Links from 2023 (277 links)

A large-scale, public access walkability index that assigns a numerical walkability score to any address in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

By treating some digital services as public infrastructure, countries from tiny Estonia to giants such as India and Brazil are reimagining what sovereignty and state capacity could look like in a world of bits and bytes.

In a recent McKinsey survey, they say, about 90% of companies had some kind of digital strategy, but they captured less than a third of the revenue gains they had anticipated. Moreover, the success rate is more uneven within industries than it is between them. The best retailer may be more digitally productive than an average high-tech firm, and the worst retailer may be as bad as the worst government entity.

I think the 3 absolute demons that will eventually seek to destroy you in any homebrewn GUI framework will eventually be:

- Rendering and dealing with text in all of its extreme permutation. Styling. Localization. Character sets. Etc.

- Modern accessibility standards. There are countless annoying yet de facto UX patterns that are just nightmarish to check off the list from scratch. Inputs/forms/etc. Even worse than accessibility, because you can decide to forgo that completely if you really wanted. The sheer volume of UX use cases and edge cases involved in even seemingly basic input components is also an exercise in rote dread. You've got input validation, error states, just so many ergonomics to deal with.

- Fluid layouts and scaffolding. This is where modern HTML/CSS finally starts to shine because making flexible layouts is actually quite painless. But it's a motherfucker to roll your own approach.

Almost too in-depth.

An open source game about learning Git

DevOps started as a well-intentioned set of practices and culture. Over the years, it has devolved into an unholy beast of division and tunnel vision.

The most important thing that Apple announced this week was not actually that Vision Pro, even if it is what has grabbed the headlines and will decide Apple’s future. Instead, it is the software and operating system that underpins it, and which could be around for much longer than the headset itself.

If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.

Spicy.

Via Popular.

Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users. That asymmetry is, I believe, at the crux of the open source sustainability.

As the amount of UPF we eat rises, so do rates of cancer and diabetes. Riddled with additives that are crammed into tiny print on the sides of packs, such food constitutes 57% of Britons’ energy intake. This is the highest in Europe, comparing with 14% in France and 13% in Italy. Being overweight or obese affects 63% of adults in England, among the highest percentage in Europe. There now appears to be incontrovertible evidence that such a diet heightens the risk not just of diabetes and cancer but cardiovascular disease and dementia.

What is more striking, though, is the extent to which Apple is leaning into a personal computing experience, whereas Meta, as you would expect, is focused on social. I do think that presence is a real thing, and incredibly compelling, but achieving presence depends on your network also having VR devices, which makes Meta’s goals that much more difficult to achieve. Apple, meanwhile, isn’t even bothering with presence: even its Facetime integration was with an avatar in a window, leaning into the fact you are apart, whereas Meta wants you to feel like you are together.

A simple, lightweight PowerShell script that allows you to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to declutter and customize your Windows experience. Win11Debloat works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

We wrote the first season in the belief that nobody would watch the show. And nobody did, really. Or the second season. It took a global pandemic, and the world’s population sitting at home wondering what they could do, for people to really start paying attention.

“Succession” is a tragedy because breaking the cycle of familial abuse has always been a pipe dream; “Succession” is a comedy because of how the show illustrates that truth. The diamond-sharp scripts are an indelible mix of erudition — bags aren’t big, they’re “ludicrously capacious” — and inarticulate bluster, the Roys stammering in strings of “ums” and “yeahs.” The direction, established by Adam McKay in the pilot and then led by executive producer Mark Mylod, is hyperactive and deliberately un-stylized, focusing on anxious, greedy people rather than the gorgeous spaces they inhabit. Visually, the show looks more like a vérité-style cringe sitcom (such as “The Thick of It,” where Armstrong once worked as a writer) than an escapist fantasy.

In the core implementation of Interplanetary Internet, satellites orbiting a planet communicate to other planet's satellites. Simultaneously, these planets revolve around the Sun with long distances, and thus many challenges face the communications.

I am getting more and more convinced that big, systemic change takes root in conscious but modest shifts in behaviour and thought. The argument developed in this short book confirms this: asking the right questions, from an authentic attitude of respect and curiosity, is the basis for building trusting relationships; trust facilitates better task-related communication and, thereby, ensures collaboration to get the job done.

An Edinburgh based art shop, specialising primarily in spray paint, street art and graffiti art supplies.

Open source, privacy-first web analytics. Lightweight, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative. Self-hosted or cloud.

Via ryudozen.

Shorn of its title and visuals, Resort Island could potentially be about any kind of impermanence or decline. But this speaks mainly to the limitations of instrumental electronic music, and Resort Island should be applauded for engaging with an emotion as fundamentally elusive as ambivalence.

When it’s time to get online, the MP02’s 4G LTE connection can be shared with a tablet/laptop – which means easier typing in comparison with a smartphone, and a bigger screen. This two-device approach means that the Internet is something you dip into, rather than the other way round.

Pocket Operations — A collection of drum machine patterns

His readers might recognize his signature touches—affectless narration, illogical plot turns, strangely dispassionate sexual encounters, all brought to life via a suite of signifiers with an unarticulated personal meaning, such as the many references to music, baseball, cats, cooking, and so on—but they belong to Murakami. (That said, the English novelist David Mitchell’s Number9Dream comes thrillingly close to Murakami, maybe the most successful work of literary fan fiction ever published.)

It might be nice to think it is, but I don’t believe that getting angry on Twitter particularly helps anyone other than Elon Musk, or that sitting in judgment on every passing infraction is anything other than a hiding to nothing. It is not effecting change – it is the illusion of effecting change. It is exactly the sort of looking-the-wrong-way that allowed the Post Office scandal to happen – and if we keep doing it, the people who really run things will keep on getting away with it.

The depressing reality of what has happened here becomes all the more stark when you look across the river. Right opposite the power station stands Churchill Gardens, a vast postwar housing estate designed by distinguished architects Powell and Moya, built to house 5,000 people across a 12-hectare site, with several blocks now listed and around half still council-owned. Built by Westminster City Council, it was designed to accommodate a balanced cross-section of society, with the highest standards of housing for all – and not a segregated entrance in sight.

Gitlab's fine Root Cause Analysis (RCA) template.

The W3C spec is mostly stable, and there’s a working prototype in Chrome now. We just need a little interest from the community to entice other browsers to build their implementations and kick this over the finish line.

Via Popular.

ISO 9241 is a multi-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) covering ergonomics of human-computer interaction.