Hello! I was talking to a friend about how git works today, and we got onto the topic – where does git store your files? We know that it’s in your .git directory, but where exactly in there are all the versions of your old files?

From In a git repository, where do your files live?

Im a lover for this kind of deep dive/look into internals and Julia always writes them in a nice exploratory way.

📖 Starred Fine Dining by War and Peas

📖 Starred In a git repository, where do your files live? by Julia Evans

📖 Starred Making crochet cacti by Julia Evans

Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS

A fun read about how simple changes about representation/algorithms could have a big payoff.

📖 Starred Virgin Mary by War and Peas

📖 Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/770488479034605568 by Sarah’s Scribbles

📖 Starred Ep. 1037 - Lunartic by Safely Endangered

📖 Starred whoops, forgot to post this here! by Hi, I’m Liz

📖 Starred https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/post/770729269848670208 by Hi, I’m Liz

📖 Starred Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS by Julia Evans

📖 Starred Some Go web dev notes by Julia Evans

As I weave through double parked cars and brave pedestrians, I see that this bicycle with an electric motor has returned the hope I’d lost over the years. Here, listen, it whispers: tech doesn’t have to be a con or make us the worst versions of ourselves. Look: technology has kept its promise and genuinely made the world better!

My e-bike is pulling me into an alternate dimension where tech isn’t designed to be a grift from the start, as these two-wheeled bad boys aren’t only here to generate shareholder value; they’re designed to help.

I’m halfway through my ride now and it’s dawning on me that this little e-bike of mine offers a critique against tech culture as a mere profit-generating tool, sure.

Here’s the kicker though. E-bikes aren’t cool because of the way they look or how loud they are and they’re certainly not cool because they turn heads or make strangers jealous. Instead, e-bikes don’t care about cool. They argue for a new kind of world where technology is genuinely helpful, where technology doesn’t have to be cool at all.

Technology can just do the job it’s meant to.

As someone who’s worked in tech for more than a decade (sorry) I’ve seen how a lot of folks in the industry are terrified of making something merely useful. It must be important! It must scale! It must have a million eyes on it!

From This Glorious Machine

Good user experience should be good SEO. People prefer fast websites; fast websites will rank higher. Good markup and metadata improves accessibility and happen to help ranking algorithms. Where interests align that’s a bonus.

I can’t be the only one seeing the quality of search results tank? Let’s be honest, as despicable as Google are, their search results were miles ahead. Now it seems Google has given up. They don’t even pretend to care about quality. Apparently Google are using “AI” in their algorithm now?

From Weblogging: Part 3 – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

📹 Starred AOL Desktop Still Exists in 2025… Is It a Ripoff? by Michael MJD

📖 Starred This Glorious Machine by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred An AVR Programmer for the C64 by www.linusakesson.net

📖 Starred The Tenor Commodordion by www.linusakesson.net

📖 Starred A letter to open-source maintainers by Xuanwo’s Blog

📖 Starred DoubleClickjacking: A New Era of UI Redressing by Paulos Yibelo - Blog

📖 Starred What is the smallest phone number? by Cadence’s Blog

📖 Starred Static initialization blocks in JavaScript classes (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Weblogging: Part 3 by David Bushell

📖 Starred In case of … by Blog of fearless web developer Silvestar Bistrović

📖 Starred Deliver the Bare Minimum by bt

But, doing it this way taught me a lot. It also helped to demystify the black box that someone else built, to give me the confidence that I could come to understand this tool as well as the creator, no matter how brilliant they seemed from a distance.

My action item to you, developer: when you start using a brand new, shiny technology, talk about it! Ask questions, write blog posts, share on social media, and be open about your findings. You never know who you could be helping! And the more you share, the easier it will be for other people to find you and return the favor.

From Apollo Mission - The Pros and Cons of Being an Early Adopter of New Technology

📖 Starred Use "translate" to turn off element translations (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred How and why I deleted all my tweets by Bruce Lawson

📖 Starred The beautiful sentence that is the web by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Apollo Mission - The Pros and Cons of Being an Early Adopter of New Technology by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred I really love entering raffles by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred 📷 Lone Magpie by Luna’s Blog

Whatever Happened to Profile Customization?

