All Posts, page 12

Emily S. Rueb interviews Jean-Jacques Savin, a French adventurer who “spent 127 days alone in a large, barrel-shaped capsule made of plywood, at the mercy of the winds and currents.” It sounds like he had a lovely time:

If it was nice, I swam, and dove underneath the barrel to catch a fish, sea bream, to supplement my meal.

I made a breakfast in the morning, and a nice dinner in the evening. I had a lot of time to write my book. I played a lot of bluegrass on my mandolin.

Nick Heer:

When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that we allow the automatic execution of whatever code a web developer wrote. We don’t do that for anything else, really — certainly not to the same extent of possibly hundreds of webpages visited daily, each carrying a dozen or more scripts.

Esther Rosenfield:

It’s no coincidence that you never see the comic posted in response to criticism of some understated indie drama or underground Bandcamp musician. You only ever see it used to defend the commercial output of mega-corporations; your Marvel, your Game of Thrones, your Ariana Grande, etc. It’s no surprise, either. A recent development in corporate art is the positioning of it as a cultural underdog, constantly under siege from Haters and Trolls. You see it most with the nerd properties mentioned above. They parry the childhood fear of being bullied for liking nerd stuff into the suggestion that those bullies are still out there, waiting to pounce, and they take the form of everyone who dares to not like the IP in question.

Adrian Roselli:

Underlines, the standard, built-in signifier of hyperlinks, the core feature of the web, are beautiful.

This is objectively true. They are aesthetically one of the most delightful visual design elements ever created.

They represent the ideal of a democratized information system. They are a frail monument to the worldwide reach of ideas and discourse. They are proof of our ascension from trees and swamps, a testament to our species’ intelligence, and a witness to our inevitable downfall.

❤️

Adrian Roselli:

Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding.

However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution to all our coding struggles.

In this 2019 GDC session, Subset Games co-foudner Matthew Davis details the Into the Breach design process from early drafts to the final balancing decisions. Davis dives into years of cut content and iteration to show how Subset Games approached the difficult design challenges of making Into the Breach.

John Gruber:

These companies are trying to usurp the word podcast for one simple reason: people love podcasts. What I think and hope they are missing is that part of what people love about podcasts is the openness. It’s one of the last remaining areas of the internet that works exactly as the internet was intended to work.

Brent Simmons:

In a way, it feels like iOS devices are rented, not owned. This is not a criticism: I’m totally fine with that. It’s appropriate for something so very mass-market and so very much built for a networked world.

But what about Macs?

Macs carry the flame for the revolution. They’re the computers we own, right? They’re the astounding, powerful machines that we get to master.

Except that lately, it feels more and more like we’re just renting Macs too, and they’re really Apple’s machines, not ours.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Deep down, behind every “people like you” recommendation is a computational method for distilling stereotypes through data. Even when these methods work, they can help entrench the stereotypes they’re mobilizing. They might easily recommend books about coding to boys and books about fashion to girls, simply by tracking the next most likely click. Of course, that creates a feedback cycle: If you keep being shown coding books, you’re probably more likely to eventually check one out.

On the 30th anniversary of its release, Marques Brownlee unboxes and explores how the Game Boy came to be, it’s impact on society, and why it’s leaving us feeling so nostalgic.