Tim Harford — Article — What We Get Wrong About Technology
Toilet paper, barbed wire, shipping containers, and replicants.
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Toilet paper, barbed wire, shipping containers, and replicants.
Brendan’s list of dos and don’ts (mostly don’ts) from his years of conference speaking.
A good introduction to variable fonts, and an exploration of the possible interface elements we might use to choose our settings: toggles? knobs? sliders? control pads?
Tuukka Ojala is a programmer working on the web. He’s also blind. Here are the tools of his trade.
It turns out that Brighton has a mandolin orchestra. This aligns with my interests.
More on that event with Brian Aldiss I was reminiscing about: that was the first time that Kate unveiled part of her Purple People book:
Jeremy insisted this would be an excellent opportunity for me to read an excerpt from Purple People, and so invited me onto the stage with those illustrious, wordy wizards to share an early indigo excerpt. I was quite literally shaking that night (even more than a talking tree, ho ho), but all was jolly. I read my piece without falling off the stage, and afterwards, folk made some ace and encouraging comments.
Now the book is being crowdfunded for publication and you can take part. It’s currently 59% funded …come on, people, let’s make this happen!
Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:
If Safari is updating its “share” functionality to look for canonical URLs, then that should work not just for AMP pages, but also Medium posts that include a canonical URL (like the ones created by posting to the Medium API, which is what I’m doing).
Jason lists the stages of gradually turning the Cloud Four site into a progressive web app:
- Jul 13: Our redesign launches
- Oct 3: Service worker added
- Oct 18: More offline functionality and faster performance
- Nov 22: Web notifications
- Dec 7: Small tweaks and “launch”
And you can just keep incrementally adding and tweaking:
You don’t have to wait to bundle up a binary, submit it to an app store, and wait for approval before your customers benefit.
I quite like this proposal for geo
element in HTML, especially that it has a fallback built in (like video
). I’m guessing the next step is to file an issue and create a web component to demonstrate how this could work.
That brings up another question: what do you name a custom element that you’d like to eventually become part of the spec? You can’t simply name it geo
because you have to include a hyphen. geo-polyfill
? geo-proposal
? or polyfill-geo
? proposal-geo
?
Alla looks at ways of documenting animations into a pattern library. I tell ya, her book is going to be unmissable!
Paul Ford jots down his thoughts on that report on Ev’s blog:
The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It’s a paradox and very thorny. I’m writing this on a centralized platform called Medium. Clap!
I like his geeky idea for mini self-contained social networks:
What I want is like, 5 of these little computers and whenever I see a truly trusted friend, I just give them one. And they take it home, and plug it in somewhere, and now we’re on the same, secure network together. Sharing files and with a little messageboard. Maybe after 5 computers the network can’t get any bigger. And if you unplug one your whole archive goes down. I don’t know. I’m riffing here.
A report by the Digital Currency Initiative and the Center for Civic Media. Download the PDF or read the executive summary.
In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we evaluate advertise censorship-resistance as a major benefit. Second, these systems could indirectly enable greater competition and user choice, by lowering the barrier to entry for new platforms. As it stands, it is difficult for users to switch between platforms (they must recreate all their data when moving to a new service) and most mega-platforms do not interoperate, so switching means leaving behind your social network.
Interface is a font for highly legible text on computer screens.
And it’s free!
This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.
Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
Lin gives a deep dive into Firefox’s new CSS engine specifically, but this is also an excellent primer on how browsers handle CSS in general: parsing, styling, layout, painting, compositing, and rendering.
Luke has been asking people to imagine ways of augmenting the world. Spimes are back, baby!
Deb Chachra:
If research on biases has told us anything, it is that humans make better decisions when we learn to recognize and correct for bias.
Matt writes about the pleasure of independent publishing on the web today:
It feels transgressive to have a website in 2017. Something about having a domain name and about coding HTML which is against the grain now. It’s something big companies do, not small groups. We’re supposed to put our content on Facebook or Medium, or keep our publishing to an email newsletter. But a website?
But he points out a tension between the longevity that you get from hosting the canonical content yourself, and the lack of unified analytics when you syndicate that content elsewhere.
There’s no simple online tool that lets me add up how many people have read a particular story on Upsideclown via the website, the RSS feed, and the email newsletter. Why not? If I add syndication to Facebook, Google, and Apple, I’m even more at sea.
Joschi gives the backstory to last week’s excellent Material conference in Iceland that he and Brian organised. I love that this all started with a conversation at Indie Web Camp Brighton back in 2014.
Every newspaper has an obituary of Brian Aldiss today, but this heartfelt reminiscence by Chris feels very special to me:
Jeremy got Brian for the panel alongside Lauren Beukes and Jeff Noon - the result is still probably the single best author event I’ve ever attended.
Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap
as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional
and font-display: fallback
as well.
I like this list:
This is not a checklist. Instead, it is a set of broad guidelines meant to preserve an underlying value. It can be used as a guide for someone working on implementation or as a tool to evaluate an existing project.
I’ve added them to my collection of design principles.
Author = Laura
Guy = Erik Spiekermann
All’s well that ends well in this tale, and it prompted my entry for the subtweeting Olympics.
This is a smart way to queue up POST submissions for later if the user is offline. It’s not as powerful as background sync (because it requires the user to revisit your site) but it’s a good fallback for browsers that support service workers but don’t yet support background sync
- Do not depend on color
- Do not block zoom
- Rediscover the alt attribute
- Add subtitles and captions to your videos
- Semantics = accessibility
- Use the right mark-up
- Use roles when necessary
- On hiding elements
- Follow web accessibility standards
- Audit and review
There’s a free Creative Commons licensed PDF of this vital book available online.