📹 Starred Becoming A Test Pilot: Do You Have What It Takes? by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred this cannot be real. (access any device, anywhere) by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred This build goes out to all the pee shy fellas out there. by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025 ? by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred farmers steal government water by William Osman 2

📹 Starred How Long Could You Live In The ISS If Earth Was Destroyed? by Vsauce

📹 Starred GTA3 on the Sega Dreamcast is incredible by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred Lindows - The Linux Distro That Microsoft Sued… and Lost by Michael MJD

📹 Starred i tried to warn you. by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Raw Egg vs Hard Boiled Egg Test by Mark Rober

📹 Starred Screwball Scramble! by Vsauce

📹 Starred Maths-adjacent leisure. ■ Reverse Trivia 2x04 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred what if we just verified all the pointers? by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Tried moving the hand model in stop motion.【ARTIST SUPPORT ITEM】#stopmotion by Animist

📹 Starred Why are Christmas Cartoons so Depressing? by Entertain The Elk

📹 Starred Flipbook cartoon bird. | Komadorisaurus by Animist

📹 Starred i made a laser hairdresser that cut off my head by I did a thing

📹 Starred This 3D Printed Marble Machine Fits in your Hand by SeanHodgins

📹 Starred Can I Solve This Unsolved Math Problem? by CodeParade

📹 Starred This PS4 Controller is a Music Sequencer (Secret Santa 2024) by Becky Stern

📹 Starred Making A FLAMETHROWER ORGAN by LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

📹 Starred A COLD Knife is ok BUT this…. by colinfurze

📹 Starred Win or Get Electrocuted - Taser Operation Game by Emily The Engineer

📹 Starred The Ultimate Maker Gift! by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred The Handsomest Set of Handy Hand Tools by Xyla Foxlin

📹 Starred Automatic Sentry Turret | MEET THE ENGINEER by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred I Made MASSIVE Leatherbound Books… and gave them to the author by Nerdforge

📹 Starred The LAST Howl’s Moving Castle I’ll ever make by Studson Studio

📹 Starred What does "Bulletproof" REALLY Mean? by Xyla Foxlin

📹 Starred mars rover sent me a box by William Osman 2

📹 Starred We’ve run out of rods. ■ Reverse Trivia 2x03 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred World’s Most Advanced HUD | Real Life Power Armor (Part 3/6) by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred Installing NetBSD on the Nintendo Wii! by Michael MJD

📹 Starred The First Amiga Virus - Something Wonderful Has Happened by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred this is a HUGE problem. (the future of AI?) by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred the US government is considering a HUGE ban by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Am I the real Wallace and gromit #colinfurze by colinfurze

kirby vs. this blog post

And this is why personal websites are the best

📖 Starred Drawing a line to connect elements with CSS anchor position by Blog of fearless web developer Silvestar Bistrović

📖 Starred kirby vs. this blog post by Brad Frost

📖 Starred My Sketch – OpenProcessing by Brad Frost

📖 Starred 🎬 Satisfying camera noises by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred Choose kindness over pile-ons by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Noticing the little things by Cassidy Williams

📹 Starred The Experiment We Didn’t Show by Vsauce

📖 Starred The Shape of Runs to Come by Articles by Ryan Mulligan

📖 Starred Alien Press Conference by War and Peas

📖 Starred Ep. 1036 - The List by Safely Endangered

📹 Starred Hacked a Broken Orbit to Get This Shot by SeanHodginsToo

📹 Starred Disney Adults… by MeatCanyon

📹 Starred I built a Lego Inspired Christmas Tree by Ruth Amos

📹 Starred DIY Surround Sound… USING LASERS! by DIY Perks

📹 Starred Mate, I was sitting in that. ■ Reverse Trivia 2x02 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred Why do Tightrope Walkers Hold Long Poles? by Mark Rober

📹 Starred Before Throwing Out This Camera, Play Tetris! by Janus Cycle

📹 Starred the donuts have been compromised. by Low Level Learning

📖 Starred Soulmates by War and Peas

📖 Starred Ep. 1034 - Darts by Safely Endangered

📹 Starred Christmas Baboon by Weebl’s Stuff

📹 Starred When the Inventor meets the invention by Kids Invent Stuff

📖 Starred Buff Jesus by War and Peas

📖 Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/769220073319792640 by Sarah’s Scribbles

📖 Starred GitHub “Actions” Are An Impending Security Disaster by Connor’s Blog

📖 Starred Doing things that don’t scale is about finding value by Cassidy Williams

📹 Starred Why are the best snacks always in the back seat?!? by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred Heavy and Gigantic Ancient Whale Resin Art by Thalasso hobbyer たらそほびや

📹 Starred Tall, dark, and gruesome. ■ Reverse Trivia 2x01 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred What if we made a camera that sees in reverse? by Stuff Made Here

📹 Starred A chair built for your half-dirty clothes by Simone Giertz

📹 Starred Testing The World’s Smartest Crow by Mark Rober

📹 Starred I Built An Emordnilap Machine by Vsauce

📹 Starred DRIFT5 #RCDriftTok #parody #stopmotion #toycar by omozoc

There is a cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge, which occurs when one assumes that others possess the same level of knowledge during communication.

This phenomenon is quite common in software development. People who have experience writing certain types of code and those who don’t often struggle to communicate effectively, even if they share the same theoretical foundation (algorithms, programming languages, or domain knowledge). The reason for this lies in the significant flexibility of software engineering; there are multiple ways to implement the same functionality, each with its own set of challenges.

