Blog: #links

More catching up.

Ian Sample on the first UK baby with DNA from three people born after new IVF procedure. Science fiction concepts continue to take over the world.

Austin Kleon on artists being allowed to make bad work. This resonated a lot with me. I certainly feel like I frequently have experimental periods with my art that end up being more failure than success, anyway.

Jason Kottke on how big the biggest black holes are. Whew.

@emilm on some lovely Krita brushes. Used one of these on my last piece for the brushstroke texture. Great examples at the top of the thread, too.

What Midjourney thinks professors look like, based on their department. Ha. Stereotypical but with some truth to it.

Christopher Butler on the internet. “Pockets of life within the propped-up corpse of the internet might be it. It may be the best we get. But I’d prefer to be more optimistic than that. I’d like to think that those of us living on in small ways inside this thing have a collective, good reason to keep it alive. I’d like to think that what’s happening in here can spread and once again reach the surface.”

ast-grep is super interesting.

Nate Oman on possible ways to theologically reconcile same-sex sealings. Interesting food for thought.

Mark Hachman on Sightful’s new Spacetop AR laptop. Want.

Maggie Harrison on a new wooden satellite. Very cool.

Liz Busby on religion in speculative fiction. I think I generally prefer slightly more analogous than explicit, but I also haven’t been reading much overtly Latter-day Saint fiction lately.

Bun 0.6.0 can build standalone executables.

Isabella Rosner on some amazing 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names. Love these.

Strawberry, a tiny build-free frontend framework. Love the website. Also see VanJS. I don’t know if I’d actually use either, but I’m certainly interested in tiny build-free frontend frameworks.

Jim Nielsen on .well-known/avatar. I like the idea. Ended up putting mine at bencrowder.net/avatar.jpg, because my Unix roots make .well-known feel weird to me, like it’s a hidden directory.

Elizabeth Rayne on a sensitive robot hand. “This hand doesn’t just pick things up and put them down on command. It is so sensitive that it can actually ‘feel’ what it is touching, and it’s dextrous enough to easily change the position of its fingers so it can better hold objects, a maneuver known as ‘finger gaiting.’ It is so sensitive it can even do all this in the dark, figuring everything out by touch.”

Mark Shwartz on a new nontoxic powder that uses sunlight to quickly disinfect contaminated drinking water. I hope this works as well as it sounds like it would.

Dwarkesh Patel on lessons from Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. This got me started with The Power Broker again (which I started a year ago but ended up dropping).

The cognitive load developer’s handbook. A good lens.

Meta on multilingual models that can do speech-to-text and text-to-speech for 1,100+ languages. Wow.

Andre Fuchs’ ultimate list of kerning pairs (for type design).

Molly Templeton on two kinds of unforgettable reading experiences. Many of my reading memories are tied to where I was when I was reading those books — I remember reading Lord of the Rings for the first time at the UTA bus stop my freshman year of college, reading Goethe’s Faust while pacing my bedroom, reading The Sword of Kaigen while waiting at the bus stop, reading Heir to the Empire on the floor of my bedroom when I was a kid, and apparently all my memories are either at the bus stop or in my bedroom. Ha.

Austin Kleon on disability and art. This was heartening.

John Warner on originality being undervalued. “Artistically, the question of how faithful something is to another thing that already exists is simply fundamentally uninteresting. It asks us to respond to art primarily through the lens of nostalgia, rather than on the art’s own terms.”

Simon Willison on that lawyer who ChatGPTed himself into a load of trouble.

John Ousterhout on scar tissue in relationships. Good metaphor.

Rob Stein on IVG. “The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They’ve even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups.”

Eric Karrfalt on swallowing upside down as a way to combat GERD. “A novel exercise is described for resistance training of the lower esophageal sphincter. Resistance is provided by gravity as food is swallowed and pushed up an incline into the stomach. The incline is established by kneeling with the head bowed lower than the stomach. After several months of daily repetitions, symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux ceased and the exercise was discontinued without relapse.” I’ve started trying this.

Hannah Devlin on suspended animation with rats. More science fiction poking its head in. Crazy!

Joel Cuthbertson on Connie Willis and her upcoming novel. I still need to read All Clear and Blackout.

Daniel Huffman with another walkthrough of one of his mapmaking projects. Loved this.

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I’ve been a slacker when it comes to posting these, so we’re going to go a little lighter on commentary in an effort to get caught up.

