For example: imagine for a moment the value of google.com. What would that domain cost? People’s entire personal and professional lives — email, photos, calendar, documents, etc. — 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 can’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, you’re paying ~$10 a year to build unbounded value over the years — value you control.

That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’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

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, you’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 it’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 “The App Icon Book” by Jim Nielsen

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” 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

It’s quite incredible that the money and power birthed through the advent of the web haven’t yet been able to completely overtake this “mashup art experiment” medium which “gives consumers all the power”.

All quotes from The Anti-Capitalist Web by Jim Nielsen

The Life Script – a play for algorithms https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-life-script-a-play-for-algorithms/

Some thoughts on a web+follow protocol (for the likes of Mastodon federated follow)

https://paul.kinlan.me/thoughts-on-web-follow/

The informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven’t infiltrated yet.

From The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web by Maggie Appleton

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 “intelligence.”

From Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI by Maggie Appleton

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/

I wrote about the presence of censorship in automatic captions and voice control software. With thanks to @codingchaos for help swearing/being sworn at. https://ericwbailey.website/published/swearing-and-automatic-captions/

I think that’s one quality of a good old blog; reader agency. I remember late nights roaming through my favorite blogs and I’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

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 — 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 I’d joke that “Chrome 12 [an old version] was the best Chrome”, but since I’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, there’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 wouldn’t have taken it.

It’s also funny to reflect on how much time we spent agonizing over making the most minimal thing — 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 — 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

The tools we choose have a major impact on our access to core web platform features. Are we choosing tools that help us move forward, or do some of these tools hold us back?

My latest post @OddBird https://www.oddbird.net/2022/11/11/platform-tools/

My algo -> following.tweets.sort_by(date, desc)

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

#princessmononoke #ghibli #wolf

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

a tea break from the AI firehose

maybe all the years spent on designing and shipping touch controllers, should have worked on kitchen appliances ⏲️

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

We use this quote in the first lecture of our usability course to make the point that most successful startups (and even the Web itself!) were primarily usability innovations.

You could do all these things before, but in a clunky way requiring high technical expertise. https://twitter.com/bradneuberg/status/1638590177672323073

https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2023-03-23-devices-for-internet/

✍️ New post: Transient Frameworks

Happy #bluebeanieday, everyone! 💙

https://matthiasott.com/notes/transient-frameworks

I wrote about how a framework choice can harm people in a moment of crisis. https://ericwbailey.website/published/modern-health-frameworks-performance-and-harm/

“In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.” https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies

Or, as I always say: UX > DX. https://twitter.com/scottohara/status/1638135841187823620

I talked about app stores are a massive step back in software distribution that favours the publisher over the user. The argument is that the web is unsafe and curated stores are protecting users. Except when they pay enough. https://christianheilmann.com/2023/02/20/so-you-want-to-safely-authenticate-with-2fa-app-stores-are-still-not-the-solution-why-the-web-is-dead-revisited/

How sad should I be about ChatGPT? Machines are encroaching on things I care about and now everyone needs to pay attention.

https://robertheaton.com/chatgpt

It kind of reminds me of this blog post that Rach Smith wrote, about how learning in public is challenging when you’re very deep in layers of niche engineering. It’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. It’s hard for me to explain the details around keycap designs I’ve worked out, because so few people understand how much effort that takes or why it’s exciting. It’s hard for me to describe some of the little (and big) problems I’ve solved, because y’all simply don’t have the context I have to understand why it’s thrilling that it’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 “something” 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 …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 he’s not reading this site.

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

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 don’t start with the idea first and then explore multiple options that leads to this one technology— machine learning or whatever—which just happens to be the right thing to solve it.

Tech-last

An AI should be doing my taxes while I paint cool stuff. I shouldn’t be doing taxes while an AI badly paints women with too many fingers and teeth and tits the size of a fucking Toyota Prius

okay @elonmusk why can’t we see the reason a tweet is on your timeline anymore?

there used to be notes like “because X liked this tweet” or “because X follows them”, but now we’re getting completely unsourced tweets from accounts we don’t follow - what happened to transparency? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1613995936585519104

Just like we should always ask “Could this meeting have been an email?”

…we should always ask “Could this PDF have been web page?”

@OneRadAlienDude https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2020-11-26-origen-messi/

@OneRadAlienDude

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.

