localghost.dev has a new theme! In search of a little project over the merrineum that didn’t require me to learn anything and therefore use my brain, I remembered there was a stylesheet hidden in the themes directory of my website that I hadn’t finished. The theme: teenage personal websites in the early 00s. It was a lot of fun to build, and really nostalgic to recreate the websites of my youth. Think impossibly tiny fonts, blocky layouts with a sidebar full of assorted crap, and grungey photoshop brushes. (But this time with CONTAINER QUERIES.)

From Remembering the early 00s teen website scene - localghost

For example, the word stress is slowly disappearing from the worker’s lexicon, while words like anxiety are ramping up. Because it’s in capitalism’s best interest to convince you that what’s wrong is coming from inside you, rather than what the system is doing to you.

From Robin Rendle — Stop calling yourself an IC

Right now I’m working on something, a big piece with no clear edge. I don’t really know what it is yet — or where it’s going — but for days I’ll leave it alone and wait for inspiration to strike. I’ll wait for a character’s name or an event to tumble out of the ether or hop right into my lap. I’ll wait for a scene to take shape or a paragraph to be whittled down. But progress has been glacially slow on this project because that’s just not how work works.

So if design has taught me anything it’s this: Don’t wait. Just keep noodling. Creativity isn’t a thing that you are, or a thing that you will be temporarily in the future. Creativity isn’t luck, either.

Creativity is simply a byproduct of work.

From Robin Rendle — Creativity is the byproduct of work

I don’t share this kind of anxiety. I mean, I would if my business was entirely dependent on Google but boy trusting any of these platforms in the first place was the real problem there. The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction.

Like, sure all these websites could make a business model on web advertising and being on the front page of a Google search could mean piles of cash but under the hood this broke the web in such a way that Google became the front-door of the whole internet.

From Robin Rendle — Instability

This, I realize now, is 1. dumb and 2. cruel.

It’s anti-worker and anti-union and it takes away people’s autonomy to chase a healthy work environment. Companies are allowed (and expected!) to pivot when their business model doesn’t work and yet workers are not granted the same privilege when they find themselves at a gig that’s underpaying them or putting them on useless busy work or hurling them into a toxic work environment.

You owe them nothing because that’s what the money is for. Your company is not a family, you are not letting anyone down.

From Robin Rendle — Job Hoppin’

The best onboarding experiences guide people as they interact, instead of explaining things in narrative form.

There’s only one catch here: I almost exclusively hate onboarding experiences. They’re slow and patronizing, they get in the way, and they often try to explain around their overly complex UI instead of simply…making the UI less complicated.

Most folks takes the laziest approach possible and you can see it everywhere: apps of every kind and ilk are chockablock full of annoying popups and guides and things you have to dismiss before you can use the product itself. We all hate those.

From Robin Rendle — Longboarding

Much of the concern and criticism of AI we are seeing at the moment relates specifically to the challenges with the largest LLMs, particularly when used as a proverbial sledgehammer. Considering the MVM approach as an alternative is one way to navigate forward in a balanced, pragmatic and mindful way. We would love to hear from anyone trying something similar, or different!

From MVM - Minimal Viable Model

It’s easy to think of places like Twitter (I refuse to call it X) as a right-wing, hateful, misogynist platform (it absolutely can be), but it’s also worth highlighting the other side of it - the digital relationships tools like Twitter have allowed us to form.

Despite all of the drama that often happens on social networks, I’m so grateful to all of the people I have met through these channels. I could make a muuuuch longer list highlighting all the people I’ve met online and sincerely value as ‘real’ friends, but for now let me just say how much I value you all - readers of this blog, subscribers of my newsletter, people that randomly email me, interactions on social networks, and all the amazing clients.

From Digital tools may create life long relationships – Anton Sten – Product Designer

During the rest of the flight I wrote PySkyWiFi. PySkyWiFi is a highly simplified version of the TCP/IP protocol that squeezes whole HTTP requests through an airmiles account, out of the plane, and down to a computer connected to the internet on the ground. A daemon running on this ground computer makes the HTTP requests for me, and then finally squeezes the completed HTTP responses back through my airmiles account, up to me on my plane.

This meant that on my next flight I could technically have full access to the internet, via my airmiles account. Depending on network conditions on the plane I might be able to hit speeds of several bytes per second.

When I was done with all of this I used PySkyWiFi to load the homepage of my blog using curl, tunneling the data via a GitHub Gist. Several minutes later I got a response back. I scrolled around the HTML and reflected that this had been both the most and least productive flight of my life.

From PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights | Robert Heaton

Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Or imagine that a site you poured all your thoughts and writing into decides overnight that it might be a good idea to sell access to all user data to a company that is training their large language model with it. And again, there is nothing you can do about it.

Now imagine a place where you actually own your content, your connections, and your online identity.

And now, imagine that this place is your personal website, under your own domain name, under your control.

