Links #66
Andrew J. Hawkins on cars rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving. I would love to not have to drive anymore. It’s fun, but too dangerous. I also don’t trust self-driving cars. (Yes, I realize the obvious answer is to move into a big city. Maybe someday.)
Andy Bell on the extremely loud minority when it comes to building for the web. I believe one of the reasons for WordPress’s dominance is the number of sites that are document-like rather than app-like (where React is maybe a somewhat better fit, though I still prefer more minimal solutions).
Type designer Mark Simonson on analog drawing and spending less time on screens. I need to do this more often.
Chris Coyier linking to more 2023 CSS wishlists.
Una Kravets on container queries landing in stable browsers. Awesome. Looking forward to being able to use this.
Matthias Ott on container queries.
Klint Finley on the history and future of CSS.
iOS has accessibility support for playing background sounds like rain and white noise. Had no idea!
Lincoln Michel on unnecessary things in art. I agree that art isn’t meant to be utilitarian.
Sébastien Lorber on adopting React in the early days. Anthropologically interesting.
Rerun, an SDK for logging computer vision. Pretty impressive demo.
Dave Karpf with his reverse-Scooby-Doo theory of tech innovation. A worthwhile corrective.
Local-first web development. Intriguing.
Kevin Schaul on replacing Mapbox with OSS for a Washington Post piece.
Kottke on Alex Hyner’s sky collages. So cool!
Jen Simmons and Brady Eidson on iOS supporting Web Push. In limited cases, but it’s something. And there are other nice changes included (badging, the screen wake lock API, etc.).
John Allsopp on the Webkit/Safari changes.
Openverse has more than 600 million creative works under Creative Commons licenses or in the public domain.
Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld on being bombarded by AI-written submissions. Being a publisher right now seems…really difficult.
Kevin Roose on chatting with Bing’s Sydney chatbot. I read the whole transcript and it’s bonkers. Clearly Sydney is not a person or some other kind of sentient being, but still, that was a crazy read.
Max Matza on foreign accent syndrome. I don’t have this, though my wife and kids might sometimes beg to differ. (The actual thing, though — wow!)
Curious Archive on the complex ecosystem of the indie game Rain World. I doubt the “most complex” hyperbole, but leaving that out, it’s fascinating! Especially the procedural animation.
CAD Sketcher is working on adding more CAD functionality to Blender. (Disclaimer: while I’m interested in CAD and occasionally link to it, I’ve never actually done any CAD.)
Eliot Peper interview with Ray Nayler. Relevant quote: “At no point between life’s starting point 3.7 billion years ago and my and your complex awareness right now has that chain of informational exchange and interpretation been interrupted. If it had been, you would not be here to think of that interruption’s consequences.” That blew my mind — that the ancestral chain of my physical body is unbroken all the way back (as evidenced by the fact that I’m here, and that intermediate links had to survive long enough to reproduce).
Christopher Slye on the end of Type 1 fonts. I haven’t used them in ages (since my desktop Linux days), but goodbye, Type 1!
Andy Bell on just posting (on blogs). Again, if any of y’all have a blog, let me know!
Scott Nedrelow’s Magic Sleeve desk organization system, made from merino wool. Looks cool.
Marc on accessibility being for everyone. Yes, yes, yes.
José M. Gilgado on creation happening in silence. While I can think of several exceptions, there are still some truths here.
Henrik Karlsson on the childhoods of exceptional people. Fascinating reading, even if I have no idea how reliable the conclusions are. As for me, I care a lot more about my children growing up to be good people, and don’t particularly care if they grow up to be exceptional, but doing some of the things listed in the post (within reason) seems like it might be interesting.