Stream

This is a mirror of my tweets in an attempt to follow the indieweb movement.

May 13, 2023

Again, I remember spending so much time trying to get a login form working with JSP. I donā€™t recall there being much error feedback either. It was like the thing worked orā€¦ blank page.

When I would add HTML and CSS to a page, I would get instant feedback. I would add the code, and things would appear on the page. They may not have looked exactly right, but they were there, giving me clues as to whether I was on the right track. I was hooked.

Iā€™m sharing all this to say that if you want to learn how to code or be a developer of any kind, how important it is to find the technology and feedback loop that tickles your brain in just the right way. That allows you to create something that inspires you to keep learning and build your confidence.

I just needed to find the right context in which I could learn programming. My wish is that everyone else who is struggling can do the same.

From Find your feedback loop by Rach Smith

May 13, 2023

Originally posted by Chris Hannah

I was browsing Hacker News just now, and I came across an interesting question asked by user l2silver:

[What is the] most interesting tech you built for just yourself? - Hacker News

It’s an interesting question, and I’m sure a lot of tech people could some up with something interesting. But probably none as delightful as this answer from sriram_malhar:

My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.

She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60’s and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn’t like.

The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)

Now, that’s personal tech. My favourite part of it is that it still preserves the feeling and spontaneity of listening to radio. Perfect solution, and requires no extra learning at all!

This was originally posted in Personalised radio station by Chris Hannah but its a beautiful story to be shared again in its complete form.

May 12, 2023

Originally posted by Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe also in: twitter.com

OK, those who follow the teachings of the good book (HHGTTG) know that 42 is the answer “life, the universe and everything”. But here’s where it gets really geeky: the ASCII code of *, the placeholder character for everything is also… 42.

May 6, 2023

So, back to the Web. My blog is something I own, I can shape it however I want, I already have an audience for it, and Iā€™m the admin. Everyone is already familiar with the concept of sharing web links, so thereā€™s no learning required from anyone. You know what, the web is still awesome at letting you share long-form documents. That was itā€™s original purpose, so letā€™s do this!

From Back to the Web by AndrƩ Staltz

May 4, 2023

Cool! Iā€™d expect it to, and Iā€™m sure it can even provide you some really good information. That is, if you know what to ask and know how to interpret what it returns to you. My 10 year old can also provide some very detailed information about what I do for work. About half of what she would say is true, and the rest is generally vauge and plausible enough that, sure, I have trained a shark to help blind people read the web. Why not. My 7 year old just thinks I drink coffee and write emails. Again, partially true. Iā€™m going off topicā€¦

My point is that this technology is still rather young, and what it regurgitates to you is going to be based on what itā€™s learned from humans, who are also unfortunately often incorrect. Some may acknowledge these gaps, but still assume ChatGPT could provide people with at least baseline information to start learning about aspects of web accessibility. Or at least, provide you accurate code guidance to help build accessible websites.

As with the authenticity of my kidsā€™ answers, there is some truth to that, so long as you know that this can give you a start, but you should be mindful and question each answer it provides you

But, it is going to need some corrective training to help it unlearn all the junk it has picked up so far. I mean, itā€™s learning from what weā€™ve written on the Internet. We canā€™t get upset, and we should KNOW to expect such information gaps and lack of understanding, since its just recycling what we have collectively fed it. Itā€™d be foolish to think it knows better than what it has learned from us.

From Setting expectations for asking ChatGPT web accessibility questions by Scott O’Hara

May 2, 2023

Originally posted by Halli also in: twitter.com

Let people do silly things that make no sense. The sillier the better. The nosenseier the better.

Not everything we do should be to increase the GDP. In fact, most of the things we do shouldnā€™t increase GDP.

Being alive should be a celebration of random silliness.

May 1, 2023

We obsessively optimise when it comes to scripts, styles, and other resources; interestingly, that doesn’t always apply to HTML. In the case of single-page apps, it may feel like you stand to gain more in performance if you focus on JavaScript. In the case of server-rendered, non-interactive sites, some people doubt that the performance impact of a large DOM is noticeable.

