Links from 2023

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.