Ethan

Variation on the XKCD 2347 graphic of software building on each other, showing very unstable tower, featuring sharks biting undewater cables, unpaid opensource developers, AWS, Cloudflare, AI, Microsoft, left-pad, v8, WASM and it is all almost falling apart, but not actually.

If #XKCD 2347 was made today …

(via social.linux.pizza/@latenightow...)

Stack of blocks labeled, all modern digital infrastructure. A ratchet tipping over the entire stack is labeled AI. A load bearing pillar is labeled unpaid open source development. Another label is AWS, and Cloudflare and Unpaid Open Source Developers.

Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Ladies and gentlemen... the weekend. (also: you are important and are not alone 🧡)

WALT MOSSBERG is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him. The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his company's recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the author of the weekly "Personal Technology" column in The Wall Street Journal, he's used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells back, "I don't give a fuck about your stock price!"

I think about this Walt story every day but some days a lot more than others

Date: Monday, January 13, 1992, 5:26 pm To: Byron Preiss Dear Byron, Thanks for the script of the novel. I don't know what happened to the first one. It may have been a victim of the office move (see above). I'll respond as quickly and briefly as possible. One general point. A thing I have had said to me over and over again whenever I've done public appearances and readings and so on in the States is this: Please don't let anyone Americanise it! We like it the way it is! There are some changes in the script that simply don't make sense. Arthur Dent is English, the setting is England, and has been in every single manifestation of HHGG ever. The 'Horse and Groom' pub that Arthur and Ford go to is an English pub, the 'pounds' they pay with

are English (but make it twenty pounds rather than five- inflation) So why suddenly 'Newark' instead of 'Rickmansworth'? And 'Bloomingdales' instead of 'Marks & Spencer'? The fact that Rickmansworth is not within the continental United States doesn't mean that it doesn't exist! American audiences do not need to feel disturbed by the notion that places do exist outside the US or that people might suddenly refer to them in works of fiction. You wouldn't, presumably, replace Ursa Minor Beta with 'Des Moines'. There is no Bloomingdales in England, and Bloomingdales is not a generic term for large department stores. If you feel that referring to "Marks & Spencer' might seriously freak out Americans because they haven't heard of it (or because Marks and Spencer owns Brooks Brothers) we could either put warning stickers on the cover ("The text of this book contains references to places and institutions outside the continental United States and may cause offence to people who haven't heard of them") or you could, I suppose, put 'Harrods', which most people will have heard of. Or we could even take the appalling risk of just recklessly mentioning things that people won't have heard of and see if they survive the experience. They probably will - when people are born they haven't heard of anything or anywhere, but seem to get through the first few years of their lives without ill-effects.

Haha! Love this letter from Douglas Adams to his US editor about not Americanising the text of Hitchhiker's Guide. 🐋🌸

Aww, poor guy. Nobody could have seen this coming. https://twitter.com/crackticker/status/1901799747796566376

Attempting a Safari Move: https://chriscoyier.net/2024/12/04/attempting-a-safari-move/

It's Twitter, 2024. Posters have moved en masse to BlueSky. Elon Musk tweets a meme of Left Shark saying "the woke virus strikes again." A handful of divorced 50-year-olds in Big Dog t-shirts respond "lmao EPIC sir." All is well

Did you know that 99% of email today is spam? Your inbox isn’t 99% spam because AI is used to filter it.

The same 99% will happen here too, but if AI researchers continue to get perma-banned for making available the datasets needed to filter it, it’s going to make this platform unusable.

turns out Jason is a visionary

A screenshot of the search results for "Material theme t3dotgg" on the VS Code extensions store. It shows a top listing of "Material Theme (But I Won't Sue You)"

Just learned that the creator of the Material Theme for VS Code has retroactively relicensed it as a commercial product, and started threatening everyone he can find who is using the previous version which was Apache licensed

Totally unrelated, I just published my first VS Code extension

There can only be one me. Help me let @bsky.app be aware that I’m the real me. Many thanks, Mar🐫

🙏 ♥️ 👍

Edit of a scene from I Am Robot: Will Smith: y'all got any [documentation] Robot: we got a [discord server] Will Smith: [looks down in saddened disbelief]

📌

The old man who went viral in China for making dry sandwiches

New hero just dropped

📌

📌

📌

Thank you everyone.
Wouldn't be here without you.
Literally.

Yeah we have those in the UK, they call them "Smart Motorways" and they suck.

All they do is confuse people and cause accidents as a result of the constant changing of the speed limit or closing random lanes and then opening them again its just nuts. 🙃

Screenshot of the Bluesky settings page, under "Accessibility Settings". There is a toggle labeled "Require alt text before posting".

😮 Bluesky pro-tip: in the accessibility settings, you can enforce that the images you post must have alt text.

This is important for folks who use screen readers. Instead of seeing the image, the supplied text will be read to them instead.

The M6 is like if someone sat down and thought what could make motorway driving even more painful I know endless road works constant speed limit changes and every muppet on the planet who shouldn’t be trusted with slicing their own bread let alone driving a car.

so, about that “native feel”

How to Set Your Domain as Your Bluesky Handle · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer (en-US) Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and developer from Stuttgart, Germany. Besides design practice he teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design...

Wrote a short blog post about it: matthiasott.com/notes/how-to...

(for all the newbies, yes we are calling them skeets)

Matt Pocock posts a butterfly emoji in X

I just saw @mattpocockuk.bsky.social's post, and I wonder if a flash mob where we all post a 🦋 at the same time in X could make some ripples. As in scheduling a post for tomorrow, October 31, 7 am PST 👀

New settings screen that looks way nicer

really excited for this

blue logo like the CSS3 shield made popular

rebeccapurple logo, an homage to CSS history

after tons of iteration we're excited to share RC4 of the CSS logos, and we want the community to help us pick the final color:

github.com/CSS-Next/css...

Vote by reacting to the comment!

Platform Strategy and Its Discontents - Infrequently Noted Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

Platforms are competitions, and the web is losing. We can do simple, straightforward things to combat that decline...but contemporary frontend isn't doing those things.

Why not?

A consolidated thread from last week:

infrequently.org/2024/10/platform…