We also lack the required tooling: according to Jens Meiert, not enough HTML minifiers prune optional HTML tags and default attributes. When it comes specifically to unneeded wrapper elements, tooling wouldn’t help us anyway (you would need a pretty sophisticated analysis of the associated styling to determine if an element can really be omitted).

Finally, working with deeply nested DOM trees just slows you down. […] Debugging becomes harder, tracking down nodes in the inspector becomes more tedious, and the joy of the craft is diminished.

From Fighting inter-component HTML bloat by Elise Hein

If we can use our design systems to speed up meaningful work, standardise things to a high quality, and scale the things we actually want to reproduceā€‰ā€”ā€‰then the reverse is also true. It means that we can also use our design systems to speed up problematic work, standardise things to a poor quality, and scale things we don’t want to reproduce.

From Building conscious design systems by Amy Hupe

May 1, 2023

The slowness in our tooling wasnā€™t caused by JavaScript the language, but by things just not being optimized at all.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - module resolution

Based on these numbers I’m fairly confident that we can get very close to rust’s performance with just JavaScript based on this little experiment.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - eslint

Engines are pretty good with loading big blobs of JavaScript. The main reason we care so much about file size on the web is the cost of having to deliver those bytes over the network.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - npm scripts

All by Marvin Hagemeister from the same series. Amazing reads showing how javascript can be fast if you know what you do.

April 30, 2023

My favorite part of the documentary is Megan Smith beaming over her cabinet full of hardware prototypes. Her focus on making something people love, an intimate device, is infectious. Her eagerness to blend everyoneā€™s wishes with the harsh reality of available and affordable hardware shows. Starting with off-the-shelf components and inventing if necessary. When describing the product, sheā€™s not talking about megabytes, protocols, and pixels, but talking about the sound, the feeling, the touch of the product and software in peopleā€™s hands.

I feel more vindicated than ever that prototypes, put in peopleā€™s hands, are the biggest opportunity to capture lightning in a bottle. These people are imagining and building the iPhone 17 years before the iPhone launched. Megan Smith talks like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs doesnā€™t work at Apple or General Magic. We often herald the invention of the iPhone or Android and these magic devices as invented out of thin air or our collective science fiction, but both of those products used by billions of people rose from the ashes of General Magicā€™s failure. Thatā€™s a lot to dwell on. The composting of failures produces rich and fertile soil.

From Megan Smith explaining the General Magic prototyping process by Dave Rupert

April 29, 2023

Perl had now been replaced with PHP and flat files with MySQL, and the job was truly what you’d call full stack development. All of us did everything, from compiling Apache, PHP and MySQL on freshly installed Slackware boxes, to designing databases, coding PHP and churning out HTML. Deployment was simply a matter of uploading the files from your local machine to the production server.

Testing? Maybe banging the keyboard a bit to see if your forms validated reasonably, but not much more than that. Truth be told, I couldn’t program to save my life. I - well, we - committed many grave and terrible sins. SQL injection mitigation? Please, this was the time of the honest web. Who would even try something so sinister?

The daily work was mostly routine churn: HTML forms submitted to a PHP backend, saved in a MySQL database. These were simpler sites for simpler times: a single person could easily write, understand and manage the code, database and daily running of what was at this time considered a state of the art web shop. JavaScript was maybe used for mouseover effects or scattered lines of glue logic - after all, the biggest competitor to Netscape 4 was, at this point, Netscape 3.

Much like how Commodore 64 programmers could keep a map of the entire computer in their head, a moderately competent developer could churn out an acceptable web site in a matter of weeks, understand every single aspect of it and get paid in the process. If I, a quarter century ago, had possessed the experience and knowledge I do now, the simplicity of those early web pages would’ve felt surreal. And yet, we apparently provided a service that was of some value to some people. A digital commodity, nothing more, nothing less. Actually useful software.

For quite some time, this complexity has served us well. It has made life copiously more endurable and rewarded us with great material wealth. Small wonder, then, that we want to squeeze every last drop from it. Sure, your electric toothbrush really shouldn’t require firmware upgrades, but there’s a buck to be made in all kinds of planned obsolescence. Web sites don’t need tens of megabytes of ads and tracking scripts to function, but someone is still paying for those sweet, sweet data points at which to target ads. It’s most certainly a strange idea to run a text editor inside a bundled web browser - but that way it’s easier to build for more platforms and you can even hire simpletons like me to write much of the code for it. And since more software is produced than ever, more bad software is also produced than ever before.

