Links — Prints 2.5

Baldur Bjarnason on better web apps. Agreed.

Anton Howes on why Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t invented until the 1970s. A fun question.

Bun, a new JavaScript runtime. Such speed! The built-in TypeScript and npm compatibility is nice, too. Planning on trying this out for some upcoming projects.

Rasmus Andersson on making fonts in Figma. Had no idea this kind of thing is possible in Figma.

Garrett Scott on Pipedream, a hyperlogistics startup. Kind of mind-blowing. I don’t know how I feel about the security aspects of having a chute into my house that other companies can access, though.

Laundry Jet, another interesting startup. Also something I probably wouldn’t want to use, this one because a) my house isn’t that big and b) if stuff gets stuck in there…

Matt Webb on tubes. The source of the above links.

Tree & Leaf, a lovely online genealogy site. I’m now itching to do something similar. (It’ll probably wait until after I’ve gotten this printed genealogy chart itch out of my system, though.)

ArchieML, the NYT’s markup language. A potential alternative to YAML that I’m looking at for some of my genealogy projects.

Darshana Narayanan on the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari. I haven’t read Harari yet and now will go in with more skepticism than I would have otherwise.

Tess Joosse on recent research showing that quiet background noise can numb pain. Intriguing.

Matt Levine on Elon and Twitter. An entertaining read.

Gwendal Uguen and Luc Guillemot’s visual guide to the Aztec pantheon. A cool bit of educational material.

Yi Fuxian on China’s population peaking earlier than anticipated. I’m not actually tracking this closely or anything, but it did seem interesting.

The content-aware typography Tumblr. Ha.

Steven Johnson on not looking back while drafting. I tend to do this, though maybe with a little bit more rereading than he recommends (just the last page or so of what I’ve written).

Nolan Lawson on memory leaks on the web. Something I need to do better at checking for.

Matthias Ott on just putting stuff out there on the web. This makes me want to write more often. Still trying to decide if this two-week cadence is right for me or not.

Google Docs URL shortcuts for creating new documents. Had no idea these existed. Wow.

John Christensen’s Webb vs. Hubble comparison site. Double wow.

Ahmad Shadeed deep diving into some Figma CSS.

Nolan Lawson on style scoping vs. the shadow DOM.

C. J. Chilvers’ personal publishing principles. An interesting idea for a page. I like it.

Frontend Mastery on the new wave of React state management libraries.

Klim Type Foundry on The Future, a new Futura typeface. Mmm, I love type design writeups like this.

Robin Shreeves on scruffy hospitality. I.e., not worrying so much about cleaning your house before guests come over. We haven’t had guests since Covid began, but when we start up again (which will be soon, now that our youngest are almost fully vaccinated), this is good to keep in mind.

Kurt Schlosser on “parallel reality”. It’s a new type of screen with multidirectional pixels that can supposedly privately show up to 100 customers their flight information, all at the same time from the same screen.

Matt Webb on carbon dioxide detection. Makes me wonder if I should get a monitor for this.

Miriam Suzanne on why browser stylesheets have a default margin of 8px. CSS history!

Keith Peters on randomness in generative art. Cool.

Matthew Guay on documenting first before building (software). Love this. Every time I’ve done this, I’ve been glad that I did — implementation goes so much more smoothly.

Sheon Han on the hidden history of screen readers (JAWS and NVDA, mainly).