Shin Oh’s Malaysian voxel illustrations. Love these so much.

Harold Cooper’s spinning diagrams with CSS. Fun.

David Popa’s ice floe art. Cool.

BYU campus HFAC demolition video. Sad to see it go — I had plenty of classes and dates there.

Oliver Darkshire with Neil Gaiman’s cover quote for his book. Ha.

Neal Agarwal’s space elevator page. Cool.

Sørvágsvatn, a cool-looking lake in the Faroe Islands.

Victor Tangermann on scientists potentially figuring out how to regenerate lost hearing.

Samuel Arbesman on his upcoming book, The Magic of Code.

Natasha Lomas on hydraulic haptics for touchscreens. Cool. I look forward to something like this going mainstream. Seems like it could be especially helpful for those with impaired vision.

Jo M’s trainbot (stitching together images of passing trains).

Felix Häcker on his IKEA chair making his screen black out. When I read this, I wondered if my IKEA chair was causing the random Bluetooth glitches I’ve been seeing for the past couple years. (Every once in a while — sometimes as often as once a day — the Bluetooth on my laptop would shut off for around thirty seconds, so my earbuds and keyboard and trackpad would stop working. This usually happened during Zoom calls, conveniently. And it happened on several different laptops from different companies.) I changed chairs a couple weeks ago and haven’t had any glitches since then, though it feels still too early to know if the IKEA chair really was the culprit.

François Valentin on old maps and new maps.

Baldur Bjarnason on AI. Agreed, AGI is not near.

James Somers on AI.

Dina Genkina on a new wooden transistor. Cool.

Fabien Sanglard on the polygons of Another World on the Amiga 500.

Robin Hanson on chasing your reading. Agreed. (Though I don’t do it often enough.)

Ben Werdmuller on AI in the newsroom.

Amelia Wattenberger on the UX of chatbots (and how it’s not great because there aren’t any affordances).

Chrome is replacing the lock icon.

Chris Coyier on CSS logical properties.

Jim Nielsen on the web’s backwards compatibility. Yes, 100%.

Andi with a detailed look at WebGPU.

Oliver Burkemann on using “just go to the shed” as a way to start on something.

Molly Templeton on readers being more than just consumers of books.

madhadron on the seven ur programming languages (interesting even if I don’t quite agree on the specific categorizations), also see the discussion on Hacker News.

Jessica Taylor Price on orcas that have been killing sharks and removing their livers.

Mary C. Dyson’s Legibility, an online book about how typography affects ease of reading.

Warp is integrating AI into their terminal.

Vadim Demedes’ Ink. Basically React for CLIs. Interesting.

Naomi Klein on AI. Wise words. This take resonated with me more than most others I’ve read.

Julian Gough on cosmology.

Charlie Becker on doing the weirdest thing that feels right. An interesting lens, might try this.

Jason Kottke on SineRider (Line Rider + math).

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Jo Walton’s reading posts on Tor. Lots of good recommendations throughout these posts. I need to read her An Informal History of the Hugos.

If the person who named walkie talkies had named everything. Ha.

Liz Climo’s cartoons are fun.

Kottke on customizing AirPods Pro for even better sound. Fascinating use case for those with some hearing loss.

Semaphore, a full-body keyboard using computer vision. Ha. And cool.

David Merritt Johns on nutrition science showing that ice cream is actually good for you. Sort of. At least that’s the takeaway I’m going to charge off with.

Shareware Heroes, a book by Richard Moss about shareware games from the ’80s and ’90s. Can’t wait to read this.

Sarah Constantin on why she isn’t an AI doomer and why she doesn’t think AGI will kill us all. Agreed.

Spectral.js, a nice JS color-mixing library from Ronald van Wijnen. Looks useful for generative art.

David Moldawer on rambling, in context of Robert Jordan writing Wheel of Time. I occasionally do something like this with writing, though I’ve thought of it just as journaling rather than as a dialogue with myself. (But now that I’ve read Chatter, the latter framing seems potentially more advantageous.)

Adam Mastroianni on strong-link problems and weak-link problems, particularly in relation to science. Liked this. I also liked his posts on psychology being hogwash and underrated ideas in psychology and ideas not being harder to find.

Slime Mold Time Mold on reality being weird. I was also fascinated by their posts on the gender gap in chronic illness and the potato diet for weight loss and the root cause of the obesity epidemic.