From A Quarter Century of Web Coding by Carl Svensson

April 29, 2023

Originally posted by Freya HolmƩr also in: twitter.com

every year I’m reminded of the massive cultural loss we suffered with the death of flash

it was so ahead of its time, there’s still no replacement for the creative space it once occupied for artists, animators, and game devs

April 26, 2023

There’s truth to that! I too have a great dissatisfaction with the recommender systems available to me. But I suspect that many who dismiss algorithms outright are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Chronological feeds are dominated by those who post frequently, and building an audience from scratch can take years. Recommender systems can help to solve problems like these.

In reality, I donā€™t think people actually want ā€œfull controlā€ over what they read, because thatā€™s too much work. What people are more likely to do is over-subscribe themselves, feel overwhelmed and stagnated in their content diet, and move onto a new platform if the old one doesnā€™t solve their problem for them. I donā€™t think most people are interested in painstakingly curating their feeds.

Recommendation doesn’t have to be just a tool that big tech companies use to make a number on a spreadsheet go up. How can we develop algorithms that serve the interests of individuals?

From In defense of recommendation by Jacob O’Bryant

This is something that i’ve been looking for a while. I dont think algorithmic timelines are bad as long as they only recommend things from the feeds you are subscribed and using your own thumbs-(up/down) to train that recommendation. Sometimes i have a lot of unread articles, and i dont have the energy to skim through titles, i just want a kind of “top 5 suggested based on your previous votes”.

April 25, 2023

[…] But even if we restrict our focus to those who want to be founders, the reality is that it can take years for a nascent idea or desire to mature into a real business. YC may be focused on early-stage companies, but sometimes even an early-stage company takes a long time to build.

This has been workable in my case, but it points to a lack of institutional support. Not everyone has the resources (or stakeholder buy-in) to take a 4-year sabbatical. We have institutional support for researchā€”what if there was something like “going to grad school,” but for open-source developers? Could it be scaled up enough so that people can actually get in without applying 8+ times?

From Funding software innovation by Jacob O’Bryant

April 24, 2023

What this centralization means in practice and whether, for example, the US government could realistically exert control over the root operators and companies discussed here, is a different story altogether. But no matter how you look at it, the internet seems less distributed or decentralized than one might wish, as many businesses and organizations appear to concentrate in a handful of registries and cloud service providers. We don’t have a single point of failure just yet, but I do see multiple points of calamity with increasing blast radius…

From Who controls the internet? by Jan Schaumann

So all in all, the answer to the question of who can read your email pretty much boils down to – yep – “Google and Microsoft”. Even if your domain doesn’t use one of their mail servers, chances are that whoever you are sending mail to does. To be fair: these companies are going to be doing a much better job at running and securing your email than you are, and outsourcing this critical functionality often makes good sense. And yet, this is another example of the continuously increasing centralization of the internet. Our businesses, just like our personal online lives, are concentrated in the hands of just a few companies.

From Who reads your email? by Jan Schaumann

April 23, 2023

On the weekend of July 4, 2014, Brian Mayer launched a website which listed reservations for sale to popular restaurants in San Francisco. The price of each reservation was a sliding scale, based on how in-demand the restaurant was. But Brian Mayer didnā€™t own or run any of these restaurants. He didnā€™t work for or with them. He had simply called the restaurants up weeks in advance, booked a whole lot of reservations under assumed names, and then put them up for sale without the restaurantā€™s permission. He called it ReservationHop.

[…] He cited other examples of websites that circumvent or otherwise ignore the norms, ethics, and laws tied to those interactions, sites like MoneyParking, which let users auction off parking spots they had no legal right to, and Enq, which ties up IRS phone lines so they can sell that spot to the highest bigger, Doctrow claims that the end goal is ā€œMarkets in everything!ā€

From Web Products Everywhere by The History Of The Web

April 19, 2023

Originally posted by Emma Bostian also in: twitter.com

Can we stop pushing the narrative of “this topic has already been taught in courses before, we don’t need another course/blog/etc. on this topic.”

So what?

