My Pinboard

Humans have intentions and purpose to what we do. These intentions are sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, sometime clear, and sometimes nebulous. But we always have emotion and thought connected to what we make. What we create is guided by intent colliding with discovery, and these two states feed each other. And the influence that we draw from existing work is not an analysis of pixels, but an emotional response to how that work makes us feel.

Even in analytical study of form or anatomy, our brains do not operate like computer programs. While committing information to memory, we also interpret and seek to understand and this affects how that information is later able to be used. Because we are each an individual, infinitely complex being, our different physiological, environmental, and cultural variations bring us to infinite different endpoints. Like it or not, we all see the world slightly differently and our creative expressions reflect this.

every percent that you hand over to the A.I. is a percent less of your unique voice, perspective, and intention.

These programs are designed to undercut working artists with fast, cheap, and “good enough” until work is devalued to the point that artists are forced out because they can’t make a living. After that, with untold amounts of money lost by the tech companies giving away this service to drive actual artists out of business, the companies that own these programs will have effectively bought the industry. From there, they are then in a position to charge whatever they want for their shitty product because it has become the most viable option, with all of the money now going to them. It doesn’t have to go this way, but this is the logical path to profitability.

I believe outsourcing segments of the workflow also degrades one’s abilities, making you more dependent on the service. So if you value your mind, spirit, and vision at all as important components to your work, this should be a non-starter. And if you don’t value those things, you might consider another line of work altogether, because that is what makes an artist’s career possible.

This is what writing often is for me: Making a list of everything stupid and idiotic that someone else is saying and then sitting down and trying to articulate the exact opposite.

The accountability-washing that an AI provides isn’t a new service so much as an escalated and expanded one. Which doesn’t make it any less frightening, of course; but it does perhaps provide a useful clue. Any effort that’s tried and failed to hold a corporation to account isn’t likely to have more success against an algorithm. We need a new bag of tricks.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.

React encouraged a mindset of replacement: “forgot what browsers can do; do everything in a React component instead, even if you’re reinventing the wheel.”

HTML web components encourage a mindset of augmentation instead.

Having the sound of a lush forest with birds chirping wasn’t going to work in a gloomy, foggy environment, especially if the player can change the characteristics of the world at will. the solution I came up with was to take all of this information from the environment and boil it down to a single spectrum, referred to as the mood scale. At one end of the scale, you would have nice and pleasant ambience, with birds chirping. At the other end, you would hear a more sparse soundscape, featuring different types of birds, like crows and ravens that you’d normally associate with a more moody environment, as well as other sounds, like creaking trees.

Tools tend to exist between us and a goal, and the shape of the tool tells us something about how to proceed, and what outcomes are desirable. Tech enacts and shapes our world, our lives, and our politics.

It’s wild to see major tech companies throwing out all pretense – giddy to abandon previous commitments around diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility. Run free, little mega-corps! Be the evil you’ve always dreamed for the world!

But the bigger issue is that they don’t have to be successful to be dangerous. Because along the way, these companies get to steal our work and sell it back to us, lower our wages, de-skill our field, bury us in slop, and mire us in algorithmic bureaucracy. If the long-term space god thing doesn’t work out, at least they can make a profit in the short-term.

My prediction is that AI will — at least in a certain portion of the population, anyways — lead to a hunger for the handmade, for signs that the thing you’re watching/reading/listening to is “a creation of the human race.”

A modern JavaScript utility library that's 2-3 times faster and up to 97% smaller—a major upgrade to lodash.

This is the pattern […]that really broke down the barrier I’d had to understanding what makes web components so valuable. By taking this approach, you get everything HTML gives you with the <label> and <input> elements for free, and you can add things on top of it. It’s pure progressive enhancement.

You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you are surfing? There are no laws forcing websites to use them. They use them because they choose to.

Old Book Illustrations offers a wide range of public domain, royalty-free restored images scanned from old books. Searchable galleries include animals, plants, etc.

It feels like we’ve collectively given up on the hope of making a new kind of graphic design or a new kind of literature along the way. Websites are boring now. The frontier has been seized. We’re too late. So everything about my work makes that argument in varying degrees of loudness: websites can and should aspire to be so much more than they are today.

I’m fascinated by how forcing a relationship between two things, any two things, interrupts the my brains need for logic and its laziness in wanting to do what is normal or expected, and creates interesting and unexpected results as a by product

The key is to intentionally and regularly apply one random item against an item that needs context

The real web, the small web, the indie web is amazing. Don't give Facebook and the rest of these clowns your content. Don't give them the time or your attention. Get a blog, a website, a Mastodon account, something you control, and share links to cool things you find. Make a list of your favourite blogs or websites or photos of cats. Write about a pizza you had that was delicious. Share a recipe. Go down a rabbit hole for hours on end adding weird stuff to your site. Just do it somewhere you control because the real web is fantastic.