THIS IS WHY 3D PRINTERS EXIST OK DO YOU GET IT NOW 🥹 https://twitter.com/Brieyonce/status/1630051041524760576

I coded playable Tetris for the FlipDot display! #processing code and build instructions on Github: https://github.com/owenmcateer/FlipDots #kineticart #flipdot

Yeah you can add as many characters as you want, but I’m probably not going to be reading posts this long. Twitter may become a place for long-form posting, but it is not and will not be the place for long-form reading. At least not for me.

RSS Foreva! https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1623411536243965954

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

Proposed solution to twitter’s ridiculous API pricing https://www.reddit.com/r/programmerhumor/comments/10rxlve

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

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.

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

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

I don’t get it. Why not focus on getting AI to perform more mundane tasks that don’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.

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

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

“MineCity 2000 is a program that converts SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft (Java Edition) worlds”

https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000

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.

Wow, so @internetarchive is launching Palm Pilot emulation soon and it turns out they have my #Diabetes app GlucoPilot up and running in the browser. I released this in 1998 and it was the first portable diabetes management app! plus charts! https://archive.org/details/palm3_glucopil

RT @jwz

As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web.

tl;dr avoid Hive and Post.

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated…

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/psa-do-not-use-services-that-hate-the-internet/

“Our web design tools are holding us back”

— “we need tools that are not based on a historical subset of what’s possible, but tools that allow us to experiment with all the thing that are possible today.”

#webdesign https://vasilis.nl/nerd/our-web-design-tools-are-holding-us-back/

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.

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:

DUDE WTF https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

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.

GOLDEN AXE DOOM

The classic side scrolling brawler reimagined in GZDooM as a First Person Hack ’n Slash!

1.0 version WILL include: -3 playable characters -unique magic attacks -Battle rush “The Duel” gamemode alongside Story mode

DEMO available here: https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-ii/downloads/golden-axe-doom-demo

Half-Life: Another Story - return to Black Mesa in this awesome DOOM total conversion mod!

Gameplay Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX2Sb48tIzk

Article: https://www.alphabetagamer.com/half-life-another-story-alpha-download-doom-mod/

by #gamedev lolikoli #indiedev #indiegames #gaming

https://twitter.com/Bargcelona10/status/1606084180730839043

IMPORTANTE: Mañana lanzamos un pequeño videojuego/narración interactiva sobre historias extrañas pero reales de CABA. Estuvimos varios meses trabajando en esto gracias al apoyo del programa MECENAZGO. Va a poder jugarse GRATIS a través del navegador en PC, Mac, celular, tablet.

OK let’s try this again, ordering a nothing burger from McDonalds. this time nothing else in the order.

will they cancel it? deliver an empty bag? i am doing this so you don’t have to

Esta imagen nos representa, nuestros potreros y nuestra cultura.

Argentina acaba de salir campeón del mundo. Los hijos y hermanos de los jugadores entran a la cancha y se ponen a jugar al fútbol. ¿Con una pelota? No, con una BOTELLITA DE PLÁSTICO.

Argentina, no lo entenderías.

When tech companies do well it’s because they’re smart and when they don’t it’s because mAcRoEcOnOmiCs

@jaffathecake You could write an entire slide system with new css

https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2022-10-14-fully-responsive-css-slide-system/

I’m extremely on team “you do not have to” (as someone who only makes tiny websites, mostly by myself) https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1602769032427540480

Google Maps changed its URL from “https://maps [dot] google [dot] com” to “https://google [dot] com/maps”. Looks like it’s not a big deal, but when you grant the location permission in your browser you now grant it to the whole #google [dot] com domain. 🤨

#privacy #googlemaps

GIT PURR! Git Commands Explained with Cats! https://girliemac.com/blog/2017/12/26/git-purr/ @girlie_mac is the bomb

Definitely not a fan of threads.

I almost never make it past two tweets, esp for threads that are longer than 3 tweets. Most folks who write long threads follow the same writing rules (start with the hook, etc etc etc) and so all threads end up sounding the same. https://twitter.com/adambsilver/status/1596397978603819008

No one is more prepared to lose their entire online social media identity than millennials who have lost their AIM, MySpace, Google Reader, Google+ and remember the early years of Facebook. We will only return more powerful, more annoying than before.

Sergey Brin revives Google Plus team from cryogenic chamber.

“It’s time.”

A relevant reminder for anybody interested in mobility innovation.