To eliminate such communication barriers, various technical fields have developed their own set of idioms or design patterns. New projects built on these practices can avoid a lot of unnecessary trouble. The same is true for the field of databases; however, due to its niche nature and high degree of commercialization, knowledge circulated among the public is very scarce, and engineering practices are scattered across various open-source projects.

In this article, I will build a SQL IR from scratch based on my own best practices, which will facilitate the progressive sharing of some design considerations.

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Query Optimizer (Part 1): IR Design

To break from talking about actual DNS features, check out this little snippet instead:

dig +short TXT {0..92}.vid.demo.servfail.network | sed 's/[" ]*//g' | base64 -d | mpv -

Requires bind-tools, mpv. If it doesn’t work, try adding @8.8.8.8 just after dig, or replace mpv with ffplay

From SERVFAIL: the first 100 days

You have a unique voice that others don’t have. Not everyone learns best from the top teacher out there, not everyone enjoys the writing of the most prolific blogger you know, and not everyone uses the most popular app for their problem. You don’t know who might benefit from what you offer, and you won’t know until you go for it!

From Ship it anyway

📹 Starred EXTREME Hide & Seek (Hunting my Employees 2024) by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred GIANT LEGO (inspired) Christmas Tree! by Ruth Amos

📖 Starred What I Talk About When I Talk About Query Optimizer (Part 1): IR Design by Xuanwo’s Blog

📹 Starred china hacks every telephone network (still there?) by Low Level Learning

But they should not be afraid! Libraries are not magic. They are just code someone else wrote. After all, I pasted the entirety of is-number above, and nothing in there is too mysterious. And beyond libraries—languages are not magic, operating systems are not magic, nothing is magic. Dig into the source code and you will find code you can read and understand.

If you are a proponent of tiny libraries, I encourage you to overcome your fear and try writing the code yourself. You are more capable than you think.

From Micro-libraries need to die already | Ben Visness

But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it. Looking at a lot of the examples here I can’t tell what’s real without inspecting them—the crashed motorcycle has a bicycle tire for example but man I would never look this closely in most situations.

So right now I think this stuff should be straight up illegal.

From No one’s ready for this

📖 Starred Ship it anyway by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Beating the compiler by Matt Keeter

📹 Starred DRIFT4 #stopmotion #PresidentTrump #donaldtrump by omozoc

📹 Starred The Man Who Saved The World by Vsauce

📹 Starred Argh! Real Angels! by Weebl’s Stuff

📖 Starred Micro-libraries need to die already by Ben Visness

📖 Starred Safety and stability by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred A message in binary by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred No one’s ready for this by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Every webpage deserves to be a place by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Ep. 1033 - Mole People by Safely Endangered

📖 Starred A Word From Our Sponsor by War and Peas

📖 Starred The Lore of Animorphs (an Ode) by Tania Rascia

📖 Starred Combining tools for fun and profit by Cassidy Williams

Communities function like that Tamagotchi. You can’t play with them until you feed them and care for them. Unless you keep those health and happiness meters high, they will not behave in the ways you’d like them to, potentially undermining your efforts and investments.

This goes for any community. Whether it is one you created and managed for your product or open source project or one that previously existed (though especially the latter).

One of the fun aspects of the Tamagotchi was that it could be unpredictable. They had personalities and they evolved in stages, which also affected their behavior. You had to invest time and effort to care for the Tamagotchi, but the outcome was unpredictable because the personality was intrinsic to the specific Tamagotchi and not something you could control.

In much the same way communities tend to have a personality. Existing communities will have already established one that you need to invest time to understand and adapt to.

Instead of tracking the outputs, track the inputs. What are the activities we did to foster the community this month?

Done right, community efforts can pay off immensely

From Remote Synthesis | Community is a Tamagotchi

📖 Starred Community is a Tamagotchi by Brian Rindaldi

📖 Starred Web Apps on iOS: is the CMA missing the point? by Bruce Lawson

File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use.

“Stainless steel” is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can test it yourself on any tool that makes this promise, and the stainlessness of the steel cannot be withdrawn.

Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma.

A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place.

Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI.

From Self-guaranteeing promises — Steph Ango

📖 Starred Big Apple Blues by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred We don’t need a boss, we need a process by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Closed in England by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred The Pixel Canvas Shimmer Effect by Articles by Ryan Mulligan

📖 Starred Self-guaranteeing promises by Stephan Ango

However, these tools aren’t necessarily faster because they’re using a faster language. They could just be faster because 1) they’re being written with performance in mind, and 2) the API surface is already settled, so the authors don’t have to spend development time tinkering with the overall design. Heck, you don’t even need to write tests! Just use the existing test suite from the previous tool.

In my career, I’ve often seen a rewrite from A to B resulting in a speed boost, followed by the triumphant claim that B is faster than A. However, as Ryan Carniato points out, a rewrite is often faster just because it’s a rewrite – you know more the second time around, you’re paying more attention to perf, etc.

