A list of articles, sites and other resources that I found interesting or useful and decided to save to my Pinboard account.
Some of these are just useful tools, others are articles that inform how I look at the world and myself. Some of it is about stuff that's on my mind now, some of it I've had saved ages ago, but only recently read. That's how it goes, I guess. Nevertheless, it's a way of seeing what I'm thinking about.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Some strategies for helping with feeling isolated/lonely for people working remotely
Ten years ago I created The Oatmeal. I thought an appropriate way to mark the decade would be to publish a comic called "Ten things I've learned about creativity in ten years."
This is a good read for anyone doing creative work
…a lot of the materialize and dematerialize sounds came from that (homemade) Aeolian harp. […] Frequency Shifters do a weird thing. If you’ve got them at a very small offset, like 2 Hz, and you mix that into the original signal at 50%, then the sound it produces isn’t quite a tremolo but more of a Shepard’s Tone filter. I’m not sure how to describe it that well, but it’s this strange, alien-sounding “wom-wom-wom” sound. […] I’m able to take some of these old sound effects and look at their spectral arrangement and really pick that apart, to use that as a baseline or a starting point to generate new material that fits into the same realm. That’s been a huge help and a skillset that I never would’ve expected to build or think about – reverse engineering what they were doing and thinking about processes and equipment they’d have 50 or 60 years ago to make this stuff, and thinking about what I can use to emulate that.
Knip finds unused files, dependencies and exports in your JavaScript and TypeScript projects. Less code leads to improved performance, less maintenance and easier refactorings.
[…]
You could think of Knip as going (far!) beyond the no-unused-vars rule of ESLint. Knip lints the project as a whole (or parts of it).
Editly is a tool and framework for declarative NLE (non-linear video editing) using Node.js and ffmpeg. Editly allows you to easily and programmatically create a video from a set of clips, images, audio and titles, with smooth transitions and music overlaid.
How do you keep your game’s 1,000s of audio files under control? Over the years I’ve tweaked my audio design document to track SFX, music and VO. It’s my go-to for tracking progress and collaborating with CDs and production.
