Understanding Layout Algorithms
Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.
Link archive: April 4th, 2022
The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet · Yiqin Fu
Imagine a world without hyperlinks or search:
Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:
- It doesn’t allow any external links;
- Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
- You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Search engine indexing is key to content discovery in the knowledge creation domain, but in a mobile-first world, it is extremely difficult to pull content across the walled gardens, whether or not there is a profit incentive to do so.
Again, the issue here is not censorship. Had China relaxed its speech restrictions, a search start-up would’ve faced the same level of resistance from content platforms when trying to index their content, and content platforms would’ve been equally reluctant to create their own search engines, as they could serve ads and profit without a functional search engine.
UA gotta be kidding
Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.
I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”
Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter | The New Yorker
In this piece published a year ago, Ted Chiang pours cold water on the idea of a bootstrapping singularity.
How much can you optimize for generality? To what extent can you simultaneously optimize a system for every possible situation, including situations never encountered before? Presumably, some improvement is possible, but the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achieved. This is a very strong claim. If someone is asserting that infinite optimization for generality is possible, I’d like to see some arguments besides citing examples of optimization for specialized tasks.