I really enjoyed this chat with Marc:
I recently sat down with Jeremy Keith for a spontaneous conversation that quickly turned into a deep dive into something we both care a lot about: events, community, and why we keep putting ourselves through the joy and pain of running conferences.
Appealing to data as the ultimate authority — especially when fueled by engineered desire — isn’t neutrality, it’s an abdication of responsibility.
Some neat CSS from Tess that’s a great example of progressive enhancement; these book covers look good in all browsers, but they look even better in some.
There’s a new meta tag on the block. This time it’s for allowing system-level text sizing to apply to your website.
Laura’s classic book is now a web book that you can read for free online.
This episode of the Shop Talk Show is the dictionary definition of “rambling” but I had a lot of fun rambling with Chris and Dave!
People use “enshittification” to describe platform decay. What I’m describing here is one of the mechanisms that makes that decay feel personal. It’s the constant conversion of your attention into a KPI.
A fascinating talk looking at the history of the intersection of knitting and stitching with wartime cryptography and resistance.
This is clever, and seems obvious in hindsight: use an anonymous @layer for your CSS reset rules!
Well, this is horrifying.
A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.
This is depressing.
Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not causing “jank” in some abstract technical sense; you’re ignoring someone who’s trying to talk to you.
This is a great way to think about client-side JavaScript!
Also:
Before your application code runs a single line, your framework has already spent some of the user’s main thread budget on initialization, hydration, and virtual DOM reconciliation.
I’m avoiding Mac OS Tahoe because of the disgraceful liquid glass debacle, but it looks like the rot goes even deeper. Here’s a detailed look at the sad state of iconography in application menus.
I know that changes in an OS update can take time to get used to, but this isn’t a case of “one step forwards, two steps back”—it’s just a lot of steps back with no forwards.
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer’s IP address). And it’s the hard part when they’re prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.
The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.
I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
So much truth in one story:
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.