This is the basic idea behind the IndieWeb.

From Welcome to the IndieWeb · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

What makes RSS so powerful is that it is an open format. RSS is one of the reasons the blogosphere grew so rapidly and it is the reason why podcasting exploded: because this open format allowed everyone to participate by simply publishing a feed anywhere on the web, without being restricted by platform requirements, closed APIs, and paywalls. And this superpower is also why RSS is having a renaissance today: it allows everyone to subscribe to, share, syndicate, and cross-post content on the open web.

RSS already is the cornerstone of many open technology systems like podcasting, which can’t be owned and controlled by any one company. As Anil Dash notes, this alone is radical, because it is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open and empowering tech that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

From We ❤️ RSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

So, feel free to stop by any time and stay as long as you like. I won’t track you, make you look at ads, ask you to download my app, harass you with popups, suggest you sign up for my newsletter or push you through a sales funnel. Enjoy the garden, and the peace 💐.

From My own little patch

Sit with that for a second, you can write a desktop application with no tooling, launch it from your phone to the internet for free, and seconds later install it on any computer. You don’t have to ask permission, or jump through any App Store hoops. You can write a thing, push it to the internet, and then immediately use the thing. Even better, you can send the link to your friends and they can immediately use the thing. That’s the power of the web.

From Desktop progressive web applications | Trys Mudford

You don’t need to know how to implement all the data structures, that’s what (software) libraries and Wikipedia are for (and for that matter, book libraries too). However, it is useful to have an idea of what’s available and when to use it.

From This is not interview advice: a priority-expiry LRU cache without heaps or trees in Python - death and gravity

So models know everything about all the things. But it’s not enough. They don’t know how to act human.

So they need to study every online human conversation. They need social media. But social media is a walled garden — you can’t just walk up and scrape every Facebook post, every Instagram image — not after those guys already did it. And besides, maybe copyright does apply to them after all!

So they make deals with the social media platform’s owners to access its subjects’ data. Here’s every platform I can find that has publicly announced AI training:

That’s all there is. After these deals finalise, there will be no more available training data on the internet. It’s all been absorbed. Whatever the state of AI models is in a year or two, they cannot get any better after that, as there simply will not be any more data to train on.

From The internet has run out of training data - cadence’s weblog (personal blog)

After the main hubbub subsided, I was let in early on the fun. It ended up being the best gift of all to see such an amusing event in internet history caused on my behalf by my better half.

From Surprise for a programmer on Birthday

As a web developer, having a quick go-to web stack to build projects like this is essential. So many times I’ve had project ideas of grandeur, only to get stalled immediately in the technical architecture because I didn’t have the right tools on-hand to get started.

But not this time. My muscle memory for Astro + Vue hosted on github + vercel has become strong enough that these things faded away into the background, letting me focus on the core functionality.

If you don’t have this at-hand, I recommend going into real prototype mode and using something like codepen.

From Takeaways from a Weekend Project

”Did you catch the game last night?”

I don’t know who talks like that, but it seems to be the right type of thing to use as an example here.

In the age of remote work, there are a lot of culture-building moments like that lost behind the screen divide. So, in similar fashion to remote leadership, building strong remote-based company cultures takes a concerted effort.

From The Concentrated Water Cooler

Yup, that’s right; they were prepared to throw their own WebKit and Safari teams under the bus and remove Web Push, the Badging API, and all the other work those teams had done. They were happy to destroy many EU businesses that relied on PWAs, and harm those users. They were fine with sneaking in anti-competitive behaviour while blaming the very legislation that is designed to open competition.

From Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Happy DMA day to all! Where we are, and what comes next

Some people need AI Smart Cooking technology to get a perfect bowl of rice, but I am OK with a cheap IKEA pot with a lid. Some need 3D teeth tracking with AI to preserve good oral hygiene, but I am happy with my dumb brush. I absolutely don’t need any ChatGPT-driven features built into my mouse. Naively, I thought I would turn off this feature and carry on. So naive I was!

From From Logitech MX Master 3S to Apple Magic Trackpad — my honest review (of the AI hype) | pawelgrzybek.com

“Great stuff”! Really! Let’s go out and take every file, image, and other resource accessible on the internet and reuse it to make some money.

Let’s visit all these paid media services, “Save as” their content, remove watermarks, polish it and then sell it under our names. And let’s automate this process! And then let’s talk about the social contract…

From Web content, the social contract and copyrights | Stefan Judis Web Development

Here’s a thing I never would have imagined possible: an LLM embedded into a font.

From Note from June 24, 2024 | Chase McCoy

Discovering and playing Bokunatsu (and watching Tim’s 6 hour magnum opus of a review) has given me a deep appreciation for the timelessness of art and media.

A game from 24 years ago, deeply steeped in a culture that isn’t my own, has managed to create in me a sense of warm nostalgia. Its soundscapes remind me of home, but also make me long for a place I’ve never been.

