Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - Farnam Street
Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong.
Link tags: ua
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The Technium: Ideas Want to be Shared
The books I have written are created from words invented by others, filled with ideas created by others. Even the few new ideas that are new depend on older ideas to work. What I had to say would probably be said by someone else not long after me. (More probably there have already been said by someone I was not aware of.) I may be the lucky person to claim those rare new ideas, but the worth of my art primarily resides in the great accumulation of the ideas and works of thousands of writers and thinkers before me — what I call the commons. My work was born in the commons, it gets its value by being deeply connected to the commons, and after my brief stewardship of those tiny new bits, it should return to the commons as fast as possible, in as many ways as possible.
Plus Equals #4, December 2021
In which Rob takes a deep dive into isometric projection and then gets generative with it.
Metaphors We Web By: Paper and Place
Out of all of these metaphors, the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
Inertia - CSS-Tricks
Here’s a thoughtful response from Chris to my post about Svelte, Astro, and React.
Google, Facebook hiding behind skirts of small business
While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.
But tracking is an unnecessary evil.
Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.
Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.
Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.
I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
My Custom CSS Reset
This CSS reset is pleasantly minimalist and a lot of thought has gone into each step. The bit about calculating line height is very intriguing!
A visual introduction to machine learning
I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.
Podcast Notes: “Measuring Design” by Clearleft - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Well, this is just wonderful! Jim has written copious notes after listening to my favourite episode of season three of the Clearleft podcast, measuring design:
I’m going to have to try really, really hard to not just copy/paste the entire transcript of this podcast. It‘s that good. Don’t miss it.
Why you should prioritise quality over speed in design systems by Amy Hupe, content designer.
Speed for the sake of speed means nothing. If our design systems don’t ultimately lead to better quality experiences, we’re doing it wrong.
When we rush to release one-size-fits-all components, without doing the work to understand different contexts before curating and consolidating solutions, we sacrifice quality at the hands of speed.
The irony? In the long run, this will slow us down. We end up having to undo the work we’ve done to fix the problems we’ve created.
Ultimately, when we prioritise speed over quality, we end up with neither.
The impoverished language of business | Clearleft
A good post by Andy on “the language of business,” which is most cases turns out to be numbers, numbers, numbers.
While it seems reasonable and fair to expect a modicum of self-awareness of why you’re employed and what business value you drive in the the context of the work you do, sometimes the incessant self-flagellation required to justify and explain this to those who hired you may be a clue to a much deeper and more troubling question at the heart of the organisation you work for.
This pairs nicely with the Clearleft podcast episode on measuring design.
Kaleidoscope Brain: 100 Visualizations of Moby-Dick
Download this PDF to see 100 beautiful literary visualisations.
Vonnegut’s Story Shapes | Extraordinary Facility
The next best thing to having Kurt Vonnegut at the blackboard.
Plus Equals #3, September 2021
Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.
Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Engineering a better design test ~ @benjaminparry
It sometimes feels like we end up testing the limitations of our tools rather than the content and design itself.
What Benjamin found—and I heartily agree—is that HTML prototypes give you the most bang for your buck:
At the point of preparing for usability testing, it seemed ludicrous to move to any prototyping material other than the one we were already building in. The bedrock of the web: HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Software Crisis 2.0 – Baldur Bjarnason
Baldur Bjarnason writes an immense treatise on the current sad state of software, grounded in the historical perspective of the past sad state of software.
How Steven Weinberg Transformed Physics and Physicists | Quanta Magazine
His first popular book — The First Three Minutes, about cosmology and the Big Bang — became an instant classic and proved profoundly influential for both the general public and professional researchers. Many physicists, including me, started learning cosmology from this book.
The First Three Minutes blew my little mind as a teenager. It has stayed with me.
Sans Bullshit Sans — Leveraging the synergy of ligatures
As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:
We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.
Beginner JavaScript Notes - Wes Bos
A very handy collection of organised notes on all things JavaScript.