Tom MacWright on AI. “I also just don’t especially want to stop thinking about code. I don’t want to stop writing sentences in my own voice. I get a lot of joy from craft.” That resonates.

Hexagony, an esoteric programming language on a hexagonal grid, by Martin Ender. “The name is a portmanteau of hexagon and agony, because…well, give programming in it a go.” Ha.

True Millennial on David Alexander’s story of conversion and getting baptized. Loved this.

Adam Stoddard on craft at scale. I suspect he’s right.

Henrik Karlsson on the borderland between essays and code, and how AI might change that. Interesting take.

Julian Gough’s The Egg and the Rock, a book being written on Substack. One of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while, about cosmology and science. Absolutely going to be reading this as it’s posted.

John Thyer on making small games. Enjoyed this. Planning to make another small game sometime. (That’s the only kind I’ve ever made, as it happens.)

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Cursor, a text editor made for programming with AI. Interesting.

Simon Willison on AI-enhanced development. This post made me think that maybe there’s something to this after all.

John Gruber on Wavelength, a messaging app with built-in AI. I installed this but haven’t yet had anyone to talk with besides the chatbot.

Adam Posen on U.S. zero-sum economics and how relocating manufacturing production back to the U.S. isn’t actually a good thing. I have no idea if he’s right, but I’m generally in favor of globalization.

Scott O’Hara on the new HTML searchelement. Cool.

Adam Morgan’s Esquire profile of Brandon Sanderson. Way better than the Wired one.

Culturalytics with a table of cultural distances between countries. I don’t know how accurate/measurable this really is, but it’s interesting.

Christian Thalmann on the Korean-like script he designed for Netflix’s Shadow and Bone series. Cool.

Sian Bayley on Penguin’s new 1984 cover design from David Pearson. Loved this.

Blender 3.5 is released. The hair stuff is impressive, and the vector displacement maps for sculpting are also intriguing.

Marcelo de Oliveira Rosa Prates’s prettymaps Python package. I like this!

Alex Murrell on the age of average.

Hillel Wayne on ten weird things you can buy online. Ha.

Simon Willison on LLMs like ChatGPT being a calculator for words. This is a good way to think about it, definitely a better mental model than “I’m talking to something that might actually be sentient.”

Mike Crittenden on the physiological sigh. I read about this technique a couple years ago and have been using it regularly since then, and it does seem to work.

Brandon Sanderson on writing and feeling like an outsider.

Lincoln Michel on prose-forward writing. I like this way of thinking about it, more than character vs. plot, etc.

Max Gladstone about texture and aerodynamics in prose. Part of that same conversation.

Molly Templeton also on prose, and also part of that conversation.

Alexander Miller on grids. A fun read.

Mrigakshi Dixit on peanut allergies possibly being treatable by mRNA-based medicine. A lot of interesting things coming out of mRNA tech.

Linda Geddes on upcoming cancer and heart-disease mRNA vaccines. Can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

CourtBouillon on printing via the web (transforming HTML/CSS into PDFs, that is).

Andy Baio on his color blindness. A good reminder of how experiences can differ, and what we can do to make things more accessible for people.

Lian Cho on learning how to draw 200 dragons. I liked this. A good example of how to break apart a big task.

Austin Kleon with a bunch of quotes on not worrying about style as an artist.

Kepler.gl, an open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets. Cool, hadn’t heard of it before.

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words. Nice use of CSS scroll snap and web components.

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Ian G. McDowell on laying out a book with CSS. Covers a lot of the foundation.

John H. Meyer on AI speaking in Steve Jobs’ voice, saying words written by ChatGPT.

Mike Crittenden on the best stuff and the worst stuff. Not caring about stuff does seem ideal.

Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system that wants to take on LaTeX. I don’t know that it’ll be as useful for the kinds of things I typeset, but still interesting.

Matt Webb’s ChatGPT e-ink clock. Cool.

Felt is now a flagship sustaining member of QGIS. Glad to hear. I’ve been playing around with QGIS more lately and it’s pretty powerful.

Jason Kehe’s fairly mean article on Brandon Sanderson and Brandon’s response.

Clive Thompson on ChatGPT not replacing programmers just yet. Also see Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin on AI eating software for a different viewpoint. I don’t know what I think.

textra, a macOS command-line app to extract text from images, PDFs, and audio. Cool.

Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld has opened submissions again. But for how long, who knows.

Paul Butler on the WebAssembly rift between WASI and the web platform.