It’s also worth appreciating the meta aspect of the journey I went on to discover and experience this game, all because of a link in a newsletter. This is why the web is so special, and it’s what an AI will never do: unearth a lost gem.

When writing in his diary at the end of each in-game day, Boku reflects on “the most wonderful day in which nothing happened.” Let this be a reminder that there is magic waiting to be found in the mundane.

From Boku no Natsuyasumi | Chase McCoy

Contrast the above mega-corporate phone system with the simple and direct experience you’ll get when calling a typical small business:

• Phone call answered by a human being
• Provides the required information/support
• Done.

That is 1,000,000,000 times better than being treated like cattle in some limited, over-engineered, automated telephone service.

From Why Automated Phone Systems SUCK | Perishable Press

The solution that most improved passenger happiness was to increase the distance between the arrival terminal and baggage reclaim, such that, although the delay between arriving and receiving baggage was largely the same, it was spent actively moving; passengers were not feeling like they were wasting their time passively waiting around.

This was a great example of if you can’t make something actually fast, make it seem fast enough.

From Burberry X Google Hackathons | Robin Osborne

WTF!?

Modern WordPress - Yikes!

Years on and I feel that we’ve gone down a path where creativity is second to efficiency and that we often look at ready made solutions or reusing what exists. Tools like Squarespace and Wix offer pre-designed templates and drag and drop builders mean anyone can build a site without writing any code but we’ve come to a point where everything looks the same

We have deadlines to meet and we’re looking to cut costs so the process has become more about efficiency over creativity in my mind.

From Decline of web craftsmanship | Website and blog of Front-end developer and web designer, Dan Davies

It was about improvisation. How a lot of things we do every day are - to some extent, made up! From how we greet each other, to how we respond to an unexpected phone call. None of it is planned. We don’t create some sort of crazy scalable distributed architecture to deal with these things: They’re licks.

While we’re thinking of the perfect solution, the original problem is still there. Users don’t see your research, users don’t see the architecture meetings, users don’t see the ether. The only thing they see is the problem. And guess what? The problem is still there.

From Do things that don’t scale - Duarte O.Carmo

So in order to be found on google you have to pay them. Which means that if I, as someone who searches, am looking for something I end up at the website with the largest marketing budget. Not necessarily at the website with the best content. That’s bad. That very bad. But it gets worse.

From Google search is corrupt ⚒ Nerd

the world needs more recreational programming. like, was this the most optimal or elegant way to code this?

no, but it was the most fun to write.

But my favorite kinds of projects are the ones that are just for the fun of it.

From Side projects should be fun - Matt Steele

“Hey, we need to do this or we’re going to hit a wall.” Well, we’re not hitting any walls so I guess we don’t need to do this. And then we hit a wall.

Any working system can become invisible to the point where the system loses value because it’s working.

From Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease - Snook.ca

The internet today is a lot like my Seattle experience. The “For You” pages on the various social networks are spot on with regards to what I like, and they help me get more into the things that I like. But those aren’t really “social” networks as much anymore. They’re content networks. It’s things, not connections. Yes, some connections do happen, but the mediums are geared towards what content will keep you around.

I feel like the internet of the past was more like my Chicago experience. I made random internet friends who I’m still friends with from over a decade ago. There’s little pockets here and there on Discord (hello, nerds) and other more chat-oriented spaces, but it’s not what it once was.

the point is that there isn’t a big central place now to find or interact with friends unless you really put a lot of effort into it.

From Seattle and the internet

“In web development, a lot of decisions are driven by the fear of looking dumb. People are worried about appearing unsophisticated and unwilling to say this is “too complicated and we should do something simpler even though it’s not super sexy“”

Peer pressure is the ultimate evil. New developers are especially prone to thinking “seniors” will make fun of them for picking some tech stack that doesn’t look complex:

People use our app because they need it. If you happen to build something people need, and you are able to find customers in a way that’s sustainable, you’ll have success.

From Simplicity

But I need to remember, now and again, that Apple is a corporation, and corporations aren’t people, and they can’t love you back. You wouldn’t love GE or Exxon or Comcast — and you shouldn’t love Apple. It’s not an exception to the rule: there are no exceptions.

Apple doesn’t care about you personally in the least tiny bit, and if you were in their way somehow, they would do whatever their might — effectively infinite compared to your own — enables them to deal with you.

From inessential: Corporations Are Not To Be Loved

But, whose user is it anyway? That’s irrelevent. The ultimate goal is to provide a good and accessible experience to the user. The way email clients and senders are handling this right now takes focus away from that goal and the engineering effort is instead put into tricking the other party’s code to do what you want.

Its always the same game of mouse and cat around different topics like with ads when the user is not the one in control.

From Whose user is it anyway?

I want to order a pizza. · Luna’s Blog is a clear example of the uneeded complexity around things that should be as easy as a few taps.

