Links #76

bookofjoe with a map of driving orientation by country. Seems too late to ever unify on this globally, but who knows.

Jake Archibald on self-closing tags in HTML. Color me convinced.

Visualization showing how curved Chile is, because of the curvature of the earth.

HarfBuzz’s new WASM shaper lets you write your own shaping engine in WebAssembly. Interesting.

Christopher Butler on personal machines (like smartphones).

Longshot Space has a kinetic system for launching satellites on the cheap. Ooh. (Speaking for myself here and not for Planet Labs.)

Carla Hurt on how to learn Latin by yourself in 2023. Lots of good stuff here.

Primarium, documenting handwriting models across countries. By TypeTogether.

Jessie Gaynor on gentle parenting in classic literature, from McSweeney’s. Ha.

OrbStack is an interesting lightweight Docker Desktop alternative on macOS. Looking forward to trying this out, just need to upgrade macOS first. (I used to upgrade religiously each year but got burned too many times. tl;dr I’m still on Big Sur.)

Penny Thomson’s amazing moving miniatures. Love these.

Keith Houston visits Narbo Martius. Some lovely inscription photos.

Deepak Gulati on 19th-century ornamental tile illustrations.

Nat Eliason on doing hard things. Yes. I’m still thinking about this weeks later. Recommended.

Elie Mystal on Clarence Thomas.

Lin Yangchen on the Fell typefaces, including some customizations. I love those fonts.

Tsundoku, a word for new books that pile up unread. (Cough.)

Matt Stoller on the new merger guidelines.

Loz Blain on DishBrain, a new computer chip with human brain tissue. We certainly live in interesting times.

Valdemar Erk on using the HarfBuzz WASM shaper to make a long animation in a font. Wow.

Adam Rogers on Silicon Valley predatory pricing. I really don’t like Chicago School economics. Or late-stage capitalism.

Ollie Williams on the new @font-face syntax.

Andy Bell’s experience living through wildfires on Rhodes in Greece. Harrowing.

Bill Chappell on Republicans’ excess death rate spiking after Covid vaccines arrived. No comment.

Henrik Karlsson and Johanna Wiberg on cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born. Fascinating. I plan to reread this regularly.

Fabien Sanglard on Commander Keen’s adaptive tile refresh technique.

Esther Crawford on her experience at Twitter under Musk.

Carolyn Y. Johnson on scientists reviving a 46,000-year-old roundworm. Wow.

Jess Zafarris on the etymology of the word blackmail (which apparently does not have to do with black or mail).

Eleanor Janega on successor states and social media. This was good.

Amy Hoy on the boom times being over in tech. The answer: “We can build things that people will pay real money to have and use.” Yes, yes, yes.

Suw Charman-Anderson on hyper-independence and whether writing really has to be so solitary.

Axess Lab on why toggles suck. Agreed.

W. David Marx asking why Internet creators haven’t become superstars. I hadn’t thought about it much, but it’s true. Fascinating.

Francisco Pires on the recent potential superconductor breakthrough. Hopefully it pans out.

Mario Wolczko’s crazy Unix system recovery story.

Benjamin Breen on why early modern books are so beautiful. “Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books.”

@gigaj0ule on a new cancer drug. “Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors across 70 evaluated cancer types in vitro and in animal models with a therapeutic index of 6 and no discernible side effects.” Wow.