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

July 26, 2024

📹 Starred intel CPUs are literally falling apart by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred the crowdstrike situation is wild by Low Level Learning

📖 Starred Remembering the early 00s teen website scene by localghost.dev

July 25, 2024

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

July 25, 2024

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

July 25, 2024

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

July 25, 2024

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’

July 25, 2024

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

July 25, 2024

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

July 25, 2024

📖 Starred Twitter reply guys were bad, but Mastodon is no better by localghost.dev

📖 Starred Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop! by sdomi’s weblog

📖 Starred I lost my pg_control again (… yet another data recovery story) by sdomi’s weblog

📖 Starred Stakes bigger than life: fixing ext4 under pressure by sdomi’s weblog

📖 Starred Stop calling yourself an IC by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Creativity is the byproduct of work by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Instability by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Job Hoppin’ by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Sleepless in San Francisco by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Longboarding by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred MVM - Minimal Viable Model by Normally Notes

July 24, 2024

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

July 24, 2024

📖 Starred Reverse engineering Bandcamp authentication protocol by Nemanja Mijailovic’s Blog

📖 Starred Building Alan Wake’s Angel Lamp by blog.thea.codes

📹 Starred That Time I Said Prime Numbers For 3 Hours by Vsauce

📖 Starred I made a bra that tells me the weather by Estefannie Explains It All

📖 Starred :has roundup by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Can you be creative just by creating? by Anton Sten RSS Feed

📖 Starred Print design principles in a digital world by Anton Sten RSS Feed

📖 Starred Digital tools may create life long relationships by Anton Sten RSS Feed

📖 Starred Resolving to be a ‘better form’ of ourselves in 2024 by Anton Sten RSS Feed

📖 Starred When Amazon Just Wipes Your Entire Device Ebook Library by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred Julia and Sybil by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred 3 Good Reasons for Vegan and Vegetarian “Substitute” Products by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred The Great Tech and People Hypocrisy by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred Sustainability Trap by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred On the Well Astonishing Verdicts on Social Media by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred Declining 1:1 Meetings Without a Message Is Rude by Jens O. Meiert

📖 Starred Screen reading eff eff conf by Remy Sharp

📖 Starred beyond tellerrand: One of my favourite web development and design conferences by All posts - Manuel Matuzović

July 22, 2024

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

July 22, 2024

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

July 23, 2024

📖 Starred I made a Downpour…game? by Lost Boy

📖 Starred A basis for better definitions of “open” by Lost Boy

📖 Starred It takes about 4588 quasars to help you get around and get paid by Lost Boy

📖 Starred I’m not the Leigh Dodds you’re looking for. Maybe by Lost Boy

📖 Starred Norming on Mastodon by Lost Boy

📖 Starred Consistency before standards by Lost Boy

📖 Starred Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs by Lea Verou

July 22, 2024

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

July 22, 2024

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

July 22, 2024

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

July 21, 2024

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

July 22, 2024

📖 Starred PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights by Robert Heaton | Blog

📖 Starred Highlighting Blogging on Mastodon by Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

📖 Starred Welcome to the IndieWeb by Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

📖 Starred We ❤️ RSS by Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

📖 Starred Comfortable with the struggle by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred Code sketch #6 by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred Generative AI is for the idea guys by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred My own little patch by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred Post Brain by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred Spotify DJ is like a music pokie by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred I turned off analytics by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred Fig by Trys Mudford

📖 Starred Desktop progressive web applications by Trys Mudford

July 21, 2024

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)

July 21, 2024

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

July 21, 2024

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

July 21, 2024

”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

July 21, 2024

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

📖 Starred Cross Window Forgery: A New Class of Web Attack by Paulos Yibelo - Blog

📖 Starred The never type and error handling in TypeScript by fettblog.eu | TypeScript, JavaScript, Jamstack

📖 Starred The internet has run out of training data by Cadence’s Blog

📖 Starred Casio f-91w Modding by Remy Sharp

📖 Starred Retro print patterns with CSS [link] by Remy Sharp

📖 Starred On having no visual memory by Rachel Andrew

📖 Starred Closing time by Rachel Andrew

📖 Starred Six definitions of love by Stephan Ango

📖 Starred Earth is becoming sentient by Stephan Ango

📖 Starred Surprise for a programmer on Birthday by Andrew Walpole Blog

📖 Starred Takeaways from a Weekend Project by Andrew Walpole Blog

📖 Starred The Concentrated Water Cooler by Andrew Walpole Blog

July 20, 2024

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

July 20, 2024

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

July 20, 2024

“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

July 20, 2024

📖 Starred Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the Hard Way) by joshua stein

📖 Starred In-code TODOs without tickets don’t usually get done by Nick Scialli

📖 Starred TC39 – the song by Bruce Lawson

📖 Starred Indian Big Tech draft regulation makes Big Tech bosses cry scandal by Bruce Lawson

📖 Starred Book review: Prophet’s Song by Paul Lynch by Bruce Lawson

📖 Starred CSS :has(), the God Selector by Bruce Lawson

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

📖 Starred Web content, the social contract and copyrights (#blogPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred VS Code’s new minimap section headers (#blogPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Reveal an image with smart padding (#snippet) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Timestamped Git yolo commits (#snippet) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Forever projects (#note) by Stefan Judis

July 19, 2024

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

From Note from June 24, 2024 | Chase McCoy

July 19, 2024

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

July 19, 2024

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

July 19, 2024

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

July 19, 2024

📖 Starred A tale of Debian, Mesa, and ancient OpenGL by TheBrokenRail

📖 Starred https://chasem.co/2024/06/llama-dot-ttf/ by Chase McCoy

📖 Starred Boku no Natsuyasumi by Chase McCoy

📖 Starred Why Automated Phone Systems SUCK by Jeff Starr

📖 Starred Burberry X Google Hackathons by Robin Osborne

📖 Starred Cross compiling C/Rust to win32, again by Tech Notes

📖 Starred code-pen Web Component by David Darnes

📖 Starred My travel coffee brewer by David Darnes

📖 Starred link-peek Web Component by David Darnes

📖 Starred View transitions: Handling aspect ratio changes by Jake Archibald’s Blog

📹 Starred My Puzzle Robot is 200x Faster Than a Human by Mark Rober

📹 Starred After 20years I can still land it!! by colinfurze

📹 Starred Capybara by Weebl’s Stuff

July 18, 2024

WTF!?

Modern WordPress - Yikes!

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

“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

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

“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

July 17, 2024

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

July 17, 2024

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?

July 17, 2024

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.

July 18, 2024

📹 Starred Isabella’s Giant Bubble Wand! by Kids Invent Stuff

📖 Starred Testing HTML With Modern CSS by Heydon Pickering

📖 Starred What Is A Single-page Application? by Heydon Pickering

📖 Starred What is Utility-First CSS? by Heydon Pickering

📖 Starred Offloading JavaScript With Custom Properties by Heydon Pickering

📖 Starred Private class fields in Python by Kieran Barker

📖 Starred JavaScript modules and the file URI scheme by Kieran Barker