In the world of Node.js scripts, we don’t get the benefits of the bytecode cache at all. Every time you run a Node script, the entire script has to be parsed and compiled from scratch. This is a big reason for the reported perf wins between JavaScript and non-JavaScript tooling.

Most developers ignore the fact that they have the skills to debug/fix/modify their dependencies. They are not maintained by unknown demigods but by fellow developers.

This breaks down if JavaScript library authors are using languages that are different (and more difficult!) than JavaScript. They may as well be demigods!

For another thing: it’s straightforward to modify JavaScript dependencies locally. I’ve often tweaked something in my local node_modules folder when I’m trying to track down a bug or work on a feature in a library I depend on. Whereas if it’s written in a native language, I’d need to check out the source code and compile it myself – a big barrier to entry.

That said, I don’t think that JavaScript is inherently slow, or that we’ve exhausted all the possibilities for improving it. Sometimes I look at truly perf-focused JavaScript, such as the recent improvements to the Chromium DevTools using mind-blowing techniques like using Uint8Arrays as bit vectors, and I feel that we’ve barely scratched the surface.

I also think that, as a community, we have not really grappled with what the world would look like if we relegate JavaScript tooling to an elite priesthood of Rust and Zig developers. I can imagine the average JavaScript developer feeling completely hopeless every time there’s a bug in one of their build tools. Rather than empowering the next generation of web developers to achieve more, we might be training them for a career of learned helplessness. Imagine what it will feel like for the average junior developer to face a segfault rather than a familiar JavaScript Error.

From Why I’m skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in “faster” languages | Read the Tea Leaves

📖 Starred Why I’m skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in “faster” languages by Read the Tea Leaves

📖 Starred Improving rendering performance with CSS content-visibility by Read the Tea Leaves

📖 Starred Lower league football by Dan Davies

📖 Starred AI by War and Peas

The truth is that there is kind of a lot of detail to all of it. But also, detail ultimately just means it is a slog. x86 has a scrillion opcodes to implement, win32 has scrillion APIs, but the path from zero to a scrillion starts with a step like any other.

“Good things happen when I try hard to chase my sense of excitement, ignoring impulses to produce legible outcomes.” I think that observation about legibility really reached me. I went through a period in the past where I found I was only reading books that I felt like I ought to be reading and had ultimately been killing my enjoyment of reading, and I was trying to recover that feeling about programming.

Also, had I known I would need to implement some of MMX, would I have even started this project? Not even sure. I have seen it observed that sometimes not knowing how hard something will be is an important help to actually just starting to try.

I have sometimes thought about this: what are the chances of someone having both the low-level skill set needed to usefully contribute, and also the need to emulate an old Windows program? This is to me one of the best things about the internet, where even if such a person is a one in a billion chance, we have a few billion people around on here.

From Tech Notes: retrowin32, two years in

📖 Starred retrowin32, two years in by Tech Notes

📖 Starred Garbage collection and closures by Jake Archibald’s Blog

📖 Starred Video with alpha transparency on the web by Jake Archibald’s Blog

📖 Starred hypercard Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred webcare-webshare Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred throbber Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred carouscroll Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred snow-fall Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred A new Eleventy mascot from David Neal! by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred browser-window Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📖 Starred table-saw Web Component by Zach Leatherman

📹 Starred Why Tufting Guns are BRILLIANT (SUPER SLOW MO) by Xyla Foxlin

📹 Starred I Tried Building My Own Space Satellite by Mark Rober

📹 Starred Become Anyone 2.0 - A Full Face LED Mask by SeanHodgins

The year is 2005. You’re blasting a pirated mp3 of “Feel Good Inc” and chugging vanilla coke while updating your website.

It’s just a simple change, so you log on via FTP, edit your style.css file, hit save - and reload the page to see your changes live.

Now listen, I really don’t want to go back to doing live updates in production. That can get painful real fast. But I think it’s amazing when the files you see in your code editor are exactly the same files that are delivered to the browser. No compilation, no node process, no build step. Just edit, save, boom.

Funnily enough, many build tools advertise their superior “Developer Experience” (DX). For my money, there’s no better DX than shipping code straight to the browser and not having to worry about some cryptic node_modules error in between.

So, can we all ditch our build tools soon? Probably not.

From Going Buildless | Max Böck

You see, people on the Web think conventions are boring. That regular controls need to be reinvented and redesigned. They don’t believe there are any norms.

Anyway, with Apple’s betrayal, I think it’s fair to say there’s no hope for this tradition to continue.

From In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox @ tonsky.me

I don’t necessarily believe that everyone can have a job or even a career that makes them spring out of bed in the morning and gives them creative satisfaction in their day-to-day. Ultimately we live under late-stage capitalism, and I certainly couldn’t afford my house (or indeed any house) if I dedicated my life to, say, running choirs.