The free, Open Source OpenAI alternative. Self-hosted, community-driven and local-first. Drop-in replacement for OpenAI running on consumer-grade hardware. No GPU required. Runs ggml, gguf, GPTQ, onnx, TF compatible models: llama, llama2, rwkv, whisper, vicuna, koala, cerebras, falcon, dolly, starcoder, and many others

With Moom, you can easily move and zoom windows to half screen, quarter screen, or fill the screen; set custom sizes and locations, and save layouts of opened windows for one-click positioning.

Set up a collection of windows in the size and locations you wish, then save the layout. Restore the layout via an assigned hot key or via Moom's menus. This feature is particularly useful if you use a laptop with an external display—Moom can trigger saved layouts on addition or removal of displays.

Practical Accessibility is a self-paced, get-right-down-to-it course for web designers and developers who want to start creating more accessible websites and applications today

A type scale calculator (i.e. 1.25) for CSS that smoothly mixes between different scales depending on viewport widths. They also have a similar method for spacing

We look at how we can hint the browser, rather than micromanage it by leaning into progressive enhancement, CSS layout, fluid type & space and modern CSS capabilities to build resilient front-ends that look great for everyone, regardless of their device, connection speed or context.

There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

Sometimes it’s much easier to get started when you define what it is that you aren’t going to do.

What I found interesting about this turn of events was how much easier it is, as a first step, to define your own position negatively, and how the beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.

We just spend so much time solving problems, that we naturally seek problems to solve, even if we don't have those problems right now.

Humans should be problem eliminators. This is unnatural and takes extra effort. When faced with a problem, humans naturally start thinking of solutions to the problem. And when we solve it, we feel good about ourselves, but we've unwittingly made ourselves captive to the maintenance of our solution. ⛓

However, if someone can take a step back and eliminate the problem instead of solving it, they'll find themselves in an excellent position and freed up to focus on tasks other than maintaining solutions.

When you solve a problem, you have a solution you have to maintain. When you eliminate a problem you don't even have to think about it because the problem no longer exists.

Fossil fuel infrastructure requires constant fuel input. Building a coal or gas power plant, like building a wind or solar project, requires a lot of materials and energy input upfront. But for a fossil fuel power plant, construction is just the beginning. In order to generate power, you need to burn coal or gas every day for decades. Wind and solar projects, by comparison, don’t require any ongoing fuel input.

This document explores the shift in React best practices from a purely client-side approach to one where the server plays a more significant role. It examines the optimization techniques that have been applied to the client-only paradigm and the new mental models that result from the unidirectional data flow of React extending to the server. It also introduces React Server Components, where the backend is embedded into the component tree and client components can render server components, and discusses server action functions being explored in React-flavoured meta-frameworks. The document emphasizes the importance of understanding the abstractions above and below for the future of a seamless blend between client and server.

It’s perfectly understandable to me that the right has given words like nostalgia, history, culture, and tradition a bad name, so that some cannot even hear them without shuddering a little. For many of the people who use these terms, they connote a vision that is ugly, fake, and deeply racist. I am not surprised, then, that leftists tend to prefer Brutalism to McMansions.

But it is a mistake to reject the cultural inheritance of humankind on the theory that nostalgia is for Nazis.

All of these are marvels from a technological perspective, but that’s about it. They are dreary. They are culturally dead. They have no connection to the natural world.

tourists come from all over the world to just to look at Hindu temples, Japanese gardens, the French Quarter, Venice, and Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona. People literally plan entire trips, carrying themselves across the world, just so they can be near these buildings and drink them in up close. I cannot imagine anyone who is not an architect visiting the Pritzker Prize buildings.

Why? Is it just because the first buildings are “old?” I do not think it is. Instead, I think that people do not visit the contemporary buildings because they do not give certain feelings to the viewer, feelings that people enjoy feeling. They do not amaze, enchant, or make the jaw drop. They lack the kind of intricacy that means you can stare at them endlessly and keep finding new things. They feel dead

Ursula Le Guin's theory of the carrier bag as the earliest human tool challenges the linear trajectory of history, which is often associated with violence and domination. The carrier bag, as Le Guin proposes, is a vessel that can gather, hold, and share things. This idea of non-linear time, the lack of heroes, and the collective rather than individualistic approach are central to anticolonial and anarcho-feminist politics. Instead of telling the story of domination over nature, we must abandon the old story and embrace the unheroic, non-linear narrative that recognizes the complexity and diversity of life. By doing so, we can give agency to non-human actors, incorporate social movements and political imagination, and increase our chances of survival.

Capitalism, or so wrote Marx back in 1844, supposedly alienates us from four different things: from ourselves, from each other, from the products of our labor, and from nature. We develop an adversarial relationship with each. “Nature”(a constructed, slippery category that shifts over time) can, or even must, be tamed: capricious rivers are diverted, genomes are edited, crude oil is transformed into fuel.

Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her “in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.” The stick, sword, or spear, designed for “bashing and killing,” alienated her from history so much that she felt she “was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”

The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…”

There’s one study that suggested a half-hour of regular cardio exercise every day can be as effective as a prescription of Zoloft for improving your mental health … There’s also evidence that exercise can have a long-standing effect on your well-being. So, you do, say, a half-hour of cardio Monday morning, the data suggests that little bump in endorphins… that will still be there with you, if you do it Monday at 9 AM, until around Tuesday at, like, 1 PM.

Whenever I get ready to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long old, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will be at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.

A year later, Gide offers a meta-remark on the endeavor already underway:

A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. Then you want to know where you stand… An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas; or the awakening of the senses at puberty; or else when you feel yourself to be dying.

Make an index, family tree, chart, or diagram of your interests. All of them, everything: visual, physical, spiritual, sexual. Leisure time, hobbies, foods, buildings, airports, everything. Every book, movie, website, etc. The totality of this self-exposure may be daunting, scary. But your voice is here. This will become a resource and record to return to and add to for the rest of your life.

Artists must commune with their own kind all the time. There are no exceptions to this rule, even if you live “out in the woods.” Preferably commune in person, but online is more than fine. It doesn’t matter where you live: big city, small city, little town. You will fight and love together; you will develop new languages together and give each other comfort, conversation, and the strength to carry on. This is how you will change the world — and your art.

Buying this device, even if the details are a bit creepy, shows that you care, that you’re a good parent. And because parents are shamed and nudged into buying these tracking devices, more and more of them pop up on the market. It’s these purchases that technologists equate to “natural selection,” but it’s nearly impossible for most people to opt out of a lot of these arrangements.

Often consumers don’t have much power of selection at all. Those who run small businesses find it nearly impossible to walk away from Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Etsy, even Amazon. Employers often mandate that their workers use certain apps or systems like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. “It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, ‘I’m not going to give my kids this,’ or, ‘I’m not on social media,’”

And so we’re left with a tech world claiming to be driven by our desires when those decisions aren’t ones that most consumers feel good about. There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.

Have you ever needed to create a type scale following an 8 point baseline grid, or really any grid, and had to spend extra time figuring out what should be the right line-height for every text size in the scale?

A theme for various apps; text editors, terminal emulators, GTK, etc…

"All natural pine, faux fur and a bit of soho vibes for the classy minimalist."

it is not uncommon that I raise an accessibility or usability issue with a client’s design or implementation and am met with either “But Google does this,” or “But Apple does this.” Mostly it is the default response to any issue I raise, but it is far worse when it is a reaction to a genuine technical failure or problem real users have identified.

That response does not address the problem I may have raised. It avoids. It offloads responsibility. It declines to even try.

a lean, fast-loading web e-book template with a kind of definitive sturdiness. […] a tool to generate a nice web edition and robust EPUB edition from the same text

A smart library that automatically positions elements depending on their size in a grid to create responsive and beautiful layouts.

That is… based on aspect ratios — inspired by Apple's summary slides

Create React App has been a fantastic tool for developers wanting a quick, easy way to generate a new React application. Inevitably, as with anything, technology has evolved and an exciting new prospect has arrived, in Vite. Vite has established a completely new way to generate React applications, with speed at the forefront of its mind. […] Unlike CRA, Vite does not rebuild the whole app whenever changes are made, it is built on demand. It splits the app into two categories; dependencies and the source code. Dependencies are things that do not often change during the development process. Vite pre-bundles these using esbuild, which is written in Go and is 10-100 times faster than the JavaScript alternative. Source code is served over native ESM (ECMAScript modules). The benefit of this method is that there is no need for bundling, they are called on demand when required, and it is incredibly fast.

There are many benefits to getting started on sound design as a film develops as opposed to coming on at the end. It gives you more time to explore and develop creative ideas, influence the look of the visuals, and get the filmmakers involved in the creative sound process. When starting early on a film, or for complex sound design projects that require (or allow time for) experimentation, it's essential to have a solid plan for how to proceed. Staying on track will help you successfully complete your sound design project.

I think laziness really is this canary in a coal mine kind of emotion that tells us when our values are out of step with our actual lives. A lot of times we pour so much energy into being impressive at work, satisfying all the demands of our friends and family and just trying to overachieve in every possible way that we don't really listen to that inner voice that tells us, "Here's what matters most to me in my life. Here's what I really believe in and value. And here's how I really would live if I wasn't just setting out to satisfy other people."

For most of the past decade, I have spent a considerable fraction of my professional life consulting with teams building on the web.

It is not going well.

Not only are new services being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, existing experiences are pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: "why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?"