Blog, page 12

Craig Mod always reminds me that words are magic:

Hiking with a Kindle definitely feels futuristic—an entire library in a device that weighs less than a small book, and rarely needs charging. And my first impulse on reading Johnson’s final line, sitting on a dirt path in the mountains of Japan flanked by Cryptomeria japonica, was to eulogize him right there, smack dab in the text while a nightingale whistled overhead. The Kindle indicated with a subtle dotted underline and small inline text that those final sentences had been highlighted by “56 highlighters.” Other humans! Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines.

I wanted to write, “Fuck. Sad to think this is the last new work we’re going to get from this guy. Most definitely dead as I’m reading it.” You know, something in the vulgarity of Johnson himself. I wanted to stick my 10-cent eulogy between those lines for others to read, and to read what those others had thought. Purchasing a book is one of the strongest self-selections of community, and damn it, I wanted to engage.

But I couldn’t. For my Kindle Oasis—one of the most svelte, elegant, and expensive digital book containers you can buy in 2018—is about as interactive as a potato. Instead, I left a note for myself: “Write something about how this isn’t the digital book we thought we’d have.”

Jason Koebler:

There’s a subtext of the #deleteFacebook movement that has nothing to do with the company’s mishandling of personal data. It’s the idea that people who use Facebook are stupid, or shouldn’t have ever shared so much of their lives. But for people who came of age in the early 2000s, sharing our lives online is second nature, and largely came without consequences. There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be quickly weaponized against us.

Sebastian Morr:

Pixels of LCD monitors are usually composed of three stripes of the colors red, green, and blue. Tech enthusiast Matt Sarnoff used this property to his advantage when inventing a subpixel text encoding font. Its glyphs are comprised of colored strips only one pixel wide.

Straight-up one of my favourite internet finds of the year. Something about it just gets to me on a deep level. I’ve looked at it dozens of times and that feeling doesn’t go away.

I first came across it on Twitter a few months ago, and it’s been on the back of my mind ever since.

Jeremy Keith:

Very soon, the vast majority of browsers will have an engine that’s either Blink or its cousin, WebKit. That may seem like good news for developers when it comes to testing, but trust me, it’s a sucky situation of innovation and agreement. Instead of a diverse browser ecosystem, we’re going to end up with incest and inbreeding.

BDG shows how Celeste relates to real-life rock climbing and it totally clicks.

While most games will make you grind to improve your character, Celeste makes you grind to improve yourself. When you succeed, you keep that skill and that knowledge. And just link in real climbing, when you go back to a route you’ve already completed, you ask yourself: “how did I ever struggle with this?”

And that’s when you know… you have become the genius beefcake.

Will we ever run out of Celeste praise videos? I hope not.

Ben Thompson:

Still, as a thought experiment, suppose Congressman Smith were right, and that Google’s search results, whether via managerial decree, general employee bias, or rogue employee, were gamed to disfavor Conservatives. The solution seems clear: create a competitor to serve the part of the market that is dissatisfied with Google.

The issue, of course, is that Google is, at least for a while (and more on this in a bit), impregnable: the company is an Aggregator with positive feedback loops everywhere.

Dave Rupert:

But in the past we had browser disparity as a mechanism for delaying bad ideas from becoming ubiquitous so they could be hashed out in a Web Standards body. Some of the best ideas we have today, like CSS Grid, were pioneered in one browser (IE10) and then polished in a Working Group. If V1 of -ms-grid was now the de facto standard, we’d have some regrets.

John Gruber:

There have always been bad Mac apps. But they seldom achieved any level of popularity because Mac users, collectively, rejected them.

Brad Frost:

I’m confident developers will get their heads around it. They’ll figure out their swim lanes and understand which JavaScript does what. I’m more concerned about other team members who are now staring at a Big Ol’ Intimidating Ball O’ JavaScript. And I’m concerned for those recruiters and hiring managers who are even further removed from the day to day. Those job listings with a giant spray of buzzwords and technologies can now be winnowed down to a single word: JavaScript. Those recruiters have a hard enough time separating Java from JavaScript, so best of luck to them making sense of the complex JavaScript ecosystem.

Jeremy Keith:

It’s not that CSS in inherently incapable of executing complex conditions. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because CSS selectors (and the cascade) are so powerful that we choose to put guard rails in place.

On the news of Edge switching to the Chromium engine, Tim Kadlec writes:

We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

Hear, hear.

Christine Dodrill:

What? The code for that? It’s obvious, figure it out.

See? Five times as fast. Who cares that you have to throw out basically all your existing stuff, and if you mix rilkef and non-rilkef you’re gonna run into problems.

I’ve been taking a lot of interest in this topic ever since I started working on my own reset/boilerplate — Cobalt.

Heydon Pickering:

By assuming the role of the Full Stack Developer (which is, in practice, a computer scientist who also writes HTML and CSS), one takes responsibility for all the code, in spite of its radical variance in syntax and purpose, and becomes the gatekeeper of at least some kinds of code one simply doesn’t care about writing well. This has two adverse effects:

1. Poor quality code
2. A bunch of people who can (and would enjoy!) expertly writing that code, standing unemployed on the sidelines muttering “WTF”

I so very much agree with everything Heydon says here. And that agreement comes from the experience of trying to become a full stack dev myself (though going at it from an HTML/CSS-first perspective).

Graphic design work on Incredibles 2 was brilliant, as expected. But there was one glaring exception, conspicuously missing from this post: the atrocious Edna Mode logo.