A silver lining to the craziness in the past weeks is that you should realize that you are as capable, or more capable, than the heroes and leaders of the industries we are a part of.

a good website is when “john” from support pops up in the corner with a big smile asking how your shopping experience is going, and then when your cursor is about to leave the window a fullscreen message appears with a special offer begging you to stay

color picker is just a 1x1 screenshot tool

Birds are fed by their parents in their infancy. When the time comes to feed themselves, there can be some confusion when the food does not go into their mouth by itself.

I got fed up writing FFmpeg commands. Its unintuitive, and can get ugly and complicated quickly

A couple of months ago, I built this GUI to help me write complex ffmpeg filtergraphs that we have been using internally and decided to launch today.

http://ffmpeg.guide

Me working on side projects:

Works for 15 minutes

“I deserve a break”

Takes a 45 minute break

It’s pretty simple: Google Meet (original) was previously Meet, which was the rebranded Hangouts Meet. Meet has been merged with Google Duo, which replaced Google Hangouts. Google Duo has been renamed Meet, and Meet has been temporarily named Google Meet (original), for clarity https://twitter.com/kane/status/1587540685392990208

✊🏻 https://twitter.com/muanchiou/status/1587420644777418754

How to date a recording using background electrical noise https://robertheaton.com/enf/

In college, I did this project where you had to keep nodding in order to get through commercials. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1585589721971003398

Read more comics on Webtoon! http://safelyendangered.com/webtoon

📝 People in a room with sticky notes looks like work. Somebody doing the dishes does not. And yet, I think many of us feel that some of our most insightful work comes doing something that doesn’t look like work.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/what-work-looks-like/

I got a box of rainbow Nerds and noticed as I was eating that there wasn’t a lot of pink, so I started sorting them, and I’m not even done yet, and this is an outrage, the ratio is terrible

PARENTS: please carefully inspect your kids’ Halloween candy! We found Doom running inside this Milky Way bar.

Candy of Doom - Do not eat if it’s turing complete

#adafruit #halloween #candy #doom

Secondly, as someone who has been writing HTML/CSS/JS for more than 20 years, it’s obvious to me what has been proven over and over again: bet on the core foundations of the web, and don’t try to one-up them. Extend them (think PostCSS etc.) and get the most out of them, but ..

I’m sorry but “non-fungible” will always mean “impossible to turn into a mushroom” to me

I think designers underestimate just how good, usable, inclusive, & sometimes even refreshingly delightful “boring” design is.

• Visible labels & instructions.
• Link underlines!
• Good text contrast.
• Lists!
• Links! (to separate pages vs. modal dialogs)

Usable > aesthetic.

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” @timberners_lee

“However, in America there are fewer and fewer Third Places that don’t cost money” - 2007 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-developer-theory-of-the-third-place

https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2022-10-04-regex-doom/

I love this 🌿 https://twitter.com/canneo2103145/status/1577159976266584066

A new #c64 operating system in 2022 on Beyoncé’s internet?!? https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRmTPbCg/

Listen, if Google releases a product that isn’t branded Search, Ads, or Gmail, there’s a 95% chance it’s gone within 3 years.

Sometimes when I’m bored I open a new @CodePen and start with a single element in the page.

This time I started with an input range and I made a slingshot from it to burst a bunch of inputs with @greensock ✨🎆 Completely pointless but it kept me busy 💁‍♂️

https://codepen.io/Mamboleoo/full/LYmOyEG

👉🏻 “TDungeon is a small adventure game that runs in the Typescript type system”

🔗 https://github.com/cassiozen/TDungeon

Now do DOOM!

A raíz de la filtración de GTA VI, un montón de estudios (Guerrilla, Naughty, Remedy, Game Kitchen, etc) están mostrando sus juegos sin gráficos acabados bajo la irónica frase:

“Graphics are the first thing finished in a video game”

HILO Recopilatorio VA 🧵

1. TLOU: https://twitter.com/NaughtyNDC/status/1572259854764449794

Ever wondered how a QR code works?
No, me neither but it’s low-key fascinating.

(Warning, there is some extremely nerdy shit here.👇 )

That feeling after a deadline you worked your a$$ off for “Now what? What do I do with myself now?”

VPNs, Proxies and Malware scanners offering you an “always free” version are like the Mafia neighbourhood thug offering you to “protect” your shop.

In a somewhat hasty reactionary move, I bought a domain name: https://justforfunnoreally.dev/

I don’t have big plans, and I might not ever finish it, but I just had to channel my snark somewhere….