During the Renaissance, this concept arose called civic humanism. Basically, making money and owning things wasn't seen as evil. It was seen as a way to improve the city.

Before the Black Death, peasants are abundant. They're cheap. They're treated like interchangeable cogs in the feudal machine. Suddenly, almost overnight, 50% of the workforce is wiped out by this invisible pestilence that nobody truly understands. Human labor is now scarce. You can't just replace a plowman. This scarcity forced the nobility to treat labor with respect and pay real wages. However, that didn't happen immediately. The rich fought tooth and nail to make sure peasants stayed in their place with kings like Edward III even introducing new laws to make sure that workers could only be paid what they had been paid before the Black Death. But it was too late. The peasants realized they had more power and they understood basic supply and demand. This was the beginning of the end for feudalism.

we live currently in an era of irony poisoning. Trying too hard or even saying that you're trying hard like Timmy Timothy Shalamé did in his speech is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is cringe, especially for a generation that has grown up with a fear of being recorded and posted online during their worst moments. Younger generations now protect themselves with layers of irony and detachment because they're too terrified of being perceived as trying and failing.

We like to think that when the printing press came along and people had more access to knowledge, all of this instantly cleared up.

Wrong. It actually kicked off an information explosion. It created chaos and wars and confusion. There were a lot of growing pains associated with the fact that suddenly anybody could write up a tract, print a bunch of pamphlets and distribute it as truth. However, and this is the important part, the printing press eventually led to the scientific revolution and the enlightenment.

In her book, The Printing Press as an agent of change, the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the press didn't just spread knowledge. It actually forced people to develop new methods to separate truth from fiction.

A tada list, or to-done list, is where you write out what you accomplished each day. It’s supposed to make you focus on things you’ve completed instead of focusing on how much you still need to do.

Greyscale-AA is the “natural” approach to anti-aliasing. The basic idea is to give partially-covered pixels partial-transparency. During composition, this will cause that pixel to be slightly tinted as if it were slightly covered, creating clearer details.

It’s greyscale because that’s the term used for one-dimensional color, like our one-dimensional transparency (otherwise glyphs tend to be a single solid color). Also in the common case of black text on a white background, the anti-aliasing literally shows up as greyness around the edges.

Subpixel-AA is a trick that abuses the common way pixels are laid out on desktop monitors.

When characters are missing from fonts, it’s nice to be able to communicate to the user that this happened. This is the “tofu” glyph. Now, you can just draw a blank tofu (a rectangle) and leave it at that, but if you want to be helpful you can write out the value of the missing character so it can be debugged more easily.

But, wait, we’re using text to explain that we can’t draw text? Hmm.

You could appeal to an assumption that the system must have a basic font that can draw 0-9 and A-F, but for those who expect to truly Destroy Their Tools With Their Tools you can do what Firefox does: the microfont!

Inside Firefox there’s a little hardcoded array describing one-bit pixel art of a tiny font atlas for exactly those 16 characters. So when drawing tofu, it can blit those glyphs out without worrying about fonts.

If you naively respect a user’s request for a very large font (or very large zoom level), you will run into extreme memory management problems with the size of your glyph atlas, as each character may be bigger than the entire screen.

Talking about rendering text: The overarching theme here will be: there are no consistent right answers, everything is way more important than you think, and everything affects everything else.

Emoji generally have their own native colors, and this color can even have semantic meaning, as is the case for skin-tone modifiers. More problematically: they have multiple colors!

As far as I can tell, this wasn’t really a thing before emoji, and so different platforms approach this in different ways. Some provide emoji as a straight-up image (Apple), others provide emoji as a series of single-color layers (Microsoft).

The latter approach is kinda nice because it integrates well with existing text rendering pipelines by “just” desugarring a glyph into a series of single-color glyphs, which everyone is used to working with.

However that means that your style can change repeatedly while drawing a “single” glyph. It also means that a “single” glyph can overlap itself, leading to the transparency issues discussed in an earlier section. And yet, as shown above, browsers do properly composite the transparency for emoji!

Just so you have an idea for how a typical text-rendering pipeline works, here’s a quick sketch:

1. Styling (parse markup, query system for fonts)

2. Layout (break text into lines)

3. Shaping (compute the glyphs in a line and their positions)

4. Rasterization (rasterize needed glyphs into an atlas/cache)

5. Composition (copy glyphs from the atlas to their desired positions)

Unfortunately, these steps aren’t as clean as they might seem.

In the course of the fifteenth century a special room in many houses and palaces came to be set aside as a place of study and contemplation, designated by the Italian word studiolo. To have such a room in one’s home was to announce oneself as an individual who laid claim to the learning and cultivation that distinguished the Renaissance.

What's a studio you ask? Why? It's the answer to all of our problems. In Renaissance Europe, it was common for the wealthy to build a specific room called a studio, which means little study. It was a tiny enclosed space filled with books and scientific instruments and art.

[...] The studiolo is the summation of everything we need to stop our current cultural decline to fix our attention spans and fight back against the endless stream of algorithmic slop. You went into the studiolo to connect with universal knowledge. And then once you were done reading and thinking and looking at maps, you left. You got on with your life. You didn't carry the studio around with you all day in your pocket. There was a high premium put on knowledge, but that knowledge was physically contained.