Hoping to continue making some small cosmetic changes to the look and feel of the website. I’ve gotten rid of the bullets for posts and blog posts, but not for daily links. I think it looks pretty good. I’m going to try out the grid and left border ideas, and update heading sizes and possibly fonts. It should hopefully be a bit of a fresh look, and be easier to read.
It’s quite cold this morning. Brrr. #
This week’s newsletter is out!
Fixing capitalism, Labour & the Middle East, Chamath solo, Vivek, Smartglasses, nuclear war risk, OpenAI makeover, boomers get with it, Europe vs Trump, AI Twitter, happiness, the AI supercycle
Issue details:
Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #
Straws have been trending for several days now. Or straw rapers to be precise. They have been appearing literally everywhere I’ve been.
And there seems to be some sort of universe ending level argument happening, that will turn out to be proof that the existing design already solves the problem that’s being blamed on me.
And all the blaming has been the very thing causing the problem in the first place. #
Today’s links:
The Why of Crazy Stupid Tech - Om Malik was one of the first tech bloggers I started reading when I first seriously got online. I guess that was around 2003ish. He’s starting a newsletter, partnering with ex-Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein. The focus is interesting: the tech that powers the foundational layers of the stack, from materials science to sythetic biology and how they might change the future. Sounds awesome, can’t wait, subscribed :) crazystupidtech.com #
159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO's fight with WP Engine escalates - Matt Mullenweg founder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic has been in a rather public fight with WP Engine for a few weeks. The whole saga is bringing to the surface some core issues with open source and specifically Wordpress, one of the most popular open source projects. Many are worried they aren’t as safe from despotic centralised control as they once thought, since Wordpress is using some of the very tactics it was setup to avoid, namely removing things from people. Many open source projects have been runing into philosophical brick walls recently. This case could have a big impact in the space. techcrunch.com #
Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR - That’s the European Convention on Human Rights. The problem is that though it might appear to make sense from the perspective of fixing immigration, it would ultimately decrease valuable protections for all citizens across huge swath of completely unrelated areas. Not being part of a human rights treaty sounds very dangerous to me. www.theguardian.com #
liriliri/eruda: Console for mobile browsers - This basically does what it says on the tin, ads devtools to mobile browsers. You include a library in the page, and then can open up a devtools style webapp in the page to look at HTML, network requests etc. Very awesome. I wish there was an app that was a dev webserver that automatically added this to your pages, so you could do local frontend development on your mobile device. github.com #
@parischap/pretty-print - This looks awesome. All sorts of additional customisable features to JSON.stringify and util.inspect. colorisation and treeifying for example. I could see this really improving the debugging experience, printing to console is still one of the most popular ways to debug, because it works in most environments, might as well make it better. www.npmjs.com #
Get ready to meet your AI best friend (Vergecast Podcast) - Lots of awesome tech reporting in this episode, and not just about AI. OpenAI mega funding, the Wordpress community values meltdown, progressive web apps, and a mindboggling description of the Dish/Direct TV timeline over the past few decades, which bizarely sounds to me like a simulacrum of a single week of my life right now here in Vietnam. podcastindex.org #
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Punished For Being Born (Issue #184) markjgsmith.com #
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