Rich Harris on SvelteKit moving to JS from TS. Intriguing.

Laurence Tratt on how big a programming language should be. Here’s to small languages.

Robin Rendle on reading being messy. I like this. Feels more human.

Steven Heller with a little typographic trivia about a full stop in the New York Times nameplate.

James Cook makes art with typewriters. Wow.

Stanko’s Rayven, a line-hatched 3D renderer. I really like this aesthetic. Also Michael Fogleman’s ln, another line-based 3D renderer, and Piter Pasma on rayhatching.

Tyler Cowen on AI and Americans living in a sort of bubble outside history for the past few decades. Sans the AI part, this is something I’ve often thought about — how Americans have had it atypically nice for a while (when compared to the rest of the world and the rest of history), and how this most likely won’t last.

luckbeaweirdo on curing their asthma by self-infecting with hookworm. Whew.

Matthew Butterick on AI obliterating the rule of law. Cogent points. AIs being above the law doesn’t seem like a great outcome.

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Grandstander (Open Font License) would be fun to typeset a children’s book with.

Tiro Typeworks’ Castoro typeface (designed by John Hudson, Paul Hanslow, and Kaja Słojewska) looks lovely. Excited to use it.

Noah Read on AI tools. Agreed. Maybe there are multiplying effects from outsourcing our thinking, but I don’t know, it seems fraught. Plus, I like thinking. And writing, and coding, and making things.

Jancee Dunn on eight-minute phone calls to friends. I like this and need to do it more often. Texting is fine, but the catch-up calls I’ve had with friends have been even better. (Speaking of which: I love making new friends, so feel free to email me to say hi.)

Simone Silvestroni on de-branding your online life.

Tim Bray on LLMs. His conclusions seemed level-headed to me.

Sinclair Target on learning BASIC like it’s 1983. I didn’t grow up with a Commodore 64, but I did start out as a kid with BASIC — BASICA, GW-BASIC, and QBasic. Ah, nostalgia. I remember typing up BASIC programs from library books and running into dialectal differences (particularly with the graphics commands, if I recall correctly).

Hacker News thread on what your personal website/blog has done for you. As for me, I’ve met lots of interesting people (hi, y’all!) and have had several projects come out of it too. Supremely rewarding, 10/10 would do again.

Becca Inglis on, uh, tiny fairy-like robots that could replace dying bumblebees. Not entirely sure how the laser-guided direction would work with millions of these, but a very interesting idea.

MFEKglif, a new typeface editor by a former FontForge maintainer. Interesting.

Michael Eisenstein on using AI to design de novo proteins.

Jack Clark on GPT-4. The part about GPT-4 being political power was particularly interesting and worth reading.

Dave Karpf on phantom citations thanks to AI. It does seem like this is going to become more and more common, sadly.

John Herrman on the nightmare of AI-powered Gmail. Agreed. Using AI to write emails that the receiver isn’t actually going to read but is instead going to summarize via AI seems…superfluous.

Borna Izadpanah on Persian Naskh type design. Mmm.

Richard Rutter with some progress on typographic paragraph widows on the web. Promising! Also see the CSSWG thread.

Josh Comeau on AI and the end of frontend development. I think he’s probably right, and that the situation isn’t as dire as some think.

Geoffrey Litt with some interesting ideas on how LLMs could lead to more end-user programming. I hope so! That seems like a win for humanity.

Andy Wingo on WebAssembly for garbage-collected languages. Interesting (even if a good chunk of it went over my head).

Adam Chalmers on using Rust on the backend. I need to try Serde and Diesel out.

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Cat Valente on AI replacing jobs. “Because you know, at least here in the good old US of Garbage, they’d rather eat their own eyeballs than even consider something like UBI any time before the actual apocalypse. Even then, it would be $5 in CompanyBux and half an infected hot dog.” Ha. This point felt spot on to me and has stuck with me ever since: “We are not an idle species. We like to feel useful. We like to make things. We like to do things. We aren’t going to stop.”

Chloe Xiang on researchers using AI to generate images based on people’s brain activity. A bit freaky, thinking about how this could be abused.

Herbert Lui on blogging every day for a year. Something I want to get back into the habit of doing.

Carly Ayres interiews Marcin Wichary about Shift Happens.

Marcin Wichary’s typewriter simulation. Fun.

Richard Rutter on text-wrap: balance. Inching closer to getting better typesetting controls on the web. (And how far we’ve already come!)

