Links and photos (27 May 2024)
On HTML and CSS #
We really don’t make enough of the fact that you don’t need JS to make a nice website. Just HTML and CSS
And, whatever most programmers say about HTML and CSS, they absolutely are much more accessible to learn than JS ever has been or will be
Scumbag versus Scumbag #
“Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h”
In the end, who knows? Cloudflare has absolutely no information on when they will force you into custom billing, but when they start “urgently” needing to talk to you you’re probably not going to get out until you have a juicy custom contract with them
So, on the one hand, the company in question is a casino and, honestly, fuck casinos.
But, on the other hand, Cloudflare is clearly running a protection racket so fuck them too.
Must-read of the week. #
This talk by Meredith Whittaker is excellent. I originally clicked way from it without reading because the title is in German, but turns out the talk itself is absolutely in English.
https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin
What we call AI today grew out of this toxic model – and must be understood primarily as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance and concentrated platform and computational power.
Other links #
- “Tom Luth, R.I.P. – News From ME”
- “Pixels of the Week – May 26, 2024 by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.”
- “Distracted”. “This industry used to sell solutions. Now it sells nothing, disguised as possibility.”
- “Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History”. To confound matters, the Etsy stores selling these generated images also sell genuine prints by Morris, Monet, Klimt, and Matisse."
- “Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa — with a lot of water | AP News”. “Ren’s team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what’s in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions.”
- “How the new Microsoft Recall feature fundamentally undermines Windows security | by Kevin Beaumont | May, 2024 | DoublePulsar”
- “Masonry and reading order – Rachel Andrew”. “There’s a proposal however that aims to deal with this, that would let developers indicate to the browser that they want to follow the “visual” flow of items rather than source order. This is currently named reading-order-items.”
- “Update on the Layer Based SVG Engine (LBSE) in WebKit”. This is looking really promising.
- “Half-ass it | everything changes”. This is excellent advice.
- “Boring is good”. I don’t think it’s that much of a coincidence that I read this in NetNewsWire.
- “I Need Your Help to Make 11ty Fully Independent and Sustainable in 2024—zachleat.com”
- “ongoing by Tim Bray · The Colors of Racism”. “Trollope’s writings and opinions were strikingly self-inconsistent.” Inconsistency is one of the core characteristics of a reactionary and Trollope is pretty much the dictionary definition of a reactionary.
- “The most harmful belief I had as a beginner photographer — aows”. Speaking of mental models that hold back your learning.
- “Forget Subtext – People Don’t Even Get Surtext – Terence Eden’s Blog”. In my experience, reactionaries generally do not even do a surface reading of texts.
- “My own little patch”. “It feels like things have descended in to a complete shitshow, and are only getting worse.”
- “Apple Annie’s Weblog · Working for a Living When Your Living isn’t Working, Part IV”. The other three entries in this series are worth your while as well.
- “Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages | Scientific Reports”. “These results provide a novel framework for understanding programming aptitude, suggesting that the importance of numeracy may be overestimated in modern programming education environments.”
Cat photo #
Here’s a sneaky picture I took of a neighbour cat. It shows off his collar, which I’m told by people in the neighbourhood is quite effective at preventing bird murder.
