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All Posts, page 13

  1. Details / Summary Are Not [insert control here]
    adrianroselli.com

    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.

  2. The Final Girls

    2015 film

    Watched 25 April 2019

    I was pleasantly surprised by how genuinely funny and creatively consistent this movie is — and it’s clear that everyone was having fun while making it. Pretty great!

  3. The Hitman’s Bodyguard

    2017 film

    Watched 25 April 2019

    You can tell that they tried (most of the time), but it’s not as sharp as it clearly thinks it is. Also, they shouldn’t have let Ryan Reynolds pick all the songs.

  4. There are a few CSS techniques for hiding content visually while keeping it accessible to screen readers, but none of them are perfect — and in some cases may even be harmful.

    @zellwk has put together a great round-up of the issues.

  5. Freedom
    inessential.com

    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.

  6. How Recommendation Algorithms Run the World
    wired.com

    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.

  7. Escape Room

    2019 film

    Watched 22 April 2019

    Fun to watch and kinda cool in a sort of childish, cartoony way. I wish it had learned even further in that direction.

  8. Hold the Dark

    2018 film

    Watched 20 April 2019

    So enamored with the poetry of its own subtext that it fails to make the actual text engaging. The slow, painful lingering is fitting, but at some point it’s too much and there’s not much else there to balance it out — even the action sequences seem drawn out. Starts out pensive, ends up boring. Still, there’s an interesting story there if you can catch it being mumbled at you.

  9. Tower Heist

    2011 film

    Watched 21 April 2019

    Soulless and devoid of artistry. It’s built around social commentary but never in an honest or insightful way — there’s a constant tinge of disdain for the issues it tries to build jokes around. As it goes through the motions of its terrible boilerplate script it is never truly funny or surprising; the most it can muster is being face-palm stupid when it goes for the focus group-approved absurdist humor.

    (I thought it was bad.)

  10. I was just reminiscing about this a few days ago. Nine years later, @lorenb’s Twitter for iPad is still unmatched. Devices are now several times more powerful, yet the experience of using Twitter on the original iPad is the best we ever got.

  11. Apple owes everyone an apology and it should start with me, specifically
    theoutline.com

    Casey Johnston’s butterfly keyboard saga continues:

    I dread the Overton window shift that Apple now appears to be attempting to push, which is that its customers and their crumbs and dust and bad habits are to blame, and should bend themselves around the “sensitive” keyboard, keep canned air (not supplied by Apple itself) on hand at all times, as if this is a problem we’ve always had, and not one Apple singlehandedly created with a nearsighted design.

    My 2014 MacBook Pro is still going strong, thankfully. (Knock on wood.)

  12. Advice to a Young Me
    craigmod.com

    Craig Mod:

    At 23 I was obsessed with minimizing recurring costs of living. They felt like poison to me.

    Obsessing over minimized cost of living has a light-touch hint of Thoreau to it: the calculating, the measuring, the valuing of time.

    “House: $28.12 ½; Farm one year: $14.72 ½ …” and on and on Thoreau wrote in Walden. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediate or in the long run.”

    Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism devotes a chapter to Thoreau. My favorite quote though is from Frédéric Gros on Thoreau’s processes: “[Thoreau] says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain or lose?”

  13. Why Vlambeer’s Co-Founder Thinks Mobile Games Market is Broken
    variety.com

    Brian Crecente talks to Rami Ismail about why traditional game development is broken on iOS:

    “I’m here to make video games,” he said. “I’m not here to fix somebody else’s problems. Our users? Absolutely. If they have a bug and it’s our fault, we’ll fix it. But having made a game in 2013 and then the platform going, ‘It’s broken now,’ That would be like if somebody went and updated like the internet and now all text is right to left. That’s how it feels to me. It’s like we made a game, so now we’re getting punished for it.”

    Apple has created a very inviting — but ultimately hostile — platform for games. There’s no malice there, they just don’t care about legacy software as much as they care about pushing things forward.

    Video games have historically been extremely well preserved, yet some older iOS games seem to be gone forever. This ephemerality is unprecedented; it’s not just bad for game developers, it really feels like a big part of gaming history is being erased.