So I get my creative energy and joy from elsewhere. I’m fiercely protective of my free time, even if it’s just spent horizontal on the sofa playing video games. When the working day is done, I have creative pursuits that bring me joy and put art into the world in their own little way.

Art is in the weird and wonderful websites I make occasionally, which bring people (including myself!) a moment of joy when they land on them.

In a world of shit, creativity for creativity’s sake is radical.

I cant stress enough that last quote, So i will quote it again

In a world of shit, creativity for creativity’s sake is radical.

From The art in everyday life - localghost

There is no reason for AI generated output to be shared with humans online. There’s already so much on the internet created by humans — so much that not only would I never be able to see it all, I will never understand just how much there is. All of us use our creativity to make things and share them with others in the hope for human connection.

From “Created by a human” badges - cadence’s weblog (personal blog)

📹 Starred Programmers Wont Like This by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Truco de Nintendo DS para mostrar gráficos 3D en las 2 pantallas by Guinxu

📖 Starred The moment before: 30th Aug by Remy Sharp

📖 Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/768585891952345088 by Sarah’s Scribbles

📖 Starred 20 years blogging by Paul Kinlan

📖 Starred Idly musing about Manifest by Paul Kinlan

📖 Starred Being forced to upgrade by Cassidy Williams

📹 Starred New divisibility rule! (30,000 of them) by standupmaths

📹 Starred We sent a ROBOT CHICKEN to "SPACE"! by Kids Invent Stuff

📖 Starred ReST vs GraphQL an invalid comparison by Programming Missives

📖 Starred Going Buildless by Max Böck

📖 Starred Unsafe for work by fettblog.eu | TypeScript, JavaScript, Jamstack

📖 Starred Hacking cars in JavaScript (Running replay attacks in the browser with the HackRF) by Charlie Gerard

📖 Starred In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox by tonsky.me

📖 Starred The art in everyday life by localghost.dev

📖 Starred “Created by a human” badges by Cadence’s Blog

We’ve built incredible general-purpose computing devices with processing power to run circles around the big desktops I learned to program on. But the way we interface with them locks them up as devices for consumption, not creation.

It’s not because I can’t use my phone for these—I have! People usually like to bash iOS, saying things like, “it’s just not possible to write the apps to do all this in the first place…” but for me, all the apps actually exist! I drafted this whole post in a markdown app on my phone. Blink Shell gives me a whole Linux environment to build code, even on iOS. Tailscale lets me build a website at home and access it anywhere. GitHub, Gmail, and Google Docs all have mobile apps.

Rather, the reason I don’t is because it’s so unsatisfying. The disconnect between my speed of thought and my speed of action is grating, making it impossible to get into anything resembling a flow state. Like a runner stuck on a crowded sidewalk, I’m constantly frustrated by the sputtering pace of progress.

From What if typing on phones was fast? – Jake Zimmerman

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

From Home-cooked web apps

Perhaps most well-known today for its jarringly out-of-place high-octane soundtrack by the inimitable Tim Follin, the game makes you play bizarre minigames to reveal a drawing, and then — in traditional Pictionary fashion — you have to guess what was drawn, against the clock.

A community quickly formed around “CSS crimes”, making all sorts of wonderful things by pushing the platform’s capabilities to the limit. Blackle’s CSS Puzzle Box remains one of the most impressive creations on the site. I took part in this phenomenon too, making a zoetrope that shows your browser’s refresh rate, a demoscene-esque twister, a recreation of the Star Wars opening sequence, a light hypnotic induction replicating the site’s UI, and more.

With the easter egg drawings starting to show up, people naturally started enquiring about the possibility of submitting their own

I’ve given a lot of thought to why the Pictionary bot in particular was so popular, and I think it ultimately comes down to the “yes, and” posting culture of Cohost. This could have just been a bot posting drawings from the original NES game. But people latched onto it and made their own game out of it. People loved it so much they wanted to contribute back to it, for no other reward than getting to share their work with their friends. People formed a community around it, and I’m so grateful that they did.

From The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam · Luna’s Blog

I cant get over the main theme of the game, but a beautiful tale of how internet could still be a nice and beautiful place to share and hangout with others

Cheff kiss

And in that traffic, I’ve started recognizing people I see every day. We don’t talk. There’s no handshake. It’s not like we’ve technically ever met. We just happen to be in the same dense traffic at the same time on a regular basis.

From More Human Than Human - Geoff Graham

I’ve enjoyed working with some of the most brilliant web engineers. All of them enjoy a good challenge. They want an excuse to flex some development muscle and show what they can do. In more than one case, the idea of using an existing tool, resource, platform, whatever, led to all-out shoutiong matches driven not by what the user wants, but by the unwillingness to back down from a challenge.