That’s like telling an author “there are already thousands of murder-mystery novels, your book is worthless.”

April 18, 2023

Time Sense is a wearable sensory headband which allows the wearer to feel the passing of the 24-hour clock around the circumference of the head. As the day progresses, a tiny heat sensation passes the length of the headband.

Also

[…] it allows him to feel and hear colours as audible vibrations inside his head, including colours invisible to the human eye such as infrareds and ultraviolets.

The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording.

From Filtered for clocks by Matt Webb

April 16, 2023

All of this is to say that open source has absolutely nothing to do with being cloned. Open source licenses will not save you, copyright won’t save you, patents will not save you: if you have a successful product it will get cloned. This is inevitable and trying to prevent it is a waste of your resources. Not even the almighty Apple can prevent the mass cloning of the AirPods.

From A reply to Josef PrÅÆÅ”a by Stargirl Flowers

April 16, 2023

The simple power of a URL is that anyone can click it and instantly access it. All you need is a browser. There is no need to install an application or worry about what operating system you are running on.

A quote from Thomas Nattestad in Photoshop’s journey to the web

Web applications are inherently universal. They run on whatever operating system is capable of running a Web browser and they do not need to be compiled for each operating system separately. The same code base powers the application on all platforms. This does not mean that there are no compatibility issuesā€”there are plenty actuallyā€”but there is a solid, shared, increasing baseline that all applications can build upon.

Investing in a memorable domain name can sometimes actually be better for discoverability. Even for app stores, people still rely most on recommendations from friends and family members to discover new apps according to research done by Google.

The tooling and framework situation in the Web development world is infamous for being confusing and hard to keep up with. In practice, though, companies would use one technology and tooling stack and stay true to it for many years. The world of tech Twitter is one thing, the reality in businesses, where the decades-old jQuery is still (and by a large amount) the most popular framework, is the other.

Web applications have seen impressive performance improvements thanks to advanced technologies such as WebAssembly (including SIMD), WebGPU, and general JavaScript engine progress in recent years. Nonetheless, a carefully developed, platform-specific app will typically outperform a Web-based application (albeit the situations where this actually matters may be limited). With even high-performance audio-editing tools like Soundtrap (thanks to the Web Audio API and AudioWorklet), interactive development environments like Jupyter Notebook, and graphics-editing tools like Figma (thanks to WebAssembly), and of course graphics-intensive games like Quake (thanks to WebGL and WebGPU in the future), the boundaries are being pushed at a rapid rate.

From Not everyone’s currently building for the Web, but probably more people should by Thomas Steiner

April 16, 2023

So, has Open Source won? Mostly, I’d say. At the very least there are good Open Source alternatives to nearly every programming language and paradigm. There are some niches - science, finance, gaming - which rely on proprietary languages. And Cloud services run custom software on their custom OS running on custom processors. The new paradigm of LLM AI might eventually be fully open, but rely on processing power so out of reach of mortals that it might as well be closed.

From Are there any modern closed-source programming languages? by Terence Eden

April 15, 2023

Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you with all the typical pleasantries and talking-points? While AI doing these things for you is likely to happen, itā€™s not necessarily a good thing. Even when these tools exist, they are not a replacement for writing. Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.

From AI: Do we really “get it”? by Anton Sten but is quoted from Why Write?

April 15, 2023

Experiments like Arc feel like they could have more in common with tools-for-thought software like Obsidian and Roam Research. Those tools build knowledge graphs of connected nodes. A kind of hypertext of ideas. But weā€™ve already got hypertext tools we use every day: web browsers. Itā€™s just that they donā€™t do much with the accumulated knowledge of our web browsing. Our browsing history is a boring reverse chronological list instead of a cool-looking knowledge graph or timeline.

From Browser history by Jeremy Keith

April 14, 2023

You donā€™t have to prove everything. Sometimes you gotta follow whatā€™s interesting, follow your gut, even if you canā€™t immediately measure it and extrapolate it to a theory. If it proves to work, thatā€™s its own metric, however opaque the mechanics.

