Links from 2023 (277 links)

When I remember being very young, moments of intense happiness stand out – happiness that came from just curling up in bed, or playing a game with friends, or flicking through a book about beachcombing. As I got older, that simple, deep happiness became harder and harder to achieve as new emotions and adult responsibilities settled in. In many ways, my attempts at happiness in adulthood have been attempts to get back to that uncomplicated feeling of relaxation and pleasure.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why didn’t they use Figma, or Sketch, or Photoshop (lol), as their single source of truth? As much as we love Figma, we know that design tools come and go, but our icons are forever, so Github made the most logical sense. And given that it’s where our code lives, it kept things simple too.

Good "don't keep your assets in your flavour-of-the-month design tool" evidence.

Some astounding (to me at least) stats.

New research from Ofcom has found that a fifth of three- and four-year-olds now have a phone of their own, and are already using them to watch streaming services, use social media and play games online.

The first thing I know about burnout is this: burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes.

The battle for masculinity is being fought primarily online. In the UK, 91 per cent of 11-year-olds have a phone. Boys aged seven to 16 say they spend more than two hours a day on YouTube.

Static file serving and directory listing

Pfft.

System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.

Via ttscoff.

An independent source of information on which services support MFA/2FA and help consumers demand MFA/2FA on the services that currently don’t.

The reasoning behind "no longer has access to the chat" in Teams.

So they’re in the wild now. You may not be legally able to build a commercial product on them, but the genie is out of the bottle. That furious typing sound you can hear is thousands of hackers around the world starting to dig in and figure out what life is like when you can run a GPT-3 class model on your own hardware.

Billed as a rant but actually fairly even-handed.

Via Popular.

The combination of geopolitical shocks, corporate strategies, and changing societal values will affect trade and investment patterns along four main axes. As companies opt for resilience over efficiency, they will increasingly shift their approach to supply chains from “just in time” to “just in case.” This will come at a time when security concerns gain greater weight in commercial considerations, and companies will move away from risk-sharing and general partnerships to more narrowly designed arrangements. Meanwhile, consumers will increasingly look for an emphasis on purpose in their commercial interactions.

Via Popular.

Genuinely horrifying.

Via gilest.

A weak take.

Functionalism is a theory of international relations that arose during the interwar period principally from the strong concern about the obsolescence of the state as a form of social organization. Rather than the self-interest of nation states that realists see as a motivating factor, functionalists focus on common interests and needs shared by states (but also by non-state actors) in a process of global integration triggered by the erosion of state sovereignty and the increasing weight of knowledge and hence of scientists and experts in the process of policy-making.

Designed with and for children under the age of 14, the space aims to inspire the next generation of artists, designers, performers and practitioners.

I am of the belief that currently, Python is actually two very similar programming languages sharing the same name. This certainly isn't a surprise to anyone who's been using Python for a while. What might be a surprise, though, is that I think this is actually a good thing. The languages, let's call them untyped Python and typed Python, even though sharing a very large common base are fundamentally different in how they enable the developers using them to solve problems.

Via Popular.

There’s another, simpler explanation for the enshittification of platform economics. Rather than trusting the self-serving narratives of the Prodigal Techbros who claim to have superhuman powers but promise that they have stopped using them for evil, we can adopt a more plausible worldview: that tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Puffin said they made the changes so that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”. How refreshingly candid. Substitute the word “enjoyed” with “purchased” (a process they’re presumably comfortable with) and we have the truth. There is nothing soft about making these changes at all – it is commercially ruthless.

It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.

Via monospaced.

Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition – as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests – or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.

What to include, where it goes, and why it matters more now

More anti-complexity, use-the-platform sentiment.

Some interesting comments on Lit.

It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

I found this youtube channel[0] has some pretty good walkthroughs (quite literally) of using various iOS apps to scan architectural spaces. The short answer is that the LIDAR and iOS APIs are remarkably powerful, but not 100% accurate. There are techniques to improve accuracy (e.g. using a gimbal), but ultimately you'll need to do tape or laser measurements and modify the models that these tools can build, or just model it yourself with the scan as a reference.

Bring people together, have discussions, make proposals and achieve clear outcomes

A Collection of Scripts Which Disable / Remove Windows 10 Features and Apps