The delights of putting smart in things that shouldnt be

Why do monkeys count in base-8?

Im a sucker for this kind of content of “lets build a cpu in the most random places” or “this thing is turing complete”. Love it.

It always amazes me the kind of things that you can do with redstone.

Maybe im in a nostalgia train, but i love the idea that a group of fans are trying to recreate and let you experience how things worked in the past.

On the fringes of the internet, where things are small and specialized (even when they’re grim or shocking), there’s something far more captivating than the sanitized, controlled environments we’ve established on the modern web. And it is still very much out there, and I believe it is growing.

From Reversing the boring web by The History of the Web

JavaScript in the address bar, as a protocol for a URL, was possible virtually from day one of the language, effectively creating JavaScript URLs.

[…] And pretty early on, people realized that these JavaScript URLs were also bookmarkable, just like any other URL.

And, crucially, easily shareable as links.

From Wait, what’s a bookmarklet? by The History of the Web

A little history of bookmarklets, something that i really like and even shared in my posts

More software running as a kernel space driver? What could go wrong?

When I say “I don’t know where everyone went,” I know everyone’s out there surfing the web, of course, but it feels like it’s a different place now. When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet. The “For You” pages of the world are right, I am interested in that content, but I’m not seeing it from my friends, or that one author I like, or that random blog I found when I was learning about an obscure hobby.

From I miss human curation by Cassidy Williams

I also found myself mourning in the last weeks the old communities that i had on the internet.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with other BlueSCSI developers to add Wi-Fi functionality to their open-hardware SCSI device, enabling Wi-Fi support for old Macs and other vintage computers going back some 36 years.

From Adding Wi-Fi to the Macintosh Portable by Joshua Stein

I always like this kind of posts bringing old tech to modern life with open source (hard/soft)ware

After reading Embed Slides, YouTube Videos, and More by Adrian Roselli i finally decided to replace my youtube embeds with click-to-load widgets.

Since WHATWG HTML is versionless, and since it essentially only takes one browser implementation to get into WHATWG HTML, and since the people approving PRs to WHATWG HTML seem to be the same ones adding features to Safari and Chrome, perhaps the best way to stay on top of HTML today is to look at Chrome “intent to ship” announcements and Safari feature releases.

From Splitting within Selects by Adrian Roselli

Hoy me entere de esta horrible noticia, de las pocas ultimas comunidades que aun sobrevivian en internet frente al avance industrial y de jardines privados. Sin embargo, me hicieron conocer este relato.

So instead of messing with any device/computer I want to plug this ethernet adapter into I now have a normal USB ethernet adapter with just one extra solder connection :)

From Making an USB Ethernet adapter work [SR9700] by Martijn Braam

So when I teach about HTML I always start with the elements that are obviously interactive. I show them the multitude of UX layers of a link, I show them the layers and layers of UX that are added to a well considered form. I show them what happens on a phone when you use an input with a default text type instead of the proper type of email. First we need to get people exited about HTML by showing all the free yet complex layers of UX you get when you use the interactive elements properly. And then, when they do understand the interactive elements, when they’re really excited and they ask for more, show them the more obscure UX patterns.

From The UX of HTML by Vasilis Van Gemert

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a very cool research project around using the sound of touch gestures on your face to create new interactions with interfaces.

After reading the paper, I decided to try and recreate something similar using JavaScript. I’ve experimented with using sound data and machine learning in the past and the result was quite successful, however, I had never thought about working with more subtle sounds like the ones this research is focusing on.>

From Control UIs using wireless earbuds and on-face interactions by Charlie Gerard

Almost all of Charlie’s interactions are amazing, and this isnt the exception.

So in this article I’m digging into what JSX is, where it comes from and how one might go about using it as a simple server-side HTML template engine.

From Using JSX on the server as a template engine by Evert Pot

I also found myself making my own JSX Factory for a personal project recently for a similar use-case

I spent almost all of this year working on projects for other people. While I am proud of the work I did, and enjoyed it, there’s still something special about making tools for yourself. Does anyone else in the world want to make their websites in a weird dialect of Lua? Maybe not. But I do, and that’s enough.

Try building something for yourself. Try writing code for you, and you alone. Don’t worry about whether it will look good on your resumé or attract lots of stars on GitHub. Just write something that feels good to you. Explore a weird idea and see where it takes you.

Who knows—maybe someday other people will like it too.

From I made JSX for Lua (because I hate static sites) by Ben Visness

I dont share some of the thoughts, but i always like this thing of doing something for you because its fun.

This began as a quick-and-dirty experiment to visualize the UK National Minimum Wage in real-time, inspired by Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine.

Then I added the US Federal Minimum Wage, since a sizeable proportion of this blog’s readership are US-based. Did you know the US also has a Youth Minimum Wage? I didn’t.

