Links #62

@elsif’s Genuary 9 generative art piece. Love the painterly feel of this.

Ian Sample on scientists steering lightning bolts with lasers for the first time. A sentence I never thought I’d write.

Jason Kottke with a video of a drone diving the full height of the Burj Khalifa. Whew.

The Book Cover Review, where they review book covers. I love book covers.

Chris Coyier on scalable CSS. I’ll mention here that I don’t really like Tailwind. Used it at a job and while I get the appeal, it takes away the joy of CSS for me.

Michelle Barker on a couple downsides of using a CSS framework like Tailwind. Yep.

Autogram on design systems and AI.

Scott Alexander on the ethics of eating insects. Food for thought. (Har, har.) Did I ever mention the time I bought waxworms and ate them? Looks like I blogged my plan to buy them back in 2018 but forgot to post about it afterwards. Eating one live was traumatizing and felt like a car accident in my mouth. I froze and then fried the rest and ate them in tacos and they were surprisingly good!

Bill Ferris on how to blurb someone’s book. Ha.

Gluon, a new framework for creating desktop apps from websites (like Electron or Tauri) using normal system-installed browsers, for a much smaller footprint. Intriguing.

Jim Nielsen on the anti-capitalist web. Yes, yes, yes. That’s probably one of the main reasons I love the web, too, now that I think about it.

Esther Hi‘ilani Candari’s ARTbook project, an art companion to the 2024 Book of Mormon Come Follow Me curriculum, aimed to be more diverse and inclusive. This is great.

Jeremy Keith on three attributes for better web forms. I didn’t know a lot of this!

Jessie Inchauspé on how the order we eat food actually matters. This changed my life, in the sense that it was a notable revision to my mental model that’s going to affect how I eat going forward.

Robb Owen on hand-thrown frontends (as opposed to assembling Lego bricks). I like this.

bsandro made a monochrome terminal for an e-ink monitor. Mmm. I really hope that larger e-ink displays with fast refresh rates become an affordable thing in the future.

Mirza Silajdzic on how Wi-Fi routers can be used to produce 3D images of humans. Fascinating and a little creepy.

Daniel Sims on gravity batteries in abandoned mines. This sounds really cool, actually.

git-sim lets you pre-visualize Git operations, which could come in handy.

The misleading St. Louis Fed graph. (And oh how I wish the U.S. would take a big chunk of its military spending and put it towards something more humane.)

Gideon Burton about children leaving the faith. A really good article. This is something I think about a lot, having children of my own and also seeing siblings and cousins leave.

Steven Garrity on efficiency over performance. Yes, agreed.

Blenderheads, a documentary about the people making Blender. Cool.

TBRCon2023, a virtual sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention. I was surprised by how many well-known authors they had. I’ve only watched parts of a few panels (video is not my thing and I struggle to make time for it), but what I saw was great.

JinjaX, a way to do Jinja includes via component instead of extension. Cool.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea on complexity in software. Yup.

Deena Theresa on a newly discovered anti-aging gene that apparently rewinds heart age by ten years. Hopefully this ends up being usable (and safe) for humans.

Haley Nahman on the contagious visual blandness of Netflix.

Becky Ferreira on a liquid metal robot that can escape a cage. It’s slower and clunkier than you might expect, but still fascinating.

Jason Kottke on sunburn photographic printing. Disturbing yet fascinating.

Chronophoto, a web game where you try to guess what year each photo was taken.

Tom Critchlow on the magic of small databases.

eBoy’s TiliX reference, a howto on drawing isometric pixel art.

Meta’s Text-To-4D dynamic scene generation paper. What is this new devilry.

widget.json, “a file format designed to push content from the web to your home screen.”

Joe Miller’s Screens, Research and Hypertext book. A fascinating exploration of hypertext and the web.

Chris Lattner’s introduction to LLVM, in the Architecture of Open Source Applications.

Robin Rendle on hypertext, which led me to the next link.

Kicks Condor interviews Nadia Asparouhova. Quoted in the Robin Rendle piece, this bit stood out to me: “Someone (I think Eugene Wei?) once tweeted that all Twitter accounts eventually sound like fortune cookies. I don’t want to become a fortune cookie. So I like things like newsletters, and my notes page, which are still discoverable and semi-public, but aren’t subject to short feedback loops. I also removed comments on my blog for the same reason, and I never look at my site analytics.” Also this: “The problem with likes is it naturally draws your eye towards the most-liked stuff, instead of deciding for yourself what’s most interesting. It almost feels like I’d be taking agency away from the reader by doing that.” This is one of the several reasons why I much prefer posting here.