The lost thread
The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
Tags: ban
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Friday, November 18th, 2022
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.
If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.
Thursday, February 24th, 2022
The web is overrun and pop-up blockers haven’t worked in years
The technical challenge in blocking modern pop-ups is bigger than the pop-ups of the past decades. However, it’s long overdue that web browsers step up and act to protect their users’ interests. Pop-ups, pop-overs, interstitials, modal dialogs, whatever you want to call them! It’s time to ban them from the web again! At least immediately after a page load.
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022
‘Like an atomic bomb’: So what now for the IAB’s GDPR fix after regulator snafu? - Digiday
Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021
Email Tracking and Paperless Banking – Dan Q
Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021
A Few Notes on A Few Notes on The Culture
When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.
First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”
Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever
There are some links that I return to again and again.
Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.
Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?
But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).
Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.
Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.
Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.
I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.
Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!
I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.
Tuesday, June 1st, 2021
Broad Band
I like to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is often of the science variety. Actually, so is the non-fiction.
There was a non-fiction book I had queued up for a while and I finally got around to reading. Broad Band by Claire L. Evans. Now I’m kicking myself that I didn’t read it earlier. I think I might’ve been remembering how I found Mar Hicks’s Programmed Inequality to be a bit of a slog—a fascinating topic, but written in a fairly academic style. Broad Band covers some similar ground, but wow, is the writing style in a class of its own!
This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling—a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting—even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.
It’s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.
I absolutely loved it. So did Cory Doctorow:
Because she is a brilliant and lyrical writer she brings these women to life, turns them into fully formed characters, makes you see and feel their life stories, frustrations and triumphs.
Even the most celebrated women of tech history – Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper – leap off the page as people, not merely historical personages or pioneers. Again, these are stories I thought I knew, and realized I didn’t.
Yes! That!
Saturday, January 16th, 2021
HTML Video Sources Should Be Responsive | Filament Group, Inc.
Removing
mediasupport from HTML video was a mistake.
Damn right! It was basically Hixie throwing a strop, trying to sabotage responsive images. Considering how hard it is usually to remove a shipped feature from browsers, it’s bizarre that a good working feature was pulled out of production.
Friday, December 18th, 2020
No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog
I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:
We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020
Merch Table
Feel bad because your favourite artists aren’t getting any income from Spotify? Here’s a handy tool from Hype Machine that allows you to import Sportify playlists and see where you can support those artists on Bandcamp.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data | Polypane Browser for Developers
There’s no browser support yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t start adding prefers-reduced-data to our media queries today. I like the idea of switching between web fonts and system fonts.
Monday, September 7th, 2020
Kokorobot — leanerweb
The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.
This speaks to me:
Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.
Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.
There’s a list of links at the end of this piece to help you reach this goal:
It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible.
Sunday, September 6th, 2020
Mapping a World of Cities
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Sunday, July 19th, 2020
90s Festival Generator
I spent far too long hitting refresh and then clicking on the names of some of the Irish bands down near the bottom of the line-up.
Friday, June 12th, 2020
The City — Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber
Tiny ruins.
Monday, June 1st, 2020
The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later
If you’re in a group of people being chased by a bear, you only need to be faster than the slowest person in the group. But that’s not how websites work: being faster than at least one other website, or even faster than the ‘average’ website, is not a great achievement when the average website speed is frustratingly slow.
Sunday, May 3rd, 2020
Fictional Band Trivia | Rob Weychert
Okay, so I didn’t get many of the answers, but nonetheless these are excellent questions!
(Ah, how I long for the day when we can once more engage in quizzo and picklebacks at National Mechanics.)
Monday, March 23rd, 2020
Free Movie of the Week
While we’re all confined to quarters during The Situation, Gary Hustwit is offering one of his films for free every week. The fantastic Helvetica is just about to finish its run, but every one of Gary’s films is worth watching (and rewatching): Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and Rams.
Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID crisis. Each week we’ll be posting another film here. We hope you enjoy them, and please stay strong.
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020
Visitors, Developers, or Machines
Garrett’s observation is spot-on here:
I’ve been trying to understand the appeal of these frameworks by giving them an objective chance. I’ve expanded my knowledge of JavaScript and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have their places, but the only explanation I can come up with is that developers are taking a similar approach as Ruby and focusing on developer convenience and productivity. Only, instead of Ruby’s performance being tied to the CPU level, JavaScript frameworks push the performance burden to the client.
In both cases, the tradeoff happens in the name of developer happiness and productivity, but the strategies have entirely different consequences. With Ruby, the CPU is still (mostly) the responsibility of the development team, and it can be upgraded. With JavaScript, the page weight becomes an externality pushed onto visitors.
Monday, February 24th, 2020
Web bloat
Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.
Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:
- A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
- Some sites will use a lot of data!