Then I got curious, and added some CEOs for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this…

It’s fucking sobering.

From Minimum Wage Clock by Luna

I LOVE THIS. Similar to my Comparate con Forbes Argentina but so much better. It has a real sense of time is worth.

Shared state isn’t all doom and gloom. It causes problems when you have asynchronous or threaded code and unclear access patterns.

But your database is a repository of shared state and that works great. The cache in your networking layer is a type of shared state. Works fine. State management libraries popular in modern app development are all about sharing state and they can be fantastic.

What gives?

Explicitly declared state dependencies with strict guidelines around access patterns make all the difference. If a compiler or linter can enforce those patterns, even better.

From Avoid spooky action at a distance by Swizec Teller

When you’re spitballing at a meeting and it all fits together and makes so much sense, nobody knows you’ve written 5 deep articles about this topic exploring it from all sorts of directions. They just see a fuckin’ genius who can anticipate their arguments, has answers ready, and has a proposal that stands up to scrutiny.

From Why write by Swizec Teller

One of the best ways to learn how something works, though, is to build it yourself. And plus, we gotta keep those “days since last JavaScript framework” memes going. So let’s write our own modern JavaScript framework!

From Let’s learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one by Nolan Lawson

I also liked Use web components for what they’re good at

Tech is not neutral. It can’t be. It is always the sum total of human decisions, priorities, and tradeoffs, deployed to meet certain ends and desires, and particularly capitalistic interests. AI is far from being an exception to the rule. And in this case, any desire for image generation models to be able to represent me is going to butt heads with another incentive: the desire to avoid shocking users with body horror.

Successive model retrainings have made rendering humans much more accurate, and tighter restrictions on prompts have made it much harder to generate body horror, even intentionally. As a consequence, non-normative bodies are also incredibly difficult to generate, even when the engine is fed hyperspecific prompts.

It is something of an amusing curiosity that some AI models were perplexed by a giraffe without spots. But it’s these same tools and paradigms that enshrine normativity of all kinds, sanding away the unusual. As tech continues to charge headfirst into AI hype, this is going to have far-reaching, yet largely invisible to the mainstream, consequences to anyone on the wrong side of that normativity. Better hope you have spots.

From I’m a Spotless Giraffe. by Ben Myers

Pessimistically, I believe the app promotes homogeneity, based on the reel formulas I see creators using. They are all the same, and it’s not the fault of creators. It’s the fault of the product itself.

More often that not it’s the fault of the need for unlimited growth, whether it’s news users or monthly recurring revenue. I suspect some poor product manager is doing what they have to do to drive more people to pay to play.

Not everyone wants to pay though. One of the reasons we might post to social media is to share with the world, in hopes of finding like-minded people, not necessarily to sell anything. How do we find those like-minded people if we only see what an app forces us to see instead of discovering it organically?

From Instagram killed creativity with the removal of recent hashtags by Stephanie Stimac

To avoid shitty logic, you need to know what’s happening in your code. If there’s “magic” anywhere in the mix, you have a black box with no obvious cause and effect. This means that what you think is happening and what actually happens start to diverge.

Software is built by humans and humans make mistakes. Therefore, software should be everything but magic. It shouldn’t be overly concise and clever — it should be explicit and predictable. It shouldn’t make assumptions — it should throw errors.

Make the final product magical, not the software that runs it.

From Magical Software Sucks by Hristiyan Dodov

Like one day I’ll stumble on a website that’s gloriously corpo in the best possible way: smart typesetting, clean imagery, plain copy. The blog posts are pristine, helpful, perfunctory. It’s a business card, really. Perfect. I get it. But despite my jealousy of how clean and straightforward they are, within twenty seconds I’ve forgotten about them.

I want weirder, more broken websites!

And a personal website should capture that thing we’re all trying to avoid, as cheesy as it sounds: that we are a poem and not software.

From I am a poem I am not software by Robin Rendle

But modern websites are not worthy. They’re slow, hard to navigate, and plagued with visual crap; pop-ups, bad typography, newsletter modals, and everything else imaginable. And that’s just the baseline. When I use a website on my phone I likely won’t trust it to show me the same information, I won’t trust interactions when I click buttons or fill in forms or even when I try to navigate elsewhere.

I don’t even trust the back button any more.

When I find a website that doesn’t hijack the scroll, or a website with pleasantly sized text, or a website that loads in under 300ms then it makes me bolt upright in my chair. I wonder at what tech they’re using under the hood, what kind of conversations they had in those rooms, I try to imagine what kind of grueling process the team went through to make something so quiet and simple. All the things they had to say no to.