From “Where the people are” - Geoff Graham

📹 Starred Debloating a Windows Bootleg into a Clean Install of XP - Is It Possible? by Michael MJD

📖 Starred What if typing on phones was fast? by Jake Zimmerman

📖 Starred Bug squash: An underrated interview question by Jake Zimmerman

📖 Starred Home-cooked web apps by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred It’s okay to lower the bar by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred 📝 The NES Pictionary Bot, In Memoriam by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 🎬 Lightning Talk: We Need To Talk About K8s by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred More Human Than Human by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred “Where the people are” by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred The Adjunct Model of Teaching is Stupid and Broken by Geoff Graham

Not in the notification feed, not in any sort of hover pop-over, no growth-hacking “put follow buttons everywhere” nonsense, you basically had to visit someone’s profile to follow them. It made the act of following much more intentional.

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular

From Online following and Starter Packs · Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 Netscape, Now! by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 Drawing 88×31 buttons with Pixaki by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 Have you seen this bug? by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📷 Look, a squirrel! by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 Macros in Rust, the wrong way by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 Online following and Starter Packs by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📷 Look, a squirrels! by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred 📝 The hardest problem is naming things by Luna’s Blog

📖 Starred How Meta Brings in Millions Off Political Violence by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Shifting Identities by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Our family broke down and got a stinkin’ puppy. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred “About 1 second remaining” is the new beachball spinner. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Pre-Publish Check by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Funny Container Query Defaults by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred CSS Meditation #8: .work + .life { border: 10px solid #000; } by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred How my son got into Duke by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Where I can enter my vote to go back to saying “the net” instead of “the web”? by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred CSS Meditation #6: The color space is always calc(rgb(0 255 0)+er) on the other side of the fence. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred CSS Meditation #5: :where(:is(.my-mind)) by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred “Hey, will you build me a website?” by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred CSS Meditation #2: Who gives a flying frick what constitutes a “programming” language. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred CSS Meditation #1: If the code works as expected and it fits your mental model, then it’s perfect. by Geoff Graham

📖 Starred Artificial Listicles by Geoff Graham

📹 Starred Hamster balls + bowling = chaos! 🤣 Watch #HumanVSHamster streaming now on Max! 🐹🎳 #MaxPartner by the Hacksmith

This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.

From Note from September 30, 2024 | Chase McCoy

And it validates something I’ve been complaining about ever since the concept of “App Stores” came up: this isn’t about user convenience, but about controlling the whole experience and keeping people in your app. It’s “time spent in app” KPIs over and over again.

Speech recognition and speech synthesis is something we already have on the platform level. An app running on the platform should integrate with these instead of competing. As a user, I have spent a lot of time setting up my environment to fit my needs. And I spent time and money to install and buy solutions I like to use for various tasks. Apps should recognise my efforts to cater the experience to my wants and needs and not offer me a lesser experience and sell it as innovation.

From Kirby apps and regressive enhancements | Christian Heilmann

📖 Starred A most unusual brightness by Chase McCoy

📖 Starred Note from September 30, 2024 by Chase McCoy

📖 Starred Ep. 1031 - Santa’s Dead by Safely Endangered

📖 Starred Return of the Front-end! by David Bushell

📖 Starred Matt’s Malware by David Bushell

📖 Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/768314105977323520 by Sarah’s Scribbles

📖 Starred The Deno Package Paradox by David Bushell

📖 Starred The Path to Learn Web Development by Flavio Copes

📖 Starred I just pulled a 2006 and uploaded my holiday photos to Flickr with a Creative Commons Licence by Christian Heilmann

Having been in a startup situation where literally everything was deleted, you begin to understand that it ain’t all about the code we write. The “outputs”; all the code, the designs, the processes, the tests—they’re ultimately fleeting. It might be our choice, it might not, but it’ll all be replaced or removed in time.

But the relationships you make, the impact you have in colleagues’ & customers’ lives, and the growth that occurs in your professional journey outlasts any fork in the road.

From All code is fleeting | Trys Mudford

📖 Starred Kirby apps and regressive enhancements by Christian Heilmann

📖 Starred Lossless Cut is my new favourite tool to cut parts from a video without any hassle by Christian Heilmann

📖 Starred The State of ES5 on the Web by Philip Walton

📖 Starred Hyper-responsive web components by Trys Mudford

📖 Starred BBC Sound Effects by Trys Mudford

📖 Starred All code is fleeting by Trys Mudford

📖 Starred Fixing Next.js’s CSS order using cascade layers by Trys Mudford

📖 Starred The Kind King by Jonathan Snook

📖 Starred AI is taking your job by Kent C. Dodds

📖 Starred Web Components for Password Input Enhancements by Articles by Ryan Mulligan

📖 Starred Center Items in First Row with CSS Grid by Articles by Ryan Mulligan

📖 Starred Musings on LLMs by Connor’s Blog

📖 Starred Native dual-range input by Muffin Man

📖 Starred https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/post/768074266200637440 by Hi, I’m Liz

