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2023/08/31 #

  • 16:28:00 +07:00 Should you use AsyncLocalStorage? - I've read through this a couple of times now and though I do understand most of the code, I feel like I'm missing something crucial. It looks like it might be a very useful nodejs API but I'm not seeing yet exactly what type of use cases it could br relevant. Hopefully I'll get some more time later to find more examples. # eytanmanor.medium.com

  • 12:43:00 +07:00 The new economics of Twitter outrage - The twisted economics that are playing out on Twitter with Elon Musk's new rules. It has changed the "main character" dynamic from something that could benefit people that fitted into existing structured of business, politics and media to one where "you’re just paid directly by a billionaire -- though only if you can afford to pay him first". I'm not sure what it is exactly but some things in this article ring true to real life for me. # www.garbageday.email

  • 12:30:00 +07:00 Bézier curves - Richard Ekwonye did a deep dive on this topic and created this article which containts some excellent interactive examples illustrating how Bézier curves are used in animation easing, but also in adding curves to simple and complex shapes found in fonts, icons, illustrations, data visualization charts, 3d objects and other visual elements. # blog.richardekwonye.com

  • 11:29:00 +07:00 CSS Nesting just landed in Firefox 117 - Wes Bos Twitter thread where he gives 11 examples of the new CSS nesting feature which is now implemented in all browsers. This is awesome. Having a nesting feature in native CSS will make things so much easier to organize. # twitter.com

2023/08/30 #

  • 17:09:00 +07:00 Applying SRE Principles to CI/CD - An interesting metrics based methodology to ensure an acceptable service level for your CI/CD system. It's the sort of approach that many of the larger engineering teams use with Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error budgets. I like the sound of this approach, as long as it doesn't drain the life out of the team, you have to leave room to enjoy yourselves a bit. # buildkite.com

2023/08/29 #

  • 06:05:00 +07:00 🚀 New Post: Very long timescales - A new era is begining where we need to consider very long timescales when building software. Lots of strange things to consider, especially in free and open source software. # markjgsmith.com

2023/08/28 #

  • 15:42:00 +07:00 Patterns for Reactivity with Modern Vanilla JavaScript - I haven't done a huge amount of frontend javascript recently, so this was a very refreshing and enlightening piece. It collects together the main patterns used to implement reactivity in the browser using plain old vanilla javascript. Patterns like PubSub, Observer, Proxies, Signals and Observables as well as using Object.defineProperty. Also covers using classes, async and native browser APIs such as MutationObserver, Web Components, IntersectionObserver, requestAnimationFrame and the Web Animations API. Some great examples such as reactively rendering a simple HTML UI listing pizzas, interactive scrolling, animation and game loops, reactive animations, and reactive CSS. Monster article packed with awesome stuff. # frontendmasters.com

  • 12:54:00 +07:00 Giving up the iPad-only travel dream - Long term Apple user Jason Snell goes into some detail as to why, at least for now, he has given up trying to use his iPad as his main device. The critical thing for him is the terrible experience recording podcasts, but he also goes into more broader problems some face. People that need to be able to adapt their workflows in dynamic environments run into issues, because the iPad's top down committee based development approach is just not flexible enough in an acceptable timeframe. # sixcolors.com

  • 09:14:00 +07:00 Ex-Meta Researchers Have Raised $40 Million From Lux Capital For An AI Biotech Startup - Much of the hype in the recent LLM boom has centered around generation and processing of various digital media, whether that's text, audio, video, image etc. It seems like the next wave is going to be a big level up as the technologies are deployed into the science industries that seek to make very futuristic discoveries in areas like biology and material science. There is a lot more money in these areas an the scope of is enormous because the possibilities space is so mind bogglingly large and relatively untouched by current methods. Lots of interesting detail in this article including companies that are having an impact. # www.forbes.com

2023/08/27 #

  • 10:16:00 +07:00 Wordpress: The 100-Year Plan - "The 100-Year Plan ensures that your stories, achievements, and memories are preserved for generations to come. One payment. One hundred years of legacy. US$38,000." - It just so happens to be $1 per day, which means even if you only had 1 customer you might just be able to pull it off. What a curious price, don't you think? # wordpress.com

  • 07:43:00 +07:00 Get NIP-05 verified - For Nostr verification badically you have to add a json file on your website located at /.well-known/nostr.json. What you put in this file is a bit condusing imo. # nostr.how

