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Links, page 12

  1. We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites
    motherboard.vice.com

    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.

  2. Browsers
    adactio.com

    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.

  3. Polygon: Celeste will make you better at every video game
    youtube.com

    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.

  4. The State of Technology at the End of 2018
    stratechery.com

    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.

  5. #​Edge​Goes​Chromium
    daverupert.com

    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.

  6. Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript
    bradfrost.com

    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.

  7. Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack
    heydonworks.com

    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).