📖 Starred Ep. 1030 - Meteor by Safely Endangered

📹 Starred the 7zip rabbit hole goes extremely deep. (1000’s of crashes) by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Juegos con problemas que la comunidad corrigió by Guinxu

📹 Starred Pelear sin tener ningún Pokémon (Generación 2) by Guinxu

📹 Starred KDE on Windows - Exploring the Forgotten Port by Michael MJD

📹 Starred Becoming a CYBORG with TWO ROBOT ARMS! by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred this vulnerability has been hiding for 10 years. by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Why Did Yankee Doodle Call This Macaroni?? by Vsauce

📹 Starred Hello from Dianna! - Two years in bed by Physics Girl

📖 Starred https://lizclimo.tumblr.com/post/767694021333336064 by Hi, I’m Liz

Good defaults make things easier to teach. They point to what the layout method is designed for. Flexbox is really designed for putting things into a line and distributing spare space. So that initial behaviour of putting all your things in a row is a great starting point for whatever you might want to do. It may be all you need to do. It’s not difficult as a teacher to then unpack how to add space inside or outside items, align them, or make it a column rather than a row. Step by step, from the defaults.

From Masonry and good defaults – Rachel Andrew

📖 Starred Masonry and good defaults by Rachel Andrew

📖 Starred Build and Deploy Websites Automatically with Git by bt

📖 Starred “This Key is Useless Now. Discard?” by bt

📹 Starred I like it Picasso 👌🖌️🎨 #challenge #hacksmith #engineering by the Hacksmith

📖 Starred Ep. 1029 - Abduction by Safely Endangered

📖 Starred https://sarahcandersen.com/post/767679922464505856 by Sarah’s Scribbles

📖 Starred Day 109: the animation-composition property by All posts - Manuel Matuzović

📖 Starred Blogroll by David Darnes

📖 Starred Awesome Standalones by David Darnes

Call me oldschool, or even stupid, but I find everything a lot more rewarding when I put some effort into it. Using a pen for writing feels good. Music sounds deeper from the spinning on the turntable record. The time it takes to develop an analogue camera film makes a picture more memorable. But all this is a story for another article.

From Combating mental AI fog | pawelgrzybek.com

Am I an analog girly, or am I just a snob?

Probably both. I feel like the more experienced and “deep” I get into tech, the more I retreat into… low-tech. I enjoy pen and paper. I have fun with my typewriter. I want DVDs instead of streaming. I like using a point and shoot camera instead of just my phone’s camera.

I like not relying on the internet or some level of availability to be entertained or to do tasks. I like owning the things I own, and not thinking about what algorithms are watching me back. I like not being interrupted by notifications when I’m doing something.

From Analog girly

📖 Starred A catalog. by Ethan Marcotte

📖 Starred Type-safe environment variables in Astro 5.0 by Bryan Robinson

📖 Starred Hello World, meet Kian by Evert Pot’s blog

📖 Starred Git commit hashes that spark joy by Tyler Cipriani: blog

📹 Starred I made a 10,000V Chidori glove by Allen Pan - Sufficiently Advanced

📖 Starred Combating mental AI fog by pawelgrzybek.com

The result is bloated websites built by framework developers. And you can’t blame all the new developers for that. When all the job postings require framework experience, people joining the web dev world focus on becoming framework experts.

A dev knowing the web platform will produce great websites regardless of the tech stack. At the end, there’s “just” web stuff below all the framework magic, right?

From On being a “JavaScript framework developer”…

📖 Starred Losing is part of being a designer (but that doesn’t have to be you) by Adam Silver

📖 Starred Analog girly by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred I fell asleep in a driverless car by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Sleep is the most magical thing in the world by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Side quests by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Voice lessons taught me that I should be… true to myself by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Why JavaScript variables don’t always update by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Building the Micro Journal by Cassidy Williams

📖 Starred Harris for President by inessential.com

📖 Starred On being a "JavaScript framework developer"… (#blogPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Processes and rules make code review less intimidating (#blogPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred How to search for strings in Git commit additions or deletions (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Navigate your shell history with CTRL keys (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred Earlier function parameters are available to default parameters (#tilPost) by Stefan Judis

📖 Starred What Is React.js? by Webbed Briefs

📖 Starred Time-based CSS Animations by yuanchuan.dev

📖 Starred Creating an electromagnet and sound wave learning environment by Justin Miller

📖 Starred How I increased my visibility by Kent C. Dodds

📹 Starred Narwhals Lyric Video by Weebl’s Stuff

📹 Starred Lasers vs Lightning- Which Is More Powerful? by Mark Rober

📖 Starred TypeScript enums and falsy values by Jack Franklin

📹 Starred unboxing more stolen USPS supplies by William Osman 2

📖 Starred Opposites in the Presidential Succession. by Matthew Felgate

📹 Starred As per my last email… by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred History Is Accumulating by Vsauce