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 Notes from a Mastodon migration - This is a must read if you are trying out Mastodon, especially if, like me, the main draw was that it's an open system and you can move server at anytime. I thought it was as easy as packing your virtual bag and venturing over to your new online home. In reality you will lose several things. Replies to your old threads won't reach you, your old posts remain in the old location, DMs received from people can't be exported, and lists you got added to won't point to your new username. That's quite a lot of important stuff! Definitely worth testing the process before you get too comfortable. # erinkissane.com

2023/08/26 #

  • 18:50:00 +07:00 🚀 New Post: UK politics cognitive disonance - Some observations about UK politics. We have such a rich history, but is that causing our politicians to be out of touch with the current reality of the people? # markjgsmith.com

  • 16:42:00 +07:00 The EU's war on behavioral advertising - Lots more detail about the new regulations in this article. Maybe they just averted a future apocalypse. The at infiniti situation with all this behavioural advertising is pretty scary in my opinion. At some point it ceses to be advertising. What does it become? Probably unpleasant and very confusing causality bugs in spacetime. I'm only half joking. I'm not sure it's a good idea to find out. # thisisunpacked.substack.com

  • 13:05:00 +07:00 Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee - There have been a lot of web scraping court cases over the years, and the courts don't seem to have a firm handle on the situation. Add to that the recent surge in companies looking for data to train their AI models. It's a hot topic that looks likely to see some controversy as companies take contradictory and hypocritical stances when it comes to web scraping. # blog.ericgoldman.org

  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bingeing the Past and Building the Future (Issue #129) # markjgsmith.com

  • 12:44:00 +07:00 France to spend €200m destroying wine as demand falls - Interesting data point. The wine industry appears to have been particularly badly wrong footed by the COVID supply shock. Consumption has fallen in double digit % while production rose by 4%. The emergency measures are to ensure there isn't a collapse in prices. # www.bbc.com

  • 11:29:00 +07:00 Create A CI/CD Pipeline For Front End Projects - Good article to read if you are looking to get a high level overview of continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD). Lists the major tools used and some example configuration files cli commands and scripts to get a sense how all the pieces fit together. Falls short of presenting a fully working repo though, you'll need to do that yourself, but it's a good article to get situated. # blog.openreplay.com

2023/08/25 #

  • 10:49:00 +07:00 Use web components for what they’re good at - Nolan Lawson continues the discussion started by Dave Rupert a few days ago. A lot of his points make sense. For me though the big downside of web components is the fact that serverside rendering doesn't really work. That means web component based websites are poor at working offline. I think websites, especially content focussed ones, should be able to work offline by default, fancy javascript stuff should be a progressive enhancement. IMO many folks are too quick to build fancy stuff that falls over on the basics. # nolanlawson.com

2023/08/23 #

  • 14:01:00 +07:00 Elon Musk plans to remove headlines from news articles shared on X - Looks like I'm not the only person considering post titles this week. What are the chances? I quite like the idea that it will encourage people to write something instead of mindlessly re-posting. Personally when I share links I like to have both the original author title as well as personal comment. # fortune.com

  • 13:41:00 +07:00 Unix: technology and idea - Makes the case that when we say something is Unixy we mean two distinct things, namely that it conforms to certain technology choices but also a more broad philosophical idea, and this can cause people to disagree on unixness, since they are talking past each other. # utcc.utoronto.ca

2023/08/22 #

2023/08/21 #

2023/08/20 #

2023/08/19 #

  • 16:58:00 +07:00 JSX without React - Chris Coyier comments on the nice fit and possible usefulness of NakedJSX as a templating library. Basically enables you to write your templates in JSX, but doesn't require React. I thought pretty much the same thing when I saw this a few weeks ago. Being able to build your static pages using components is a big draw. When I have some time I might very well try integrating this library into my static site generator.# chriscoyier.net

  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Make Things, Take Notes, Profit (Issue #128) # markjgsmith.com

2023/08/18 #

  • 12:49:00 +07:00 Open Circuits - Cory Doctorow writes about his recent trip to Defcon, the famous hacker conference in Las Vegas. Sounds like a cool conference, though personally I think I'd be too worried about getting hacked to enjoy myself. He mentions a cool new book about the tiny electronics that power the computers of the modern world. What's cool is that the book, which is educational, reframes these marvelous tiny inventions, highlighting them as beautiful art. I love this. Take something that seems boring and show why it's actually amazing. It's maker culture at it's best. # pluralistic.net