From AI & The Science of Creativity by Jim Nielsen

April 14, 2023

And this idea of AI making you ā€œmore collaborative in Teamsā€? Collaboration is about relational exchanges, cooperation, and connection. Writing a product strategy update for your team takes into consideration the individual circumstances, unspoken doubts, and historical context of the individuals on your team ā€” not just the emails and messages the computer parsed (AI canā€™t synthesize what hasnā€™t been captured).

The most rewarding work Iā€™ve done always originated outside of my tools. My satisfaction of feeling collaborative, or creative, or expressive, or ____ came about first outside any given tool.

From More Everything With AI by Jim Nielsen

April 12, 2023

A single ant eats about 2mg per day according to a random website, so you could support a colony of a million ants with 2kg of food per day. Supposing they accepted pay in sugar, or something similarly expensive, 2kg costs around $3. Perhaps you would need to pay them more than subsistence to attract them away from foraging freely, since apparently food-gathering ants usually collect more than they eat, to support others in their colony. So letā€™s guess $5. My guess is that a million ants could do well over $5 of the above labors in a day.

How do you hold an ant accountable if they fail to deliver on a contract? Do individual ants even have agency? Can we require an ant colony to purchase public indemnity insurance?

So while we, in the 21st century, are tying ourselves in knots trying to figure out the appropriate remedy when civil unrest caused by a social media app leads to deaths, maybe in Athens how ever many millennia ago they simply would have sunk a few of the servers in the Aegean.

From Filtered for ants and laws by Matt Webb

April 11, 2023

There used to be a salmon smokery in north London. Aside from the juniper and beech wood, Ole Hansen (proprietor) would, once a day, sit down and play piano to the hanging fish ā€“ live jazz and occasional singing.

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampflerā€™s cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels.

Letā€™s take hip-hop ovens to CES 2024 by Matt Webb

April 11, 2023

YET ā€“ I find myself labelling this task as a failure of the industrial design. Oh, the charging port gets fluff in it! Get rid of the port! Invent a whole thing for wireless charging! Which is a shame. Because in other worlds it is a marketing benefit to use oil in your car that makes it run better over time. It is a pleasure - and a performance benefit - to oil a cricket bat, or wax a violin bow, or season an iron pan. A vocation to prune a bonsai.

“if you donā€™t fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it is very likely to finish failing just when it is the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with, such as in the midst of a storm.”

From Donā€™t bother me now Iā€™m waxing my phone by Matt Webb

April 11, 2023

So my theory is that AI finger mistakes are actually representative of the pre-tetrapod transition 7-fingered body map buried deep in the collective unconscious, now unearthed by LLM gestalts.

And it points out that kisses now neednā€™t be synchronous. Async kisses could, I suppose, be recorded, replayed, traded, added to the permanent collection of the museum of kisses of famous smoochers (perhaps), pirated!, kept for lending in a nationwide state-run kissing library, etc. Deepfake kisses would enable kissing inaccessible celebrities (ick) or people from long ago or fictional people. Or what if the AI boffins at DeepMind got their hands on this. AlphaGo, AlphaProteinFolding, AlphaSnogs. The Kasparov/Deep Blue moment. 2024 will be the final year that humans are better than computers at kissing, what then.

Filtered for causes and kissing by Matt Webb

April 12, 2023

Originally posted by Henri also in: twitter.com

For anyone who missed the lofi girl’s countdown and the boy’s intro

Image

April 10, 2023

Instead - I think most people would be better served by subscribing to small b blogging. What you want is something with YOUR personality. Writing and ideas that are addressable (i.e. you can find and link to them easily in the future) and archived (i.e. you have a list of things youā€™ve written all in one place rather than spread across publications and URLs) and memorable (i.e. has your own design, logo or style). Writing that can live and breathe in small networks. Scale be damned. When you write for someone elseā€™s publication your writing becomes disparate and UN-networked. By chasing scale and pageviews you lose identity and the ability to create meaningful, memorable connections within the network.

Forget about ā€œvisibilityā€ for your post. The unit of blogging isnā€™t pageviews, itā€™s conversations.

From Writing, Riffs & Relationships by Tom Critchlow

April 9, 2023

When it comes to day-to-day production code, here’s the barometer I like to use: will a junior developer, someone at the very start of their career, struggle to understand this code? In the context of a shared codebase, good code is simple code. Code that doesnā€™t do anything fancy. Code that makes minimal use of abstractions. Code that youā€™d use to explain fundamental concepts to novices.

