Archive: October 2025

  • Enrique Peñalosa: Why buses represent democracy in action - YouTube

    Enrique Peñalosa on how to build cities that prioritise human beings over cars and guarantee a citizen’s right to safe mobility.

    In my opinion, the following bit at the start of the video certainly holds true for India:

    The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport or bicycles.

  • Today I learned, :root (0-1-0) has a higher specificity than html (0-0-1).

    In hindsight, it’s obvious. :root is a CSS pseudo-class selector and, like most pseudo-class selectors, it has the same specificity as a class selector or an attribute selector.

  • Hot take: Padel is to tennis what bowling with bumpers on is to bowling. Its design choices lead to fewer mistakes and a lower barrier to entry.

  • The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges | Quanta Magazine

    To see how this unfolds, take the perspective of an ant on the march. When it comes to a gap in its path, it slows down. The rest of the colony, still barreling along at 12 centimeters per second, comes trampling over its back. At this point, two simple rules kick in.

    The first tells the ant that when it feels other ants walking on its back, it should freeze. “As long as someone walks over you, you stay put,” Garnier said.

    This same process repeats in the other ants: They step over the first ant, but — uh-oh — the gap is still there, so the next ant in line slows, gets trampled and freezes in place. In this way, the ants build a bridge long enough to span whatever gap is in front of them. The trailing ants in the colony then walk over it.

  • I keep forgetting, but the alt attribute of the <img> element is not just useful for users who are visually impaired. It is also useful when the image is not displayed in the browser for whatever reason. For example: the src attribute does not contain a valid path to an image.

  • John Mayer on how trying and not doing it well enough is a wonderful technique for being yourself:

    Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself. So I’m not necessarily thinking this thing from scratch, going, Okay, I’m gonna, like, do Jerry-esque things, but I’m still gonna sound like me. No, it’s more like, I want to sound just like Jerry, and then the way I naturally, obviously don’t — that’s your personality. Music doesn’t let you lie. […] You try to sound like who you want to sound like, and you just will always end up sounding like you.

    I like this advice. It is an interesting take on the learning by copying method.

  • Adactio: Journal—Mind set

    Ah! Good old Jeremy Keith, insightful and funny.

    If I really want to change someone’s mind, then I need to make the effort to first understand their mind. That’s going to be far more productive than declaring that my own mind is made up. After all, if I show no willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, why should they?

    There’s an old saying that before criticising someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. I’m going to try to put that into practice, and not for the two obvious reasons:

    1. If we still disagree, now we’re a mile away from each other, and
    2. I’ve got their shoes.