2023/08/17 #

2023/08/16 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 microsoft/azurechatgpt - Microsoft's private ChatGPT enteprise option, enables you to safely use your own data sources, guarantied privacy with isolation from OpenAI operated ChatGPTs. Runs on several interesting technologies and libraries including Nodejs, Nextjs, Tailwinds CSS, and LangChain to name a few. # github.com

  • 06:01:00 +07:00 Peter Shor's MIT Quantum Computing Course Notes - This passed through the past few days, quite synchronous considering my latest static site generator feature. Looks like it could be quite comprehensive. Even though it's very early days when it comes to quantum, MIT will likely have some of the best learning material available. # math.mit.edu

2023/08/15 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 The Exploding World of ETFs - I was mildly interested in the this just because it's become the hot topic in bitcoin circles. About 1/2 way through the article though, where he paints the picture of how broad ETFs can get, the thing that sparked my attention was the similarity with content curration. They are like currated content feeds but for stocks. It got me wondering about communities. If you and your friends wanted to invest in the communities that surrounded you, how could you do that? Wouldn't an ETF type model be worth considering? You wouldn't necesarily make money, though you might, maybe the value you got back would be in a more vibrant community that had currents of activity that alligned with your interests. The currator in me thinks hyperlocal ETFs might be interesting as a vehicle for improving the places we live in. Of course there could be downsides too, getting the balance between mainstream and fringe might be a challenge. # jameslavish.substack.com

  • 06:01:00 +07:00 Running a Mainstream Linux Distro Natively on Apple Silicon: Fedora Asahi Remix First Impressions - I've been following at a distance the progress being made by the Asahi team. It's super cool that there's a Linux distro that runs on Apple Silicon. I wish Apple would make it easier though. It's strange to me that they are so scared of Linux. I mean they don't seriously think that regular users are going to switch do they? As far as I can tell this would only ever be used by power users and developers. OSX is a tremendous OS for most users, they should be more confident in their creation imho. I also wonder what the Asahi team think of the recent controversy with Red Hat becoming hostile to Fedora. I'd feel better if Ubuntu ran on Apple Silicon. # jasoneckert.github.io

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 A blog post with every HTML element - One for all the web development nerds out there. A few weeks ago I updated all the HTML tags on the website so I found this post mostly fascinating. However I'm reading offline on iOS, so no way to open up devtools to have a look at the page HTML, which made the post a bit tedious. Great reference article, there are so many details to consider. It's amazing how much thought has gone into even just HTML, nevermind CSS and Javascript. # www.patrickweaver.net

2023/08/13 #

2023/08/11 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 Jamstack is dead, long live Jamstack! - This week's Bytes newsletter was all about the recent announcement of the demise of the popular webdev architecture / abstract feeling / lifestyle choice. There's something very interesting going on here. It's dead, but it's also quite not dead. In fact it seems to be somewhat benefitting from the recent turmoil's Streisand effect, and I'm ok with that. It feels like something cool might emerge from all this carfuffle. More jamstack stuff here here and here. And also this very pro dynamic database websites piece, which I mostly agree with too, authoring experience is currently very bad for Jamstack sites. # bytes.dev

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 sahat/hackathon-starter - A boilerplate for Node.js web applications - I find it useful to checkout some of these boilerplate style repos occasionally to see the latest trendy services and techniques. I wouldn't necessarily use these outside of a hackathon context because you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary code for your use case. Still this looks on the surface to contain a lot of interesting node / javascript / css / 3rd party stuff. # github.com

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 @markjgsmith: "It’s one of the strangest things about writing software is that when you are creating something for the first time, it’s totally not obvious how it needs to be.

    Then when you finally get it working the way it should be, you just can’t even remember how it wasn’t totally obvious." #

2023/08/09 #

2023/08/06 #

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 Bram Moolenaar has died - Bram created the vim text editor. It was one of the reasons I decided to get more into programing 20 years ago. As a young sysadmin in a VFX shop, I would watch the tools guys effortlessly do things with vim that were pure magic, and at some point I just thought, "that's what I want to be able to do". I got pretty good at vim over the years but never reached vim wizard status. Maybe that will happen some day if the world ever decides to allow me to have another laptop. Strange timing given the latest newsletter, kind of adds to the far out notion that the entire tech industry is fake imo. I mean seriously, what are the chances? Anyway RIP Bram, thanks for vim, Mark. # news.ycombinator.com

