Links

WebReplay

The Four Tools of Discipline

Brunello Cucinelli

Why I Never Use Shallow Rendering

LisaDziuba/Awesome-Design-Tools

What Are Design Tokens?

Love this. Doesn't need to be stored as JSON either, can convert from whatever and generate

A cron job that could save you from a ransomware attack

I have been obsessed with rsync lately

Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

How to do hard things

Identifying what specificially the hard things are, then adjusting the task to add/remove difficulty

CSS{ In Real Life }

Minimal Viable Programs - Joe Armstrong - Erlang and other stuff

First 90 days with Syncthing

Zombie Miles And Napa Weekends: How A Week With Chauffeurs Showed The Major

Very clever approach to estimating impact of self-driving cars. Interesting that budget limited a lot of the scope. Since this should be pretty important, but also that saving money is going to be a benefit of this!

Small sample size + novelty surely impacted the effect of a driver. Also that they can get out of the car and do stuff, whereas doing groceries or drycleaning you'd still need human intervention

Preventing Injury: 8 Best Hand and Wrist Exercises for Computer Users

Also remember to take damn breaks

SteamVR/Frame Timing - Valve Developer Community

Leapfrogging the IDE

XO - XLN Audio

Novel concept to visualise audio samples

Building from Source · Onivim 2 User Manual

Yet another vim alternative to try

Reducing activation energy for writing

Copied verbatim because I love this:

1. Observe the world, pay attention to things.
2. Jot down snippets of observations/ideas in a single Google Docs document (available on almost any platform). Don't try to organize it. Keep it really simple. The key is to keep it low effort and frictionless.
3. Look over the Google Docs document from time to time. When you have enough ideas coalescing in a cluster/theme, feel them out. When the cluster feels like it's ready i.e. you feel an emotional connection to it, start writing. Important tip: don't feel you have to finish writing in one sitting -- you can stop, let your writing sit, and keep re-clustering until you have something that is worth putting out there.

The World-Wide Work. — Ethan Marcotte

Combo of talk + write-up below is excellent

no_plugins/no_plugins.vim at master · changemewtf/no_plugins

How to do what vim plugins do with just vim

Dynamic SVG Animation with CSS Variables

I like the sidebar underlines and main page heaxagon anims on this

code.talks 2019 - 20 Terrible Ways to Reverse a String

This is glorious

Beware the Metagame

One more lane will fix it...

Useless use of cat - Wikipedia

TLDR use cmd < file, not cat file | cmd

A Guide to Getting Unstuck

Removing and purging files from git history

Wanted to remove a bunch of old/unused binary files that were bloating a repo.

Change macOS user preferences via command line

Explanation and practical uses of defaults in macos

macos - How to enable/disable grayscale mode in Accessibility via Terminal

Useful to have a script/clickable thing for this as I toggle it on/off frequently

Location, Privilege and Performant Websites

Chaos Design: Before the robots take our jobs, can we please get them to help us do some good work?

Phenomenonly written and researched, with amazing demos and ideas throughout. Multi-themed components being visible in dev is a wonderful idea

Scott Galloway on Twitter: "#GrubHub earnings...plus my thoughts on UberMoney

What Is Zombie Simpsons? | Dead Homer Society

Text Editing Hates You Too

The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” – Mother Jones

Finding my People — Stephanie Hurlburt

Not everyone’s going to be my people, or each other’s people. No one in any group large enough is going to like everyone, or even be neutral to everyone— there’s gonna be some “get away from me” and strong dislike floating around, there are going to be divides. Pleasing every single person means being close to no one.

An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools | Hacker News

Some additional useful bits in comments (also a lot of 'just use x'). Actual list has some gems in it: repgrep, podman, mdcat etc

Memex: Browser Extension to full-text search your browsing history and bookmarks

This looks very useful. Full-text search and some other convenient integrations

Free for developers

Massive list of tools and SaaSes, some free, some with free quotas listed.

Excavating AI

Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks

Hard to watch Twitter become less useful, valuable, and interesting with new ad insertion ratios

Interesting post/thread.

Insert more ads. Signal to noise goes down. Value to user shrinks. Value of user to advertisers decreases. Insert more ads. A vicious cycle that de-prioritizes the user experience.