From Why are websites embarrassing? by Robin Rendle

I’m not sure why, but we seem more willing to spend money on good fruit jam than on good software. I notice that I spend less on personal software than I do on groceries and many basic things. Yet software is one of the few things I pay for that truly gives me leverage. Consider its cost per use. Independent makers of quality software go out of their way to make apps that are better for you. They take a principled approach to making tools that don’t compromise your privacy, and don’t lock you in. Independent software makers are people you can talk to. Like quality jam from the farmer’s market, you might become friends with the person who made it — they’ll listen to your suggestions and your complaints. If you want to live in a world with more than a handful of software makers, then spend a bit more on quality independent software. It deserves your hard-earned cash.

From Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash by Steph Ango

My friend, all tech is political. All technology either reinforces or fights against existing social systems. In a modern capitalist society, nearly all technology requires ethical concessions. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up and support obviously bad shit.

From I follow you for tech, not politics by Chris Ferdinandi

Then I explained that if you want to make this span behave like a real link, you have to add a tabindex, a role, CSS to style it, javascript to give it a :visited state, much, much, much more javascript to give it a context menu that makes sense (which is impossible to do right, because every browser has a different context menu for a link), and then you’ll have to test if this “link” shows up in the list of links in a screen reader. I don’t think it does. There are so many hidden layers of UX in this simple HTML element. And these layers of UX are the details that matter, of you ask me. These details are why everybody should care about HTML.

From Let’s reinvent the wheel by Vasilis Van Gemert

As Jeremy illustrated in his talk Of Time And the Web, it’s easy to overlook the profound positive changes that can happen over larger timescales. Things we take for granted today, like the eradication of a disease like smallpox, are actually things that we would have considered “too good to be true” just a few years earlier. In much the same way, every little step we take, every decision we make, can add up to make a profound difference.

From No Borders by Matthias Ott

Whether it’s Slack, email, Twitter replies (or literally any text communication), many conversations just die. There’s no “thank you!” or “talk later!” to wrap things up. Apparently, it’s okay to just move the human interaction off the todo list.

From Conversation closure by Stefan Judis

The Chrome Developer “blog” homepage is a perfect example of the awfulness of modern web dev: A page that is updated maybe once a week is dynamically client-side generated A page that has almost no interactivity needs 109 requests (mostly JavaScript) to load A page with maybe 400 words of text requires 1.3MB plus 10MB for resources

A 70KB RSS file provides more value and is more readable A blog without an RSS feed isn’t a blog. Find another word.

From An RSS Feed for the Google Chrome Developer Blog by Cross Dominant

So I went to work to explore this idea of checking if a number is odd or even by only using comparisons to see how well it works in a real world scenario.

From 4 billion if statements by Andreas Karlsson

This is the kind of stuff i want to read about. People doing things just for fun.

If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing

I like how piracy came full circle from something illegal to being the source of preservation.

Since the dawn of October 1st 2022, the world has been plagued by the question: Would accelerated backhopping give you a competitive advantage in the 100m dash? In this deranged ramble blog article we shall attempt to answer the question once and for all.

Gordon Freeman at the Olympic Games by Luna is the kind of science that i like.

Can it run doom? Its not more, now its Minecraft

You either build for a device or you build for the web. You can’t build a web-app that’s just for the iMac. If you try, people will access it from other devices and rightfully expect to be able to use it, because that’s what the web is. When we build for the web, our initial design should respond to what we know about our users, and the layout and content should be able to subtly respond to a user’s capabilities on the fly. That’s how we build a more responsive web. Not a mobile web, or a desktop web, or an iPad web, or any other kind of web we might try to predict.

This is a quote from a very old post (2011) that its still relevant today that recently appeared again in my feed. From New Website by Ariel Salminen

In computer networking, IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) is a joke proposal to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons.

IP over Avian Carriers

The Genius AI Behind The Sims by Game Maker’s Toolkit

I flew on a plane from my land locked metropolis to the beach in a different state. After a few taps on my phone, I am transfigured into an expert on local marine life and tide cycles. […] The power to access infinite knowledge is intoxicating.

At the same time, I feel the Internet and these pocket computers created a world of expert idiots. We’re quick to equate a list of facts as knowledge.

Again, the access to knowledge is incredible. It’s the overwhelming confidence that comes along with it that I wonder about.

From Expert Idiot by Dave Rupert

Someone asked me a few days ago why he should care about Mastodon. In response, I will conjure up a rather hyperbolic, yet useful metaphor for explaining the concern that we should all have for the current reality of online social media.

From Rebels Using Mastodon to Fight the Empire’s Enslavement of Social Media Users by Cheapskate’s Guide to Computers and the Internet

As explained in this article about rendering issues(opens in new tab), Microsoft Outlook uses the same rendering engine as Microsoft Word. This means that opening an email in Outlook is basically like opening a document in Word, so you have to get into the mindset that you’re making a Word document, not an email.

From Why Does Email Development Have to Suck? by Hristiyan Dodov

“Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible, and spend the majority of your time, and resources, building something your customers are willing to pay for.” - Kelsey Hightower

As engineers, we are, by nature, attracted to novel solutions. However, it’s critical to discern between what’s exciting and what’s right for your use case. Often, “boring” technology – those stable, well-understood, and perhaps previous-generation tools – have a lot to offer. They are usually tried and tested, have proven scalability, and come with extensive documentation and community support.