📖 Starred [Video] Nix explained from the ground up by DasSur.ma on DasSur.ma

📹 Starred I Built a Dark Academia Gaming Room by Nerdforge

📹 Starred Spider-Man’s Lowkey Flex 😂 by HyperDrive

📹 Starred this is what happens when you let the intern write code. by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Nokia’s Linux Tablet from 2005 by Michael MJD

📹 Starred We did it! Levitation is REAL by Physics Girl

📹 Starred Is Logging Better than Debugging? #programming #coding #software by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred How to Learn Any Skill by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Building a BETTER CPU in Excel by Inkbox

📹 Starred Geography They Didn’t Teach You In School by Vsauce

📹 Starred they found another backdoor… by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Making Firefox Look Like Google Chrome! - Geckium Demo by Michael MJD

📹 Starred I can’t believe someone was throwing this away! by Ruth Amos

📹 Starred These glasses have a secret function by Simone Giertz

📹 Starred new windows malware brings it’s OWN vulnerabilities by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred It hasnt snowed in 10 years by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred I’ve never seen a beer glass quite like this. by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred HP’s iPhone Killer… That Never Was by Michael MJD

📹 Starred It’s up to us to save Video Games by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred Making a Chocolate Cup by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred World’s First Nacho Belt! by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred My Rock, Paper, Scissors Robot Never Loses (+9 Other Inventions) by Mark Rober

📹 Starred #sponsored With Google Photos, I can find all my wild projects. Should I even be near a 3D printer? by Emily The Engineer

📹 Starred How to Get Rid of Junk Mail by Emily The Engineer

📹 Starred You’ll NEVER Hear a Sonic Boom From a Rocket?? by Xyla Foxlin

📹 Starred How many fish does it take to pull my boat? by I did a thing

📹 Starred Dangerous RC Helicopter Experiments by PeterSripol

📹 Starred How on Earth does ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ produce primes? by standupmaths

📹 Starred What do we know about Asteroid 314159 aka ‘Mattparker’? by standupmaths

📹 Starred DRIFT3 by omozoc

📹 Starred Supersmarties by Vihart

📹 Starred 4 Fireworks vs Metal Pot w/@MRINDIANHACKER by Mark Rober

📹 Starred The Halloween bucket of the FUTURE! by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred 😳 when in doubt, bring the tape out #engineering #challenge by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred DRIFT2 by omozoc

📹 Starred DRIFT1 by omozoc

📹 Starred Terminator fail scene by omozoc

📹 Starred That hippo’s gonna fly. ■ Reverse Trivia 1x04 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred New largest prime number found! See all 41,024,320 digits. by standupmaths

📹 Starred Modelé un Pikachu 3D usando Bloc de Notas by Guinxu

📹 Starred Thank you for playing Wing Commander by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred kernel mode anti-cheat strikes again. by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Let me know what I should call them. And if I can eat them… by Sam Barnett

📹 Starred it’s FINALLY back! by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred What’s Inside A Flame? by Vsauce

📹 Starred I built a QR code with my bare hands to see how it works by Veritasium

📹 Starred I Spent 14 Days Painting in Off-Grid Cabins by Nerdforge

📹 Starred What if slugs get in your house?? by colinfurze

📹 Starred Real commitment to the bit. ■ Reverse Trivia 1x03 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred How is this Website so fast!? by Wes Bos’s YouTube Videos

📹 Starred How Mario Kart 64 Cheats against you by Modern Vintage Gamer

📹 Starred Saving Photos To . . . A Voice Recorder? by Janus Cycle

📹 Starred The REAL Truth Behind the DVD Logo by Mark Rober

📹 Starred We detected it… by Physics Girl

📹 Starred The Last Photograph We Took Of Earth by Vsauce

📹 Starred Anagram Land by Vsauce

📹 Starred i really don’t like the future of YouTube. by Low Level Learning

📹 Starred Freeman as Red: Honest Words Before Parole Stamp 🛑 by HyperDrive

📹 Starred How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks by 3Blue1Brown

📹 Starred Flipping Robot vs Heavier And Heavier Objects by Mark Rober

📹 Starred A wet place in the south. ■ Reverse Trivia 1x02 by The Technical Difficulties

📹 Starred Why sales is the worst part of my job by Simone Giertz

📹 Starred I Built an iPhone Case That’s Also a Digital Camera by Unnecessary Inventions

📹 Starred Mini JEEP BOAT vs HURRICANE by PeterSripol

📹 Starred The Tongue Stealer by MeatCanyon

📹 Starred A Modern OS… on a Floppy Disk?! by Michael MJD

📹 Starred No se olviden el mate by Jonadibujos

📹 Starred Behind the Scenes of Cooking with Powertools by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred What If You Were 620 Miles Long? by Vsauce