How a Decision Journal Changed the Way I make Decisions (with example)

Good strategy to minimize hindsight bias and try to improve quality of decisions. Interesting point from some interview: good decisions that have bad outcomes (due to chance) are better than bad decisions with good outcomes, as the latter reinforces bad decisions.

Learning How to Think: The Skill No One Taught You

The best way to practice is to spend time thinking

The First 1940s Coders Were Women – So How Did Tech Bros Take Over?

Parse .env file on command line

.env files were the thing that made me stop pasting credentials directly in my WIP files.

Using DevTools Features Without Opening DevTools

How to Resample a Drum Break Accurately in Bitwig

Still trying to figure out the UI and layout of Bitwig, finding these kind of focused tutorials worth it for navigation alone

My Favourite Git Commit

Refreshingly professional. My usual favourite commits are either Developers Swearing or awful puns.

Coffee is Hard

The ludicrous complexity of everyday activities is never as obvious as when you ary to add it to a game.

Design Bias is Ruining Accessibility

Accessibility won't work as an afterthought, it needs to be part of the process.
Making sites accessible makes them better for all users. Real-life example of this is curb-ramps.

The Hot Potato Process

Great pushback on the one-way design -> developer handover that often happens.

I've had some great pairing sessions with designers over video calls this year. I am curious to try using recordings to bridge time gaps.

Bullshit.js | Hacker News

Cloud-to-butt but for all bullshit buzzwords

I find journaling indispensable

HN thread has some other interesting ideas/templates for daily docs

Journaling :: Up and to the Right

Nicely written piece, and great website

Caring about tomorrow

Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants. Artificial distance that we add to 'other people'

Don't Ruin Readability for Performance

Possible counterpoint: if the text doesn't render due to slow perf then readability is also affected.

Though only comparisons of text-rendering: optimizeSpeed; vs optimizeLegibility are from a while ago, unsure
if this is still a legit perf issue anyway.

Smoother & sharper shadows with layered box-shadows

Brittany Chiang | Software Engineer

Some nice animations and flourishes. Source project includes color palette!

Why I Write - DESK Magazine

From the author of "Love letter to my website", using writing to organise the mess inside your brain

WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

As it turns out, the S-1 was correct; Neumann was pivotal to WeWork, because WeWork only exists due to his ability to get money from investors.

Climate Denial

Personal triggers are more persuasive that any other arguments or data. Future and far away people are harder to imagine than seeing change in a place you know. Image from ShowYourStripes is striking.

Ask HN: How Do You Read?

Solid advice on reading, annotating, and selecting

Consume less, create more

how to make better use of commute or dead time

This Ain’t Disney: A practical guide to CSS transitions and animations

Optics Illustrations from the Physics Textbooks of Amédée Guillemin (1868/1

Software 2.0 - Andrej Karpathy - Medium

Writing HTML in HTML

Ask HN: How do you stay disciplined in the long run?

How to manipulate CSS colors with JavaScript

GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence | Slate Star Codex

Our Increasingly Fascist Public Discourse

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure—Ste

Sometimes I think "I am a huge nerd". Then I read things like this and feel either normal or inadequate.

Celebrated Writers on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary

Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

Stats on editors/content for reddit, Amazon, and Wikipedia

Designing an audio adblocker for radio and podcasts

Soon after Adblock Radio gained some traction in 2016, I have received lawyer threats from French radio networks (more details below). I had to partially shut the website down, change its architecture, better understand the legal ramifications, etc

The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm explained very clearly | Robert Heaton

A blogging style guide | Robert Heaton

Some solid rules for writing better. A lot of structure, a bit on content, and some process suggestions

I Used The Web For A Day Using A Screen Reader

Tips from and case studies of using a few websites with a screenreader. TLDR make your markup valid and lightweight, keep headings in correct order, and add assistive tags.

The art of working in public

How to write about things you are working on without giving away secrets or spoilers

The Algorithmic Trap — David Perell

The worldwide sameness that results from everyone chasing the same internet aesthetic, and impact on tourist experiences.

Depending on algorithms, however, doesn’t work as well in cities, where culture is more important than geography

Recursivity: Columnists go ga-ga over Reagan letter that demonstrates what a tool he was