If the goal is to reduce complexity, and abstractions add complexity, should we abolish abstractions altogether? Well, no. Abstractions are everywhere. Loops are abstractions. Functions are abstractions. Programming languages themselves are abstractions over machine code, which itself is an abstraction over transistors flickering off and on really fast. Itā€™s abstractions all the way down. The key is to weigh the cost of an abstraction against its benefit.

From Clever Code Considered Harmful by Josh Comeau

April 9, 2023

Originally posted by @mia@front-end.social also in: twitter.com

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating ā€œat scaleā€ because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.

Sorry I didnā€™t quote tweet anything in order to say that.

April 9, 2023

For example: imagine for a moment the value of google.com. What would that domain cost? Peopleā€™s entire personal and professional lives ā€” email, photos, calendar, documents, etc. ā€” built up over years and years, solely accessible at that domain.

Now imagine someone who invested years of their life creating value for others and amassing a following on Twitter. They now face a dilemma: all that value lives at a URL they canā€™t control twitter.com/{username}. Even the word-of-mouth username is something they have zero control over.

However, if own your domain, create value there, and drive people to it, youā€™re paying ~$10 a year to build unbounded value over the years ā€” value you control.

That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: itā€™s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

This is the what I love about rel=me: it reinforces the value of owning a domain that people respect and trust because, through the years, it becomes a source of quality information. In an internet connected world, domains are a currency of value. Do you want to own your value, or let someone else own it?

From The Best Time to Own a Domain Was 20 Years Ago; The Second Best Time Is Today by Jim Nielsen

April 9, 2023

Early cartridge and disk-based games have been fairly easy to preserve. If you have an NES and a game cartridge, you can play the game. But this is not possible for iPhone apps. To run an old iPhone app, youā€™ll need an older device and the related cloud services to be running as they were at the time.

Modern software is in a strange place where itā€™s more at risk of being erased from history than software created in the pre-internet era. Everything we work on is so incredibly ephemeral.

From Celebrating App Icon Design by Michael Flarup

This struck me as intriguing. To run an old game, you need the hardware (console) and the software (game cartridge). But with the interconnected, interdependent nature of so much software today, you not only need the hardware and the software, but also all the cloud services the software depends on.

From Digital Preservation and ā€œThe App Icon Bookā€ by Jim Nielsen

April 9, 2023

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating ā€œat scaleā€ because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.

From this tweet by Miriam Suzanne

I still find it fully miraculous that webpage source code is freely viewable, and browsers allow for trivial editing of the source live and inline. Can just imagine the pushback against if someone tried to launch a platform like this today

From this toot by Craig Mod

Itā€™s quite incredible that the money and power birthed through the advent of the web havenā€™t yet been able to completely overtake this ā€œmashup art experimentā€ medium which ā€œgives consumers all the powerā€.

All quotes from The Anti-Capitalist Web by Jim Nielsen

April 6, 2023

All computing is to some degree artificially intelligent. At one point a TI-83 calculator was artificial intelligence. When Google search first came out it was artificial intelligence. Frankly, a modern refrigerator counts as artificial intelligence: it’s programmed to achieve an objective by taking action and uses environmental feedback to adjust its behaviour. These things are now so banal and pervasive we are unimpressed by their ā€œintelligence.ā€

From Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI by Maggie Appleton

April 6, 2023

Originally posted by CSS-Tricks also in: twitter.com

The web is lots of things. Very good things. Versatile, Decentralized, Resilient, Responsive, Adaptable, Accessible, Inexpensive, Diverse, Standardized, and Open. Makes ya proud to work on it sometimes, doesn’t it?

What the Web Still Is by @ericwbailey https://css-tricks.com/what-the-web-still-is/

April 6, 2023

I think thatā€™s one quality of a good old blog; reader agency. I remember late nights roaming through my favorite blogs and Iā€™d find something, a small trinket of the tiniest little poem, from way back in 2002. And because there were no likes or comments or anything attached to the post, I decided it was important.

