Links #146

Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Edouard Mathieu on whether the news reflects what we die from. Worthwhile. “As we’ll discuss, our point is not that we should want or expect the media’s coverage to perfectly match the real distribution of deaths, although we’d argue that it would be better if it were less skewed. We wrote this article so that you, the reader, are aware of a significant disconnect between what we often hear and what actually happens.”

Selected Poems, my friend Julie’s new poetry site. I love these.

Naomi Kanakia on reading older literature. “What I’m capable of stating quite strongly is that people who aspire to be writers of fiction ought to read the great 19th-century fiction writers.” As I’ve been reading more classics this year, I’ve found that books that would have been syntactically opaque or dry to me even a couple years ago have come to life for me, and I’m loving it. Classic lit is amazing.

Parth Kothekar’s amazing papercraft art. Particularly the cut-and-fold work and the papercut animations.

Mukta Art and Craft on making a paper phone holder. I made one and it works surprisingly well. Paper can be strong.

Bob Nystrom on why programmers should consider knitting. After reading this I bought yarn and needles and learned how to do a basic knit stitch. (I, uh, haven’t picked it up again in the month since then, but I need to.)

Matt Sephton on UI design via spreadsheets. Ooh, this is interesting. The part of me that likes to sketch designs out on paper first wonders how this compares.

Niri, a scrollable tiling window manager (well, Wayland compositor) for Linux. Fascinating idea. Hyprland has also piqued my interest. (It’s been 20+ years since I last used Linux as my desktop, but the way Apple is going, it may soon be time to return.)

Felix Kratz’s SketchyBar, a replacement status bar for macOS. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and love the customizability.

Joseph Fatula’s Two Slice, a font only two pixels tall. More readable than expected. Also see Scientifica, a slightly larger (and much more readable) font. These make me want to make an old-school pixel art game. They also remind me of Marcin Wichary’s In defense of an old pixel, which I linked to last year but is definitely worth linking to again.

This is getting long — playing catchup after this latest fallow season — so I should probably wrap it up. But let’s throw in a few more:

Anil Dash on the majority AI view. “Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years now, we’re in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.” Yep.

Bret Victor on AI (via Jim Nielsen). I love this whole section. So human and well considered.

Frank Chimero on the lemon stage of the Internet. “The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.”

Tom MacWright on pictures being famous for their humanness and not their pictureness, with a great Vonnegut quote from Timequake.