Links from 2025

Relative units like em and rem are excellent for internal relationships – keeping the scale consistent between body text and headings, for example. But things always go wrong when we try to treat em as an alias for px, with mental conversions based on their assumed default relationship. At that point we’re keeping zoom, but discarding everything else about the user preference.

Superb primer on motion design.

Basically design tokens.

This document describes requirements for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Arabic script when they are used by Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode.

If you are fortunate, a fantastic way to share your fortune is to gift a friend the cost of travel with you. You both will have a great time.

But because of how information works in our new world run by digital platforms, the difference between the illusion of power and the real thing is vanishingly small. And in an attention economy, they effectively become the same thing over time.

STL is short for Single Threaded Leader. Different from previous approach, this [...] makes the leader exclusively dedicated to a project. The individual ONLY works on this single top level initiative.

Building a lightweight Go app on the Jetstream

The 15 min City platform lets you explore how much worldwide cities are close to this ideal, by merging open data about venues within cities, population grids and routing algorithms. With 15 min City, you can check which activities or places are accessible to a neighbourhood on foot and by bike, and compare it to other urban areas. You can also check which city is the closest to the 15 minutes ideal looking at our city rankings in the map.

The case for less rigor and more nuance

Accompanying guide for this most excellent exhibition.

A good side-by-side of Changesets and Semantic Release.

Somehow missed this first time round.

Good thoughts about design systems being basically a platform function.

Missed this first time around. The demo technique is uncannily similar to how we've ended up working. This is a wonderful articulation.

“The national insurance rise, minimum wage increase and employment rights bill suggest the government is prioritising getting more people into higher quality jobs rather than just seeking to increase employment at all costs in the short run,” Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation said.

Interesting take.

Basically: be a nice human.

Bypassing means not meeting your misinformed opponent head-on. This is not a clash of arguments or a battle of the studies. You are maneuvering an argument into a different position. It’s a kind of epistemological aikido — using someone’s movements and logic against them.

Python however is hard, because it is only available in English, and requires learners to learn complex programming concepts and syntax at once. Hedy is the easy way to get started with textual programming languages!

Exhaustive list of HomeKit devices.

Tailwind helps you build web pages quickly with a utility-first approach — but is it right for your project? Here we explore its benefits and trade-offs.

Sound Blocks explores the visualization of music, assembling piece by piece to create a harmonious whole.

Very satisfying.

Making homes more energy efficient through insulation and air tightness can give superior comfort levels while also cutting carbon and bills. However, traditional solid-walled buildings present particular challenges. Lisa Pasquale will show how superior comfort can be achieved on a modest budget with appropriate insulation materials and careful draught-proofing.

"Couldn't this have all been an email?"

The Stargate presents the saga of a mysterious artifact and its victims in a hallucinatory synthesis of science fiction and folk horror, where mind bending imagery and unsettling atmospheres converge in a surreal tale of primeval blood magic, interdimensional travel and grotesque otherworldly technology beginning in the Dark Ages and journeying into voids of deep space.

I wouldn't have imagined that I'd spend the first month of 2025 watching 20 minute long progressive death metal videos but I have no regrets.

As interpreted by Lucas Debiasi (via Russell).

An open specification for enriching containers with development specific content and settings.

Spirital successor to Vagrant?

Armed with little more than the principles behind them and some maths that has been solved for half a century, you can build an entire theory of how to invest your hard-earned savings. It tells you how much you should risk on the stockmarket, how much you should keep safe and what you can spend in retirement. It requires just a few facts about financial markets and some of the simplest, cheapest investment funds that asset managers offer. What is more, it was first formulated by a Nobel-prizewinning economist and is today almost universally accepted by his successors as the “correct” approach to investment and spending. Yet outside academia, almost no one has heard of it.

In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. Homo typographicus would be followed by Homo interneticus. His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, interneticus would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.

Great article on commercially available assistive tech: AirPods Pro 2, Wandercraft Personal Exoskeleton, Emporia ME.6, Nobi Pendant light and Xigxag X-book.