Link tags: os

The Unreal Writer - by Joanne McNeil - All My Stars

Joanne McNeil on the retroactive pigeonholing of downright weird sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard and Octavia Butler:

The snobbery against science fiction in the past and today’s cartoon icons of some of its weirdest authors comes from the same root: an establishment that doesn’t know how to read or appreciate it.

And she absolutely nails the straitjacketed feeling I get from a lot of new sci-fi that’s laudable in its politics but lacking in other ways:

I suspect those authors are drawn to the genre for the thing that increasingly frustrates me about it: the way science fiction is mined for road maps and potential solutions in real situations of uncertainty and disaster. The way it’s “smart person” literature about systems with hyper-competent protagonists. I’m here for the losers. The losers are my people.

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational

A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

Every one of these 42 articles are gold!

It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.

UX London 2023 | Flickr

These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.

Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

It’s great to see how (progressive) web apps are being supported on both iOS and macOS …I just wish the discovery were better.

Automate the CEOs - by Hamilton Nolan - How Things Work

Let’s be rational here. If I were to imagine a job that was a perfect candidate for replacement by AI, it would be one that consists of measurable tasks that can be learned—allocation of capital, creation and execution of market strategy, selection of candidates for top roles—and one that costs the company a shitload of money. In other words: executives.

The logic is sound. However…

The CEOs will be spared from automation not because they should be, but because they are making the decisions about who is spared from automation.

404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner

Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.

Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies

The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:

Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using Proxy and WebComponents.

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple

This is the kind of press release I like.

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

WPDS - Accessibility | Resources

I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

The Technium: Dreams are the Default for Intelligence

I feel like there’s a connection here between what Kevin Kelly is describing and what I wrote about guessing (though I think he might be conflating consciousness with intelligence).

This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

This is enshittification.

Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.

People do use Add to Home Screen – Firefox UX

Oh no! My claim has been refuted by a rigourous scientific study of …checks notes… ten people.

Be right back: just need to chat with eleven people.

Audio Session API Explainer

Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.

I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:

if ('audioSession' in navigator) { navigator.audioSession.type = "playback"; }

PAST Visions of the Future - Future of Interfaces

Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.

A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari

An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?

Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures

Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.