Prashant Palikhe with some tips on using Chrome DevTools. I somehow hadn’t heard of console.table() until now.

Justus Romijn on removing “should” from unit test descriptions. This seems reasonable to me.

Charles Q. Choi on electronic bandages. Intriguing.

Antonio Scandurra on rendering UIs at 120 fps for Zed, a new text editor from the folks who made Atom and Tree-sitter.

Max Mudie’s fungi photos. Fascinating.

Jim Nielsen on deadlines as technology. I like this a lot and plan to start using it more consciously.

Hannah Devlin on scientists who have created mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells. Lots of interesting developments in biology (and other branches of research) lately.

B. David Zarley on scientists who have successfully done pre-emptive heart attack therapy on mice.

Ink & Switch’s Upwelling, real-time collaboration + version control for writers. Some interesting ideas here. Agreed on not wanting changes to be visible until I’m done making them.

Prathyush Pramod’s catalog of programming languages for enthusiasts. So cool. Catala especially caught my eye, though Dark and IRCIS (which reminds me of Orca) and Wasp and Battlestar are also interesting.

Prathyush Pramod’s catalog of open typefaces. Stumbled upon this after looking through the programming language catalog and ooh, lots of goodies here.

Charles Q. Choi on super-high-res ultrathin metasurface displays. Looks promising.

Simon Kuestenmacher on the seven countries bordering Türkiye. I had no idea!

Jason Godesky on JavaScript failing more often than you might think. Yep.

Ben Parr on Google Workspace’s new AI tools. And Microsoft Office is doing the same thing. It’s a weird/interesting world we’re quickly moving into. (The rate of change here is exciting and alarming.)

Dan Klammer’s modern font stacks site. Every once in a while I think about moving my site to a system font stack. Maybe someday.

Carl Bugeja on making a PCB motor. Very cool.

Nat Friedman’s Vesuvius challenge, to read some old scrolls from Herculaneum using computer vision and machine learning. Interesting.

Matt Webb on the singularity. “GPT-4 is capable of inventing and purchasing synthesised versions of new molecules, potentially dangerous ones, by conducting lit review, using chemistry tools, and contacting suppliers.”

Ethan Marcotte on AI tools. “These utilities are being created in a country that has minimal regulatory oversight, few privacy safeguards, and even fewer labor protections.” Which isn’t great.

Maggie Appleton on the expanding dark forest and generative AI. “After the forest expands, we will become deeply sceptical of one another’s realness. Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine? Is there a being on the other end of this web interface I can form a relationship with?” Very relevant. I promise I’m human.

Elizabeth Weil’s profile of Emily Bender about AI chatbots. Worth reading.

Daniel Rosenwasser on the TypeScript 5.0 release.

DreamWorks has open sourced MoonRay.

James Bridle on the stupidity of AI. “The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous.” Also worth reading.

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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.

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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.

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Saharan’s zoomable meta Game of Life. Cool. And trippy.

Jen Simmons on CSS nesting, now available in Safari Technology Preview. Come on, Firefox.

Mike Crittenden with a simple cron for cleaning up your downloads folder. I keep meaning to set something like this up.

Tom MacWright on adding circles to Placemark, and why geospatial circles aren’t as simple as they sound.

Jason Kottke on a new image of the Milky Way with 3.32 billion individual objects. Whew!

Hannah Docter-Loeb about some weird polar vortex off the north pole of the sun.

React.js: The Documentary. I haven’t watched it yet because I’m awful at making time for long videos.

Robin Wieruch on ten web development trends this year.

WHO says no level of alcohol consumption is safe for one’s health.

Turborepo and Turbopack, by Vercel. Supposedly Turbopack is way faster than Vite. Interesting.

Zach Leatherman has been collecting criticisms of React.

Laurie Voss’s rebuttal of Alex Russell’s Market for Lemons post. I can see his point — network effects are real — but I still think we can do better for end users.

Thomas F. Arciuolo and Miad Faezipour with an idea on tapping the Yellowstone supervolcano for energy. And to keep it from erupting. Color me intrigued.

Harry Spitzer on Ryan Dahl and Deno. Enjoyed reading this. I need to play around with Deno some more. And Bun.

Chris Coyier on CSS for spacing between elements. I didn’t know about margin-trim, but it seems like a great future alternative to gap in non-flex/non-grid settings.

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