Links

The goal of linking is about building community and creating networks that truly exist to support you and those around you; those networks will persist when social media lets you down.

When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral—whatever. Until I find out that it’s AI art. Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored.

To be honest, I had a tough time understanding this article completely. But that is a me problem because I think I don’t have the right mental model for view transitions yet. Nevertheless, I’m sure this article will be super helpful someday in the future.

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.

Nic Chan on how they overcame the hurdle of getting the signs to refresh on a page in a signage browser with no JavaScript. The solution was using a <meta> tag that tells the browser to refresh the page after the given number of seconds.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3600" />

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 love Astro. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to render the entire post content in my RSS feeds correctly. This article by Donnie D’Amato has been a lifesaver in this regard.

A great resource to understand how to use the alt attribute in various situations.

Initially, I thought this was just an article on how to fix the janky hover state of a card component. But it also goes over the HTML markup for a typical card component in the context of semantics and accessibility.

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.

John Oliver on drawing the line:

Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time.

I really like this explanation of what happens in between the user entering a web address into the browser and the browser displaying the result.

1. The web browser requests the resource you want to access from the web server it is stored on.
2. If the request is successful, the web server sends a response back to the web browser containing the requested resource.
3. In some cases, the requested resource will then fire off more requests, which will result in more responses.
4. When all of the resources have been requested, the web browser parses and renders them as required, before displaying the result to the user.

Jim Nielsen on the personal connections formed on the internet.

You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.

And how these connections are increasingly being lost when we prompt an impersonal LLM instead.

I love this bit from the video where Jason quotes Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia:

A developed country is not where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.

But why is it important that wealthy people take public transportation? Because, as Jason mentions,

[…] for better or for worse, these people are likely to have the power and political influence to demand efficient service.

Karthik Srinivasan discusses how to use curation to build a personal brand and shares some steps to get started.

Karthik Srinivasan uses his experience with running as an analogy to emphasize the importance of consistently showing up in the context of personal branding.

I found the analogy effective and relatable, as I had a similar experience when I started running.

Jim Nielsen uses his experience with golf as a metaphor to explain that the key to success in web development comes from actual practice — building websites — rather than obsessing over what tools, frameworks and technologies others are using.

Personal branding is about bringing focus to your touchpoints with the world (of strangers) so that the right kinds of people can find you and remember you. You make use of the attention when you really need it. But it is good to be in the consideration set.

As a freelancer, I’m always eager to learn how other folks work. Piccalilli’s behind-the-scenes look at their redesign is extremely useful.

Dr. Steve Bagley explains in layman’s terms what an operating system is:

[…] Imagine the difference between a house and a hotel. If you own a house, you can decide how to use the rooms, what color to paint the walls. But if that house becomes a hotel, you might give people the option to change the air conditioning temperature, but you wouldn’t let them fit air conditioning into their room without permission from the building owner. And it’s a bit the same with a computer. The operating system is a bit like the people who run the hotel in that it’s controlling all the resources for the system. So if Microsoft Word crashes, these days it’s not going to take down your computer because the operating system is set up in such a way that it can access resources that have been assigned to it and clean that up, and everything else continues hunky-dory.

And what happens if the operating system crashes and you get the blue screen of death (BSoD):

At that point, the thing that’s in charge of controlling everything has gone wrong, is corrupted, and can no longer run. So there’s pretty much no option at that point other than to halt the machine, say something’s gone wrong, and let the user reboot and restart.