From Notes On Hypertext by Robin Rendle

April 4, 2023

It’s neat to ponder over how for however many people you know about from their internet presence, there is a sort of “dark matter” of other super smart people you never hear about. For one example I think of the very talented Antoine, author of gnarly comments like these and seniormost person on ChromeOS, who appears to be otherwise mostly invisible on the internet.

I mention this because when we learned we got the award, and each person was told how much they would get, one of the most senior people on the team announced soon after that he was leaving the company. I remember being surprised by it and asking him about it. His response has stayed with me, something along the lines of: “Once I knew the highest upside I would get for staying, I could better evaluate it against my other options.” I think there’s a lesson there about how rewards can have the opposite effect you intend.

At one point the question came up: how many redirects should a browser follow? Say you try to load A, but it redirects you to B, which redirects to C, and so on; at some point you should give up and say something is broken. Someone picked some reasonable-seeming threshold, like 10 or so, after which Chrome would give up. Then Darin, who had previously worked on Firefox, said “no, it has to be 30, or it breaks the New York Times ā€” I know this from experience”. (Today Darin is working on another browser, hopefully getting a third use out of that hard-won lesson.)

At the time Iā€™d joke that “Chrome 12 [an old version] was the best Chrome”, but since Iā€™ve come to see underneath that for me what I wanted was a fast tight browser, and once I had that, pretty much by definition most subsequent work was just gonna make it worse. Sure, thereā€™s work like fixing rendering crashes or improving scroll performance, but most work involves adding features that make it bigger or slower.

Longer term, what I have come to appreciate about this is that I put a lot of myself into the product and I am proud of what I made at the time, but that product is a living thing that I do not control and it has gone on in directions I wouldnā€™t have taken it.

It’s also funny to reflect on how much time we spent agonizing over making the most minimal thing ā€” Chrome initially had no “Home” button and I remember there being long arguments about whether adding it even as an option was contrary to the goal of the thing ā€” vs today’s browser which is covered with buttons and settings, just like the browsers it was intending to revolt against.

All from Chrome, 10 years later by Evan Martin

March 26, 2023

Originally posted by Yuumei also in: twitter.com

I just want to smoosh my face into that neck floof.

#princessmononoke #ghibli #wolf

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March 24, 2023

Originally posted by Fox Pick šŸ¦Š also in: twitter.com

First official preview of how PicTacToe works! Watch my 12 yrold niece in purple against my sister in red and yellow! #PicTacToe #LockPick

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March 24, 2023

Originally posted by agatha āœ¦į“—āœ¦ also in: twitter.com

a tea break from the AI firehose

maybe all the years spent on designing and shipping touch controllers, should have worked on kitchen appliances ā²ļø

Gilliams Great Escape, a game where you are golf-ing a fish with a toaster @Official_GDC šŸ’œ

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March 17, 2023

It kind of reminds me of this blog post that Rach Smith wrote, about how learning in public is challenging when youā€™re very deep in layers of niche engineering. Itā€™s hard for me to lay out, for example, a specific type of strategy I learned in the game go, because so few people I know actually play it. Itā€™s hard for me to explain the details around keycap designs Iā€™ve worked out, because so few people understand how much effort that takes or why itā€™s exciting. Itā€™s hard for me to describe some of the little (and big) problems Iā€™ve solved, because yā€™all simply donā€™t have the context I have to understand why itā€™s thrilling that itā€™s finally done.

From The small, private wins - Cassidy Williams

Take one of my work days recently. I was struggling with something and thought writing a note about it might help. The problem was that the ā€œsomethingā€ was generating TypeScript types from GraphQL files using GraphQL Code Generator in a Next.js project using a custom webpack config, that lives in a monorepo powered by Lerna. There were ā€¦seven tools or technologies in that sentence. My potential note is niched down so hard, it feels like there is maybe one other person in the world who can relate. His name is Geoff and chances are heā€™s not reading this site.

From Learning in public isn’t so easy when you’re buried by layers of engineering - Rach Smith

March 17, 2023

I feel like with AI right now there is something there there, sure, but folks are just trying to slam it into everything regardless of whether or not that makes the product better. They donā€™t start with the idea first and then explore multiple options that leads to this one technologyā€” machine learning or whateverā€”which just happens to be the right thing to solve it.

