Max Forbes

ye olde oversized spinning conical gradient

unabashedly into my new 404 page

Weatherspread Remember the weather. Check the spread.

weatherspread.com

Thanks for checking it out!

There’s lots more we’d like to build, but we’re releasing it now to get feedback. It’s free and there’s no ads, so if you’re interested and would like to support us, there’s a box to give your email. In the future, we may consider a premium app version or an patreon-like support option.

We’ve also added tourism stats, and synced it to weather data. This has been particularly eye-opening. It lets us see when a country experiences over-tourism (e.g., Croatia and Austria) relative to its population.

So historical data is your best bet.

We’ve observed that the last few years is a much better indicator of what the weather will be like than most data sources which aggregate from 1900 or even 1950.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Weatherspread, a web app for visualizing recent weather and tourism data!

I built this app with friends Tristan and Shelby to aid in planning travel and events. Usually you plan things far enough out (say, 3-6 months) that there’s no reliable forecast.

complete blog post is now live! more tips, and reframed into 2-step process: (1) get accepted by page 1, (2) avoid rejection with the rest. download both PDFs too.

maxwellforbes.com/posts/how-to...

works in footnotes too

yes this is probably overall a bad idea

Exciting to zero people but me, I randomly tried putting an image in a sidenote and it JUST WORKED

if it hadn't I would have assumed no quantity of toil would have fixed it

compare vs slop from the day before "Hit Indie ggame" :-(

four gpt-4o redesigns of my game, in styles "beautiful" / "stylized" / "cell-shaded" / "cyberpunk." it's like having an amazing but stochastic concept artist.

it makes the need for *art direction* so obvious — by allowing any style, what choices do you make to achieve a vision?

Córdoba, Spain (8/100)

Granada (7/100)

Nerja (6/100) ft. Beach Gato

Málaga (5/100)

2025's 'The HTML Review' just dropped!! co-edited by friend and collaborator Shelby (shelby.cool). check it out for a dose of avant-garde web. congrats to MNC, Shelby, and the authors! (thehtml.review/04/)

The best paper-writing advice I ever got was: make the final sentence of each caption the takeaway.

This Figure 1 is so information-dense the whole caption is the takeaway. Compare vs old caption which has side note (red) taking nearly 1/3 of extremely valuable space!

Figure 1 must not only describe your work, but demonstrate its VALUE. It must make your contribution screamingly obvious.

You will not believe how accidentally un-obvious you can make it.

Accepted Figure 1 shows key dataset feature: perceptual distance affects description.

"There are three parts to your paper: the title, figure 1, and everything else." (please help me attribute this quote if you know)

If you give a paper 4 parts, add the abstract. If 5, add the intro visible on page 1. Everything else still 1 part.

Importance is front-loaded. Page 1 = book cover.

working on a post that's basically "how to get a paper accepted," using a case study one of my own that went from reject (2.5, 3, 3) to accept (4, 4.5, 4.5) with just one week of revisions

Shouting into the void is my hobby, so here’s my redesign:
1. here’s what Google Cloud Shell is
2. here’s how much data you have there
3. here’s an `ls` of your home directory
4. here is why your 2KB weighs heavy on our poor exabytes

Highlights:
- my name is “Cloud Shell user”
- enormous button text + bad vertical padding
- copyright 2020
- press button perpetually to avoid unknown bad thing

Ahh, another day, another email from Google wanting to delete something I didn’t know existed

The PhD Metagame: Don't Make Things Actually Work: It's a trap! - Maxwell Forbes Research papers generally target a specific advancement on some axis. A laser-focused algorithm, model, framing,...

please consume my writing at the following webpage
maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-m...

if you have a burning desire to make useful things, this adjacency will drive you mad.

problem is, this gap that sits between your research and actually useful systems, while seemingly so narrow, actually holds hundreds of hours of "solved" (engineering) work that will stunt your research progress

don't make things actually work

the next PhD metagame essay focuses on avoiding a bad (non-meta) strategy.

here's what i mean: in fields like computer science, your research is temptingly adjacent to making a working, useful system.

Beautiful. It makes me want to make medieval 'the sims' :-)

Hell yeah! I’m thrilled if it helps organize your thinking even in a tiny way. I think the decision took years off of my life. I wish you luck.

The PhD Metagame: How to Pick Your PhD School: By Advisor or Prestige? - Maxwell Forbes This post’s intended audience is extremely narrow: prospective (computer science) PhD students who are accepted to...

maxwellforbes.com/posts/how-to...

furthermore 'flying fish' and 'genie' would be great school mascots if anyone's thinking about starting a new one