Before adopting a new technology, ask yourself: “Does it solve a specific problem or significantly enhance my product? Is it worth the learning curve and potential instability? Is this going to help us further down the line?”

From Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible by Addy Osmani

We often romanticize the notion of programming, presenting it as an abstract form of art, a science, or even a form of magic. The truth, however, is much more practical and grounded. Code, in its essence, is communication.

Good code is sincere and unadorned with unnecessary complexity. It’s considerate, mindful of the next developer who will decipher it.

Patterns don’t just make code scalable, maintainable, and efficient, but also readable and understandable. They provide a shared vocabulary for developers, enabling them to express intricate software designs with universally recognized structures.

It does not apply patterns just for the sake of it, but because they add value to the solution, they make the code more comprehensible, and they ensure the longevity of the codebase

The beauty of our creations, however, is not judged solely by the elegance of our algorithms or the efficiency of our code, but by the joy and ease with which others can build upon our work. As developers, our task is not just to solve today’s problems but also to ensure we do not become tomorrow’s problem.

From Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it. by Addy Osmani

Good software seamlessly integrates itself into users’ lives, enhancing their capabilities and experiences without necessitating significant conscious effort on their part. In that sense, software is indeed a vehicle, its design and functionality facilitating the journey of its users from one point of need or desire to another.

Becoming lost in these tools can lead to a kind of tunnel vision, where the focus is placed more on how to leverage the latest technology than on the value that the software is intended to deliver. As a result, software projects can risk becoming technologically impressive but functionally lacking or unnecessarily complex. It is akin to constructing a sleek and state-of-the-art vehicle that, for all its advanced features, does not transport passengers comfortably or safely.

From Software is a vehicle for delivering value to people. by Addy Osmani

If your components only have one place to go, then you probably don’t need Web Components. Even if your components service a couple different apps or product teams that all use the same uniform tech stack, you probably don’t need Web Components. Where Web Components shine is when your components need to go to many places. Components in a large company not only need to go to the React app, they also need to go to the Drupal site, the old Rails app, the internal Java app, the Vue app, or the static Eleventy site some intern built; the list goes on and on. Web Components offer a path to deliver components without delivering complex build toolchains, so they can more easily graft into situations where teams face a wide surface area of languages and frameworks whether through decades of decision making, mergers and acquisitions, or chasing the latest hotness.

I’ll leave you with Rupert’s Law of Web Components: As diversity of platforms increases within your company, so does the need for Web Components.

From If I’m already using React, why should I rewrite my app with Web Components? by Dave Rupert

Maybe AI isnt that bad and what its bad its what always has been, corporate greed, companies and capitalism.

From What’s next for Chris? I’ve got a new job! by Christian Heilmann

Remember. Every design tool available to us is just that, a tool. If you’re determined to be the best you can be, you will become that with whatever tool you choose. It’s always your creativity that is key here.

From Creativity is always key, not the tool by Marc Andrew

It is based on the intriguing idea what would have happened if the Nazis had access to the internet, social media, mobile devices and card payment systems.

The NSA department tries to show off to the Nazi regime by proving that they can find out who is hiding Jews. They do this by tracking all the food people bought over a period of time and how many people live in their flats. A huge discrepancy in those numbers indicates that there are probably more people living there than are in the official registry

Although fiction, another example of how technology control cant be used by “the good guys against the bad guys”. And how everyone should fight against this.

From What if the Nazis had the internet and social media? by Christian Heilmann

It’s a good reminder when you’re working on something to continually ask yourself about the purpose behind what you’re making. It’s very possible you might have to deviate from the “best practices” or “accepted conventions” in service of a goal that is different or beyond the tradition of any medium or form.

It’s also an intriguing example of how far a principle can take you. In their case, stealth above all else made people invent some intriguing and creative workarounds to the otherwise traditional constraints and pre-conceived notions of an airplane’s design.

In this way, best practices are kind of like a grid in design: useful to follow, but where it gets interesting is where you break out of the grid with purposeful intent.

From Stealth Airplanes & Best Practices by Jim Nielsen

I really like this article from Rohan D “Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website”.

In it, they make the convincing case that phones are perfectly capable of hosting websites and - if we want more people to escape the walled-gardens - this could be a good way to get people back into self-hosting.

I loved hosting a small site on my Nokia N95 back in the day, and I’d be overjoyed if modern phones allowed this. But there are a few pitfalls.

I LOVE this idea of truly personal and selfowned websites. Although pretty hard to do in real life.

