Four new art pieces, with style experiments on some of them.
In Your Mind and in Your Heart III:
Four new art pieces, with style experiments on some of them.
In Your Mind and in Your Heart III:
Henry Oliver on smartphones not being the source of all social ills. An interesting counterbalance, worth thinking about given humanity’s general reaction to new technologies over time. I love that I can read books on my phone and keep track of my to-do list and stay in touch with family and friends. (And of course I also recognize that it’s healthy to not be on screens all the time.)
myNoise (via swissmiss) has nice ad-free soundscapes (Irish coast, Japanese garden, distant thunder, white noise, etc.).
Eleanor Konik on maintaining sane task lists. Some useful tips here.
Barry Hess on how blogging doesn’t require writing perfect essays. Good reminder. Having standards is good, but an obsession with perfection can be debilitating if it means you never finish things.
Jeremy Keith on hanging punctuation in CSS. I had no idea hanging-punctuation
exists. Browser support isn’t quite there yet, but someday!
Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel documentary on Netflix. Enjoyed this. The thing that resonated with me the most (har har) was Zimmer’s relentless experimentation.
Massimo’s disturbing video of a komodo dragon swallowing a goat in one long extended bite. I don’t know why I’m sharing this.
Kevin Wammer’s review of the Boox Palma. I am so tempted. (The phone form factor is a better fit for one-handed reading, which is mostly what I do.) So tempted.
Julianne Pepitone on a smart contact lenses that generate power from blinking, built by a team at the University of Utah. Cool. I don’t know how I’d feel about actually wearing smart lenses myself, though.
Martin Heinz on how to make your shell history more useful. Some good tips here.
Piano Music Bros. on the evolution of Mozart’s music, from age five to age thirty-five. Fun to see. (Though I also think the adulation of geniuses isn’t super healthy for all of us normies, so here’s your grain of salt with this.)
Henrik Karlsson on reading serious literature to his kids. “It is about figuring out a rich reading experience that both parties are excited about. Books that pull you in and open a space for deep conversation.” I think I want to try this.
Michael Flarup’s list of 40 things he’s learned being a creative entrepreneur. I like several of these — shrink the first step, make a lot of things, and practice daily completeable to-do lists, to name a few.
David Jonathan Ross on Indoor Kid, a variable font for lettering comics. Cool.
Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp on how AI training sets like LAION are constructed.
Hillel Wayne on syntax highlighting being a waste of an information channel. Super interesting idea. To his point at the end about highlighting conflicts, I think being able to easily rotate through highlighting modes might help. And to generalize that idea a little more, toggleable analysis overlays seem like they could be useful in several other contexts too, like writing fiction or making digital art.
Susanna Clarke has a new book coming out! It’s going to be released in October this year. Very much looking forward to it.
Jason Becker’s public letters project, with the first of four rounds of letters as an example from February 2023. Interesting idea. The introvert part of me isn’t so sure about posting correspondence publicly, but if someone wants to try this out, email me some possible topic ideas.
Susam’s Guess My RGB game. Fun.
C. J. Chilvers (not to be confused with C. J. Chivers) on why he went back to buying CDs. Food for thought. I’m intrigued by his statement that “physical media is making a comeback, including innovations in the hardware that plays physical media” — curious what those innovations are. (I should add that I don’t stream music very often. Most of the time I listen to music I bought years ago in iTunes Music on my laptop or phone.)
Andrew Kersley on how people hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one. I’m all for reducing car usage. Out here in suburbia, though, it seems nigh impossible. Maybe someday.
Some new pattern art, just for fun. (There’s no symbolic or religious meaning behind these; they’re just meaningless patterns.)
Garry Ing on a view source web, an essay in the The HTML Review. The hover effect on desktop is interesting albeit a tad distracting. I like the idea of surfacing page source more, though ideally not in an obscuring way.
Alastair Johnston on hello pages, a way to list your preferred contact methods. Cool idea. I’ve added my own hello page.
Monkey gang violence in Lopburi, Thailand. Whew.
Manu Moreale offering to be a first reader for anyone who starts a blog. Also a cool idea.
The Wall Street Journal’s front page a week ago. Some powerful white space, that.
Colin Fraser on generative AI being a hammer and nobody really knows yet what is and isn’t a nail. Good essay, worth the read. Seems to me like there are lots of tasks where what you want is determinative logic rather than probabilistic guessing. (Which I think is at least partly why I don’t have much interest in doing AI engineering — I like building determinative things where I can understand how it works. And yes, state machines are totally my jam.)
Ohm, a JavaScript library for building parsers. Looks interesting.
Invisibility shields are kind of real now. Cool. And unsettling. More the latter, I think, given all the malicious ways this could be used.
Jacek Krywko on new developments in active shielding against space radiation. A good-sized chunk of this went over my head (har har), but fascinating nonetheless.