A riveting firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements’ greatest strengths and frequent challenges.
I can’t wait to get my hands on Laura’s book. It will be released on September 26th, but you can preorder it now.
Amber describes Material much better than I could:
There’s an element of magic in the air that you get to grasp and breathe in when you gather in the same place with so many different people – people with stories and paths they could write books about. The passion, the ideas, the stories of difficult journeys (the behind-the-scenes that you never see on social media). All of this makes not a basic recipe for a good time, but one for a delicious, enlightening experience that I’ve not seen replicated in any other environment.
The only thing she neglects to mention is that her talk was very much part of what made the event so special.
Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
119 slides from Sarah on a wide range of SVG magic (with code).
Speaking of Koya Bound, here’s the web-based counterpart to the physical book.
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.
Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.
Monica explains how Shadow DOM could be the perfect answer for scoping CSS:
We didn’t have style encapsulation, so we started naming things “the right way” with BEM, so that we didn’t accidentally stomp over each other’s styles. We wanted to be able to author CSS from inside a JavaScript component, so we started using CSS-in-JS. We needed all these tools, because “the platform” (read: the browsers that be) wasn’t there, and building these tools showed that there was a need to move forward. For style encapsulation, Shadow DOM is the platform moving forward.
Although, in a way, Shadow DOM is also another flavour of CSS-in-JS:
Before you complain that using a Shadow DOM and Web Components means that it absolutely requires JavaScript: this is true.
Here’s Zach’s style guide. But the real reason I’m linking to this is his lovely description of having a personal website that grows over time:
As my own little corner of the web unceremoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.
Cynthia Lee didn’t write the clickbaity headline, but she did write the superb article that follows it, methodically taking the manifestbro apart:
Its quasi-professional tone is a big part of what makes it so beguiling (to some) and also so dangerous. Many defenders seem genuinely baffled that a document that works so hard to appear dispassionate and reasonable could provoke such an emotional response.
This is what I was trying to get at with my post, but here it is explained far more clearly, calmly, and rationally.
In the end, focusing the conversation on the minutiae of the scientific claims in the manifesto is a red herring. Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice.
We men face shame and firing if we say the wrong thing. Women face the same plus rape threats, death threats, and all kinds of sustained harassment. So women can’t speak up safely and therefore they would have to watch their male colleagues discuss how a woman’s brain determines her interests. How impossibly maddening that would be.
Normally a McSweeney’s piece elicits a wry chuckle, but this one had me in stitches.
Humans are also far more likely to “literally cannot right now.” I have never met an automaton that literally could not, though I have met some that theoretically would not and hypothetically might want to stop.
Paul pulls no punches in this rousing talk from Patterns Day.
The transcript is on his site.
Those who want to use science to support their views – especially if they seek to undermine equality efforts in the workplace – must make an effort to fully inform themselves about the science of human nature. They may be disappointed to learn that it’s not as simple as they think.
For more, read Angela Saini’s book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story.
An excellent rebuttal of that vile manifestbro, and an informative history lesson to boot.
You can’t cherry-pick a couple of scientific studies you like and use them to justify your arguments against diversity programs, while carefully ignoring the mountains of other scientific studies that show both how and why diversity programs are good, beneficial to all, and worth investing in.
I wish I could be this calm in refuting pseudoscientific bollocks, but I get so worked up by it that I’d probably undermine my own message. I’m glad that Faruk took the time to write this down.
Some of these really tickle my fancy bone.
That’s the icing on the iceberg
You let the horse out of the cart
What planet are you living under?
That opens a whole other kettle of fish
The cat’s out of the barn
Patience comes to those who wait
That’s right up my cup of tea
Paul goes into detail describing how he built a progressive web app that’s actually progressive (in the sense of “enhancement”). Most of the stuff about sharing code between server and client goes over my head, but I understood enough to get these points:
A series of questions to ask on any design project:
- What are my lenses?
- Am I just confirming my assumptions, or am I challenging them?
- What details here are unfair? Unverified? Unused?
- Am I holding onto something that I need to let go of?
- What’s here that I designed for me? What’s here that I designed for other people?
- What would the world look like if my assumptions were wrong?
- Who might disagree with what I’m designing?
- Who might be impacted by what I’m designing?
- What do I believe?
- Who’s someone I’m nervous to talk to about this?
- Is my audience open to change?
- What am I challenging as I create this?
- How can I reframe a mistake in a way that helps me learn?
- How does my approach to this problem today compare to how I might have approached this one year ago?
- If I could learn one thing to help me on this project, what would that one thing be?
- Do I need to slow down?
Jon’s been drawing a lunch note for his daughter every day since she was four years old. They are somewhat puntastic.
Oh, how I wish I could’ve been at Web Directions Code in Melbourne to see this amazing presentation by Charlotte. I can’t quite get over how many amazing knowledge bombs she managed to drop in just 20 minutes!
Here’s the video of the closing keynote I gave at the Frontend United conference in Athens.
There’s fifteen minutes of Q&A at the end where I waffle on in response to some thought-provoking ideas from the audience.
I’ve never been so excited by a single diff in a JSON file.
Service workers are coming to Safari.
Nadieh has packaged up the code for her lovely loom diagrams as a plug-in for d3.
Ben takes us on a journey inside the mind of a browser (Chrome in this case). It’s all about priorities when it comes to the critical path.
At Patterns Day, Alice shared what she has learned from shepherding the Origami project within the Financial Times.
I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.