From Should your phone be a webserver? by Terence Eden

Im all in for this kind of generative digital art from Coding Randomized Zelda Patterns by Paul Hebert in CloudFour

Miller’s interest in MrBeast resulted in a new academic paper, written with Eddy Hogg, in which Miller places MrBeast in the context of a media-studies concept called the “audience commodity,” the idea that media consumption is essentially a form of labor, because people spend time creating a valuable commodity - an audience - that is then sold to advertisers.

Do users see themselves as workers?

From If my eyeballs are being resold to advertisers then it had better be worth my time by Matt Webb

Magic technology that would allow the “good guys” to hack the “bad guys” but not the “bad guys” to hack the “good guys” simply doesn’t and will never exist. It’s wishful thinking.

If a vulnerability exists, it can be used by anyone with the resources to exploit it, and in today’s interconnected and globalized world it means a lot of people.

What can go wrong when an hostile State will use the same vulnerabilities to hack your country and “influence” the elections?

Reminds me of that time that Apple tried to make its CSAM NeuralHash.

From Legalizing spyware. What can go wrong? by Sylvain Kerkour

The problem with the information paradigm is how “information” is ripped out of its context: the people, the inherited knowledge, the culture that produced it. Everything is seen as an atomic digestible, and there is little regard for the processes, conversations, debates that produced those digestibles.

With Google, all of that was shattered to the winds, indexed, optimized, and presented to you in under 100 milliseconds. Connection and commitment are irrelevant and frankly unnecessary when you can just instantly retrieve the directions in a new city with Google Maps, you can discover the most common medication based on your symptoms, and so forth. All without interacting with any single human being. Or at least not directly, because ultimately all of this comes from communities of people.

I started reading and highlighting and when i finished, almost everything was highlighted. An excellent read for the current times.

From Google shattered human connection by André Staltz

But what ultimately turns a disparate group of professionals (i.e. developers) into a community (i.e. Jamstack community) is communication and connection. Everyone working within their own silos, even if they share common interests, does not make a community. And right now there is no means remaining of connecting those folks in whatever was once a Jamstack community. The meetups are dead, the conference appears to be gone (no 2023 date has been announced) and now the Discord is gone.

Yes, many of these same people may be on the tool-specific communities, but what made them part of a larger Jamstack community was the connections beyond each specific tool.

Honestly, this is all ultimately has little impact on how developers do their jobs, whether they considered themselves Jamstack developers or not. But when it comes to those connections, it probably means a deepening siloing of developers around their specific tools.

From Is Jamstack Officially Finished? by Brian Rinaldi

Maybe it’s because blogging is often a much quieter affair than posting on social media, but I love these little blips and boops of connection. They hit harder than comments and likes and reblogs. They feel more personal. They remind me to reach out and email people (or write them a card!) when their work strikes a chord.

From One Quick, One Slow by Lucy Bellwood

Because it’s not really Twitter that I miss: it’s the activists and artists and writers I followed; the voices who weren’t like mine, the people who walked different paths than I did, each of whom taught me so much.

From Post by post. by Ethan Marcotte

Maybe for another offering, winning isn’t about constant scale or growth, but about smaller, more sustainable longer term communities. Maybe winning isn’t always about who becomes the richest and the biggest. Nothing lasts forever anyway, not the big ones and not the smaller ones. So why not allow for different kinds of winning?

From The Great Social Media Wars of 2023 by Leah Reich

For the most part, I think the RSS reader apps that we have now are actually much nicer than Google Reader ever was. So my nostalgia is very tempered. But the social features of Google Reader, I don’t think, have quite been replicated yet.

I imagine David considers it trite because, these days, the vast majority of people would use a social network to share/comment on a link. A select few might blog.

You can follow my starred articles though, thanks to a clever Feedbin feature that makes a feed out of them.

I think this is the final thing missing in the RSS world. The parts are there, you can already share your starred articles, and blog with comments in a section of yours. The only thing missing is a user experience that makes this easy for everyone.

From Social RSS by Chris Coyier

One of the most fascinating things I took away from so many of our sessions was how little people cared about our software — especially the user interface.

All they ever wanted was to get a job done, and our interface was nothing more than a delivery mechanism for the thing they actually wanted.

In fact, customers would often specifically mention how little they cared for the “usability” of our software. They vowed they’d go through the most tedious workflows imaginable if they could ultimately get the primary thing they wanted from us, which was not software.

It made me think of the different kinds of software I use and how I am willing to deal with difficult, obtuse software if it means I can get the thing I ultimately want which is often beyond the software itself. The software is often merely a means to an end.

From User Feedback by Jim Nielsen

Behind “Hello World” on Linux by Julia Evans is a nice behind the scenes top down explanation post of how linux run software.

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

From File over app by Stephan Ango

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

Actions precede feelings. If you want to feel a certain way, create the environment that allows you to nibble your way there. Don’t hope that inspiration will come. Take a small bite. Action precedes inspiration, not the other way around.

From Nibble and your appetite will grow by Stephan Ango