Links #64

Marcin Wichary’s Kickstarter for his Shift Happens book. I backed this because man, I want that book. The livestream was fun to watch, too.

Nick Compton with an introduction on Tyler Hobbs, the generative artist.

Zach Watson’s writeup on his Arcadia generative art series. I love these types of things.

Tushar Sadhwani on adding C-style for loops to Python. Ha.

Stefan Schubert with a map showing the mean center of the U.S. population over time. Fascinating.

Johann Hari on the medium being the message and how it relates to television, social media, and books. A good way to look at it, I think.

Adam Roberts’ Tolkien reread. Good lit crit.

Kristin Houser on Shift Robotic’s new moonwalker shoes. I don’t know that I’d ever use these but they’re interesting!

Jay Hoffmann’s Vague, But Exciting… The Story of the World Wide Web. The first ten chapters are up.

Browsertech Digest, an interesting newish newsletter about modern browser technology: “We’re talking WebAssembly, WebRTC, WebGL, WebGPU, WebSockets, WebCodecs, WebTransport, Web-everything.” Right up my alley.

Womp, an in-browser 3D editor that uses signed distance fields instead of meshes. Fascinating! This was quite fun to play with. Also see the Browsertech issue where I learned about it.

Lunatic, an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly. Currently has libraries for Rust and AssemblyScript but can be used from any language that compiles to Wasm. The motivation page was worth reading.

Alex Russell with some strong words against the bigger JS frameworks. The footnotes were helpful for understanding things. I don’t know that I feel anywhere near as strongly about it as Alex does, but I very much agree that JS frameworks should be focused on the end user first and then the developer.

Eric Meyer’s 2023 CSS wishlist. Anchors sure would be nice. And from Dave Rupert’s wishlist, I very much want <selectmenu> and the View Transitions API for MPAs.

Richard Crossman reading part of the Scots edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane. (Yes, stane.) This was fun.