Some small site changes:
Three new art pieces.
He Hath Talked With Me Face to Face:
Hurl, “a language created for one purpose: to explore a language based around exception handling as the only control flow.” Ha.
Tracy Durnell on blogging about blogging. Several of these resonated with me. I pretty much always like reading blog posts about blogging.
Sean Voisen on moving beyond chat as interface. “One of the great failures of modern computing is how it has largely ignored the presence of the human body beyond the slightest acknowledgement that humans have a pair of eyeballs and a few fingertips…. Compared to the way we employ and use other tools and instruments—from spatulas to screwdrivers to accordions to violins—the way we use computers today is a gross underutilization of both the expressiveness and sensitivity of our bodies.” I think it’s great how some with disabilities are still able to use computers because of this very thing, but I’m also intrigued by the idea of multimodal interfaces.
Daniel Schroeder’s voxel displacement rendering technique. This is cool.
Jason Becker on one’s consumption-to-creation ratio. Agreed, time spent is what matters on this.
Cory D on boring technology being good. Generally agreed. I’ve even entertained thoughts lately of building local CLI tools in C or C++, as a more boring (and thus hopefully more resilient) solution than using Node and JavaScript. (C/C++ compilers are omnipresent, and the binaries don’t require an interpreter.) (Yes, Rust or Go would probably make more sense. But I think I also kind of miss the old days when all my programming was in C/C++.)
Chase McCoy on some new animation features in CSS. These are great.
Lea Verou on inline conditionals in CSS. Lots of interesting developments in the works for CSS these days.
Stitch People’s realistic hair cross-stitch techniques book. Cool.
John Durham Peters’ research techniques. “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).” I especially like the dictionary reading recommendation and need to make time for that more often.
Elan Ullendorff on an eighteenth-century map of Spain. Five hundred maps, actually. Delightful.
Madiba K. Dennie on how constitutional originalism is a dangerous, disingenuous ideology. “Originalism observes that white supremacy dominated the country’s past and reasons that it must also dominate the country’s future.”
Melissa Price’s English monarchy book. Enjoyed the design of this.
Caroline Cala Donofrio’s list of 40 things she needed to hear. Several good recommendations here, particularly the New Yorker one.
Ambuj Tewari on recent advances in machine learning helping computers to recognize smells. Cool.
Alexander Obenauer on the interfaces with which we think. I like the idea of decomposing computing into smaller blocks that aren’t wrapped in monolithic apps. Seems like a great concept, allowing for more interesting composition.
Sara Saljoughi on how to get unstuck. Yep. This has worked for me.
Rob McCormick on building flexible, fluid websites rather than using breakpoint-based media queries. (Since there’s always going to be a large variety of different browser sizes.) At some point I’d like to do this with this site.
Bronwen Tate on five ways to take a real break from creative work. Good tips.
Tjaart on the curious case of the missing period. A weird little SMTP bug.
Web lunch video with Maggie Appleton. Her comment about having no long-term overarching plan for her career resonated with me — with both my day job and my personal projects, it’s always been one step at a time. Once in a while I freak out about that and feel like I need to get things figured out, but as I look back, line upon line has been working out pretty well so far.
Douglas Adams on our reactions to technology as we age. This may have felt particularly apropos in context of how I feel about generative AI. Ha.
Sean Voisen on networked note-taking using tools like Obsidian and Roam. “I’ve found networked note-taking to be a practice that mostly overpromises and under-delivers.” I feel a little better about never actually linking my notes like I always intended to.
Who Can Use, “a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.” This is great.
Jaron Schneider on Looking Glass’s new holographic spatial displays. Cool.
Hamilton Nolan on putting everyone into the grinder (metaphorically, don’t worry). “One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it.” Hear, hear. Via Tracy Durnell, whose post on equal systems being better systems is also good. I also liked and agreed with Hamilton’s post on nationalism being poison.
Louise Perry on the quiet return of eugenics. Interesting throughout. In reading this, I realized I don’t yet know what I think about polygenic screening. Something to mull over.
Mixbox, a library for paint-like color mixing. Very cool. I wish Procreate adopted this.
James Brown on Apple Intelligence. “Someone took all of the liberal arts people out of the room when they built this feature and let the Wall Street AI hype-men steer the ship. This isn’t a bicycle for the mind, this is a steamroller for the mind.” Count me among those who aren’t terribly excited to start getting emails from friends LLMs.
Rick Perlstein on conservatism’s endgame. “Note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization…. This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.”
Sharon McMahon on America’s rising sun moment. As someone who’s been feeling less optimistic about America’s future (cf. the previous link for one example), I found this a bit of hope in this post. Recommended.
Cirkoban, an interesting Sokoban + cellular automata mashup.
Maciej Cegłowski on the follies of NASA’s Artemis mission. Really good. And sad that the project is so disappointing. (Obligatory disclaimer that this blog post does not represent my employer in any way.)
Jason Kint with a supremely satisfying set of newspaper front pages from this week’s big conviction.
Meredith Whittaker on AI. Quite good. Contrary to the initial appearance, by the way, it’s in English — just scroll down a bit.
Frank Force’s 256-byte raycasting system. Cool.
Matt Sephton on the early history of emoji, which have been around longer than I realized. I love the early pixel art style, too.
Maggie Appleton on generative AI forgeries, “buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse.” Generative AI seems to cause more problems than it solves.
Slash pages, the new name for all those indie web page types (/now, /uses, /hello, etc.). I fully acknowledge that I may have gone a bit overboard on adopting these. But they’re fun!