All Posts, page 8

Nerd City:

We tested fifteen thousand common words and phrases against YouTube’s bots, one by one, and determined which of those words will cause a video to be demonetized when used in the title.

If we took a demonetized video and changed the words “gay” or “lesbian” to “happy” or “friend”, every single time, the status of the video changed to advertiser-friendly.

YouTube’s apparently unassailable dominance over web video is a real shame. I dream of a world where web video is like podcasts: a decentralized system where anyone can participate without ceding control to a giant corporation with black box policies.

Monetization is already going the way of podcasts: crowd-funding and ad reads. Big video creators just can’t afford to trust that YouTube’s ever-changing policies will be on their side. The next step is decentralizing distribution, which seems like a harder problem to solve. But we’ve done it before: let’s bring back video podcasts. Let me get my video subscriptions in my RSS reader. Let’s take video away from YouTube and give it back to the web.

Ben Thompson:

I am increasingly convinced this is the point every company dealing with China will reach: what matters more, money or values?

John Gruber summarizes Ben’s points really well:

The gist of it is that 25 years ago, when the West opened trade relations with China, we expected our foundational values like freedom of speech, personal liberty, and democracy to spread to China.

Instead, the opposite is happening. China maintains strict control over what its people see on the Internet — the Great Firewall works. They ban our social networks where free speech reigns, but we accept and use their social networks, like TikTok, where content contrary to the Chinese Community Party line is suppressed.

Worse, multinational mega corporations like Apple and Disney are put in a bind — they must choose between speaking up for values such as the right to privacy and freedom of speech, or making money in the Chinese market.

And Nilay Patel makes a great comparison:

It’s not hard to understand that carmakers in the US market build to California emissions standards because they are the strictest - it’s the most efficient choice.

Not a leap to think global companies will hold themselves to China’s speech restrictions for the same reason.

Frank Chimero:

The features of software with massive reach always have unintended consequences. For instance, social media, by making positivity easy and quantifiable, has ensured that negativity looms large. It’s become a place where we count the good things and experience the bad things.

Jeremy Keith:

Jason shared some thoughts on designing progressive web apps. One of the things he’s pondering is how much you should try make your web-based offering look and feel like a native app.

This was prompted by an article by Owen Campbell-Moore over on Ev’s blog called Designing Great UIs for Progressive Web Apps. He begins with this advice:

Start by forgetting everything you know about conventional web design, and instead imagine you’re actually designing a native app.

This makes me squirm. I mean, I’m all for borrowing good ideas from other media—native apps, TV, print—but I don’t think that inspiration should mean imitation. For me, that always results in an interface that sits in a kind of uncanny valley of being almost—but not quite—like the thing it’s imitating.

People have been gleefully passing around the statistic that the average number of native apps installed per month is zero. So how exactly will we measure the success of progressive web apps against native apps …when the average number of progressive web apps installed per month is zero?

Toy Story 4 looks incredible, almost hyper-realistic. And it’s not a simple matter of technology getting better; there is artistic intent in the imperfections that give it that edge. Among other techniques, Pixar is simulating real-world camera lenses (along with their limitations). Evan Puschak explains:

Animation has always drawn from the lessons of live action film, from the visual language of cinematic storytelling. Everyone who worked on Toy Story 4 understands that the imperfections — the way a lens distorts, or a camera operator shakes, or a light bounces — contain their own expressive potential. And when you combine these with the limitless world of animation, the results can be stunningly tactile.

I hadn’t noticed that split diopter shot — it’s brilliant.

Nature has put together a comprehensive series of charts that do a really great job at showing just how fucked we are.

Whatever they decide, nations will have to reckon with some difficult numbers that will ultimately determine whether the world can avoid the rapidly approaching climate meltdown. Nature documents the scale of the challenge in an infographic that explores energy use, carbon dioxide pollution and issues of climate justice. At a time when countries have pledged to curb greenhouse gases sharply, the data show that annual emissions spiked by 2.1% in 2018 — owing in part to increased demand for coal in places such as China and India.

Marcy Sutton is collecting good examples of websites and interfaces where accessibility and beautiful design go hand-in-hand. Subscribed.

Bastian Allgeier:

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to programming:

less code === less potential issues

This rule of thumb controls my own feelings towards a solution. It shouldn’t take 120 MB of code to uglify some JS. But maybe I’m wrong.

In practice, this dependency hell has bitten me so often already that my life expectancy probably sank by 2-3 years. You want to build a JS file? Please update Webpack first. Oh, that new version of Webpack is no longer compatible with your Node version. Oh, your new Node version is no longer compatible with that other dependency. Oh, now you have 233 detected security issues in all your node_modules but you can’t fix them because that would break something completely unrelated.

Scott Jehl:

Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.

Ugh. Jeremy Keith comments:

The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.

Terence Eden explains how different screen technologies, human biology, and fingerprint grease make “pixel perfection” a pointless goal:

There is no grid. There never has been. You can align to theoretical pixels - but as soon as the image hits a physical screen, it will be adjusted to best fit reality.

An obsession with pixel perfect rendering is futile.

Every Layout expands on this idea, specifically as it pertains to CSS:

Suffice it to say that, while screens are indeed made up of pixels, pixels are not regular, immutable, or constant. A 400px box viewed by a user browsing zoomed in is simply not 400px in CSS pixels. It may not have been 400px in device pixels even before they activated zoom.

See also: Ian Mallett’s Subpixel Zoo: A Catalog of Subpixel Geometry.

Ollie Williams welcomes the new CSS properties for styling underlines:

Finally we can demarcate links without sacrificing style thanks to two new CSS properties.

• text-underline-offset controls the position of the underline.
• text-decoration-thickness controls the thickness of underlines, as well as overlines, and line-throughs.

I’ve been working on a blog post about this topic, and Ollie does a good job of covering some of the points I want to make. But I want to go further and explore implementation quirks, the details where the new properties don’t quite go far enough, and make a case for why underlines shouldn’t be pixel-aligned.

Rémi Parmentier:

Last march, I wrote a proposal for Can I email, a website similar to caniuse.com dedicated to support in email clients.

Today, barely six months after, I am really happy and pleased to announce that with the help of my colleagues and members of the email geeks community, we’re officially launching caniemail.com.

Wow, this was sorely needed.

Nathaniel Popper:

Called SIM swapping, it allows hackers to take control of a victim’s phone number. In recent months, SIM swapping has been used to hijack the online personas of politicians, celebrities and notables like Mr. Dorsey, to steal money all over the world and to simply harass regular people.

Victims, no matter how prominent or technically sophisticated, have been unable to protect themselves, even after they have been hit again and again.

“I’ve been looking at the criminal underground for a long time, and SIM swapping bothers me more than anything I’ve seen,” said Allison Nixon, the director of research at the security firm Flashpoint. “It requires no skill, and there is literally nothing the average person can do to stop it.”

We’ve been hearing about this exploit for years. Of course, things seem to only have gotten worse.