Links #67

Inigo Quilez on making a 3D character with math. Impressive.

Paul Butler on the bull case for Rust on the web (via WebAssembly, for high-performance apps). Seems reasonable.

Rayon, a web app for collaborative space design. (Space meaning rooms in buildings.) Uses Rust, as mentioned in the previous link. Looks nice.

Jennifer Ouellette about a bionic finger that can see things beneath a material’s surface. Intriguing.

Jon Stokes on AI. A fairly positive take. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but I found it interesting.

Charles Chen on React being the new IBM, in the sense that no one ever got fired for choosing React, in spite of it not performing as well as other frontend frameworks.

Max G. Levy on edgeless lab-grown skin. Cool.

Austin Kleon on books as toys. I like this.

Dave Gauer on Forth. Enjoyed this. Looking forward to learning Forth, too.

Wayfare is serializing The Five Books of Jesus by my friend James Goldberg, with lovely art by Sarah Hawkes.

Winners of the visitors’ choice awards from the Church’s 12th International Art Competition.

Cassandra Willyard on how gut microbes could drive brain disorders. Still early on, but if there’s anything to it, wow.

Zach Caceres on plastic roads. Intriguing!

Rachel Binx on the unbearable sameness of the modern web, referring primarily to common component libraries.

Lingua Latina Legenda, an open-source Latin textbook.

Henrik Karlsson on blog posts being very long and complex search queries to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. I like this idea, and I really like meeting new people via this blog (or via their blogs for that matter).

Foone Turing made a cube keyboard. Ha.

Marcin Wichary on Dana Sibera’s alternate-computing-history art. Love these.

Rocky Bergen’s papercraft models of old computers.

Jennifer Senior on how people often think they’re younger than they really are. Yup. Lately I’ve felt around eight or nine years younger than I am. (And this in spite of really liking my actual age.)

Amy Goodchild on using ChatGPT to implement Sol Lewitt’s procedural wall drawings. Interesting, but ChatGPT’s output is also kind of disappointing here.

Chris Loer on Felt’s move to MapLibre for rendering. Cool.

MarioGPT, generating Mario levels via textual descriptions.

Mould Rush, an online game involving real molds in real petri dishes. Ha.

Grant Handy on writing a simple first-person raycasting game in Rust (ala Wolfenstein 3D).

Charlotte Hu on mushroom-based computing. Oh so weird but also fascinating. I wonder how much of the future of computing will be biological like this.

GB Studio, a retro game creator for making Game Boy games, kind of like the game creators for Pico-8 and other fantasy consoles. I never actually use these, but they look fun and eight-year-old Ben would have been all over this.

Pedro Cattori on snake case being the best case. The older I get, the less I think I care about this kind of thing (other than keeping it consistent across the codebase, which seems like a baseline for maintaining sanity).

Eggspensive, a map showing the price of eggs across the U.S. (I should have posted this earlier!)

Jennifer Ouellette on squid skin as an inspiration for making new types of windows. Wow. I love seeing biologically inspired tech that’s more sustainable than what we used to use.

Carl Zimmer on eight previously unknown populations of humans in prehistoric Europe. Oh how I’d love to be able to look back and see what life was like for early humans.

Jared White on the great gaslighting of the JavaScript era. Feisty. I largely agree though nowhere near as vehemently.

Cole Peters on redefining developer experience. Fully agree that user experience matters far, far more than developer experience. Also agreed that the sprawling array of tools a frontend engineer needs to stay on top of these days is…a bit much, and very much agreed about focusing on web platform fundamentals.

Anna Fitzpatrick on how parking lots ruin cities.

Gaurav Sood on Iwaya Giken trying to democratize space tourism. I love reading about space, but dang — zero interest here in going up into space myself. Especially under a flimsy balloon. (Hello, acrophobia.)

Smithsonian Open Access. Lots of Creative Commons images available for use.

Nannou, a Rust creative-coding framework. The code examples look pretty good, actually — easy to read and reason about.

Dan Wang’s 2022 letter. Fascinating read about last year’s lockdowns in China among other things. The bits at the end about books and food were also quite interesting.