns That New Thing, he’ll begin The Real Life, and his current career state is temporary
- loves to say “it’s not my job” but only says that if absolutely sure that he won’t be reported for that
- uses vscode
- thinks he’s an engineer