Tech-last

March 6, 2023

Originally posted by Nicholas C. Zakas also in: twitter.com

Folks, make sure your webapp has a fallback for when your JavaScript fails to load or your fetch request back to the server fails.

Three times this morning, THREE TIMES, I’ve been stuck on a blank page on three different apps because something failed to load.

February 9, 2023

in reply of this post also in: twitter.com

@fechu @f0go El gran compumap? En the internet archive creo hay una version demo subida.

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February 2, 2023

Originally posted by NotInventedHere also in: twitter.com

let me get this straight: Twitter shows me cute animals once an hour, and the rantings of idiots every second of the day, and they’re banning the animals

February 1, 2023

Originally posted by Greg Pak in reply of this post also in: twitter.com

Swamping us with unnecessary features (no refrigerator should be connected to the internet); squeezing us for money, time, and personal data; collapsing through buggy software or spam/troll/hacker/DDoS susceptibility or mass layoffs/cost cutting leading to subpar service.

February 1, 2023

Originally posted by Sailor Recruiter šŸ’« also in: twitter.com

me acaban de pasar esto y me parece absolutamente fantƔstico y ocurrente saben quien/es? son los autores? gracias gente de frontend por ser consistentemente geniales, aguante Vuejas Locas, la radio esta re buena

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January 17, 2023

Originally posted by Papo MC šŸ”„šŸ¦… also in: twitter.com

Es 2002 tenes 7 pesos para administrar en tu almuerzo y sin saberlo tomas la mejor decisiĆ³n posible:entras al cyber Hay dos personas jugando un juego raro miras asombrado y te haces una cuenta.Elegis tu raza y de repente ahĆ­ estĆ”s siendo feliz en Lorencia No salgas es una estafa

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January 4, 2023

Originally posted by Kalynn Bayron also in: twitter.com

I donā€™t get it. Why not focus on getting AI to perform more mundane tasks that donā€™t require creativity and nuance? Use it to free up time for actual human beings to focus more on the things they love? Pushing for it to write novels, make music, and create art is weird as hell.

January 3, 2023

Originally posted by Brian Moore also in: twitter.com

I made this thing called LOL Verifier: a device that only lets you type lol if youā€™ve actually laughed out loud

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January 2, 2023

Originally posted by Goldlocke also in: twitter.com

New SNES game, everyone! Sadly, there was no SNESDEV Game Jam this year, so @bennysnesdev, @sfc_moogle and me had a little #snesdevparty instead and created Supercooked! for the best 16Bit system out there. Enjoy! https://goldlocke.itch.io/supercooked

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January 2, 2023

Originally posted by THAT @REM SHOW also in: twitter.com

If you’re attending @ffconf or not, I’ve got a special little treat for you either way:

I built an ffconf Gameboy game.

That works on a real Gameboy, on an emulator AND the web.

URL (and ROM) released during @ffconf tomorrow.

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January 1, 2023

Originally posted by Build Engine Aesthetics also in: twitter.com

It finally happened:

The Force Engine has finally reached version 1.0 after 3 years of development.

Now you can play Dark Forces on modern PCs with QOL improvements, including high resolution, mouselook, 3D rendering and quicksaves.

This is the true remaster of Dark Forces.

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January 1, 2023

Originally posted by Sam Curry also in: twitter.com

More car hacking!

Earlier this year, we were able to remotely unlock, start, locate, flash, and honk any remotely connected Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura vehicles, completely unauthorized, knowing only the VIN number of the car.

Here’s how we found it, and how it works:

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December 31, 2022

Originally posted by Juan Linietsky also in: twitter.com

Now that everyone is fresh with the country (which I emigrated from recently) after the world cup, here are some funny facts about it and open source game engines.

Godot, Cocos2D and Ogre 2.0 were all originally created by Argentinians.

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December 23, 2022

Originally posted by Magrio Animaciones also in: twitter.com

IMPORTANTE: MaƱana lanzamos un pequeƱo videojuego/narraciĆ³n interactiva sobre historias extraƱas pero reales de CABA. Estuvimos varios meses trabajando en esto gracias al apoyo del programa MECENAZGO. Va a poder jugarse GRATIS a travĆ©s del navegador en PC, Mac, celular, tablet.

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