There is zero evidence that crypto is creating any technical innovation connected to the larger economy, and a strong preponderance of evidence it is a net drain on society by circumventing the rule of law, facilitating tax evasion, environmental devastation, enabling widespread extortion through ransomware and incentivizing an increasingly frothy ecosystem of scams to defraud the public. Nothing of value would be lost by a blanket cryptocurrency ban.
Brewster Kahle:
The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.
Nicky Case on RSS:
Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.
Imagine a version of the newsletter where you don’t have to worry about them selling your email to scammers, labyrinth-like unsubscribe pages, or stuffing your inbox with ever more crap.
When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. The beaver dams are part of what biologists would call the animal’s extended phenotype, an unavoidable necessity of the ecological niche that the beaver occupies. When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation.
We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
- Get the beat.
- Listen to the wisdom of the system.
- Expose your mental models to the open air.
- Stay humble. Stay a learner.
- Honor and protect information.
- Locate responsibility in the system.
- Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
- Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
- Go for the good of the whole.
- Expand time horizons.
- Expand thought horizons.
- Expand the boundary of caring.
- Celebrate complexity.
- Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
We may not live in the best of all possible worlds, but we have dodged some bullets:
In the annals of environmental history, humanity’s response to the ozone crisis stands out as a rare success story. During the 1970s and ‘80s, evidence started to mount that certain household chemicals used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans like hairspray were eating a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer, which prevents harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the surface. Facing the terrifying prospect of a future without any atmospheric sunscreen at all, in the late 1980s nations came together to sign the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty to phase out so-called ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons.
But if things hadn’t turned out that way—if the scientific evidence linking man-made chemicals to ozone depletion wasn’t strong enough, or if ozone deniers (yes, there were ozone deniers) successfully stymied the Montreal Protocol—the world might look very different.
An excellent thoughtful piece from Angela Saini (as always):
Popular opinion, “common sense” and the closely related priors of scientific enquiry have never been reliable guides when it comes to decoding human difference. After all, European biologists once thought it was obvious that colour-coded races were different species or breeds that had evolved separately on each continent. It was obvious to taxonomist Carl Linnaeus that monster-like and feral races of humans surely existed somewhere in the world. More recently, neuroscientists were happily insisting that women were innately less intelligent than men because they had smaller brains. A few neuroscientists still do.
History shows that many supposed “facts” about human nature were actually always cultural constructions. Race is one. Gender is another. Now, some researchers believe that sex—generally seen as determined by anatomy, including chromosomes, hormones and genitalia—may to some extent be constructed, too. Binary categories of male and female, they say, certainly don’t fully encompass all the natural variation and complexity that we see in our species.
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
I think Bruce is onto something here:
It seems to me that browsers could do more to protect their users. Browsers are, after all, user agents that protect the visitor from pop-ups, malicious sites, autoplaying videos and other denizens of the underworld. They should also protect users against nausea and migraines, regardless of whether the developer thought to (or had the tools available to).
So, I propose that browsers should never respect
scroll-behavior: smooth;if a user prefers reduced motion, regardless of whether a developer has set the media query.
An audio mix for every year of recorded sound, 1859 to the present.
Currently up to 1936.
These comics by a former Googler give a cumulative insight into the decaying culture there.
We’ve enjoyed a relatively long period when we didn’t have to think about which browser to use. Alas, that period is ending: I must now keep Chrome running all the time, much like I needed that PC in the early 2000s.
An interesting proposal for defining how one element could be “anchored” to another, and how that positioning could be expressed declaratively instead of having to write a whole load of JavaScript. Melanie’s looking for use cases so share ‘em if you have ‘em.
Personally, I’m not convinced that a new element is needed but I’m open to the suggestion.
A great tool is not a universal tool it’s a tool well suited to a specific problem.
The more universal a solution someone claims to have to whatever software engineering problem exists, and the more confident they are that it is a fully generalized solution, the more you should question them.
I love the idea of cultivating a sixth sense for the location of Sagittarius A.
(I bet Matt would get a kick out of Charlotte’s magnet fingers too.)
I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.
An interesting alternative to using the full Vue library, courtesy of Vue’s creator:
petite-vueis an alternative distribution of Vue optimized for progressive enhancement. It provides the same template syntax and reactivity mental model with standard Vue. However, it is specifically optimized for “sprinkling” small amount of interactions on an existing HTML page rendered by a server framework.
A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
This is my new favourite indie web site (super performant and responsive too).
Progressive enhancement in meatspace:
IRL progressive enhancement is quite common when you think of it. You can board planes with paper boarding cards, but also with technology like QR codes and digital wallets. You can pay for a coffee with cash, card or phone. The variety serves diverse sets of people. Just like in web development, not dismissing the baseline lets us cover use cases we didn’t know existed. It is fragile, though: some manager somewhere probably has a fantasy about replacing everything with fancy tech and fancy tech only.