2023/08/05 #

2023/08/04 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 Apple have released a Vision OS developer kit. Looks like you can apply and if they like your project they'll send you a free Vision Pro headset. Kind of cool. # developer.apple.com

  • 06:01:00 +07:00 Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA form Alliance for OpenUSD to drive open standards for 3D content - I took a look at some examples that I found in an HN thread discussing OpenUSD and I have to admit it doesn't make much sense to me. It just looks like Python subroutines. Still it's good to see that open standards in this space are being developped, because it appears as though 3D content is going to start appearing in many more places in the next few years, especially with the introduction of the Vision Pro from Apple next year. And Pixar have the most experience working with 3D assets at scale. It will be interesting to see if the 3D workflows they have built translate well to other types of content creators.# www.apple.com

2023/08/03 #

  • 06:49:00 +07:00 Yesterday's posts were created by an automated process. I had been building this the week running up to running out of build minutes.

    It's the first time it fully worked. I post the links to a feature branch with a special prefix during the day, and push the branch to the remote. At midnight a Github action runs, creating a PR with the latest links, then auto-merges them into main. That merge triggers a rebuild of the site. When I wake up all the links from the previous day have been published to the website. They have also been automatically posted to Twitter.

    That for me is why Jamstack sites are awesome, it opens up a entire world of workflow possibilities. I know the Jamstack term is going out of favour, but I'm going to keep using it for now. #

2023/08/02 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 Repying to the latest Changelog homelab episode on Mastodon: "What I want in order to be more mobile is a device about the size of a portable battery that can host a Github actions equivalent and some cloud provider api fake endpoints so I can do cloud dev even without an internet connection. Then quickly sync when I am back online." # mastodon.social

  • 06:01:00 +07:00 WordPress Playground lets you run WordPress entirely in your browser - I guess this is cool. I mean the fact that you can run a serverside program entirely on the client, suggests clientside tech has made some serious progress. I'm having a little trouble conceptualising what it actually means though. It's a little confusing. Having said that, one of the long term goals of my static site generator, which I haven't made much progress on so far, was to be able to run it entirely in the browser. To me THAT makes a lot of sense. And I suppose that if that ever does happen, having Wordpress also be runnable in that environment might be useful, because you could theoretically integrate it into the build process. How about some other serverside programs, like a queue, scheduler, s3 storage, and to go full on kitchen sink, how about a github actions ci/cd in the browser? Why not have an entire cloud dev stack running in the browser? # techcrunch.com

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 What are "Rollups" in crypto? - I've been hearing the term mentioned a lot recently, so I wanted to know how they differ from side chains, and layer2's. I'm still slightly unclear, but it appears layer2's are parallel blockchains to main chains like Bitcoin and Etherium. They take some transaction load off of the main chain, process them, then eventually record them back to the main chain. Rollups are a popular type of Etherium layer2 that aim to help scale the overall network. Arbitrum and Optimism are popular optimistic rollups, whereas Starknet and Loopring are popular ZK rollups. In Bitcoin instead of rollups, the layer2 is Lightning. I've heard some people make the analogy that Lightning is to Bitcoin as the IP protocol is to the internet. # www.coinbase.com

2023/08/01 #

  • 18:03:00 +07:00 My Journey Away from the JAMstack - Jared White replies to Brian's piece. He goes into a lot of detail, highlighting that the term Jamstack became so broad as to not mean anything. It just got way too confusing. This part rings true to me - "What Netlify gave us originally was a vision of how to deploy HTML-first websites easily via git commits and pushes". It's about git, files and repos everything else flows from that. The database is an enhancenent. # www.spicyweb.dev

  • 18:02:00 +07:00 Is Jamstack Officially Finished? - Brian Rinaldi looks at the current state of the Jamstack movement. The thing I liked about the Jamstack movement was that it gave a name to static file websites, but made it a bit grander, so you could imagine a whole ecosystem of futuristic technologies. The important thing was no longer the database it was the code repository. It seems to me that repos are a more stable building block, because ultimately it's just files. That doesn't mean databases are bad, and actually it's a great idea to use databases in your setup, but the focus is on the repo. Around the repo you can build a whole lot more than just the website. It would be great if there was a term that communicated this idea, because 'static sites' doesn't really do that, whereas 'Jamstack', even though it's imperfect, sort of kind of vaguely does. # remotesynthesis.com

  • 18:01:00 +07:00 The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide - There is a related argument in bitcoin that the base layer should be completely open so that you can see inflation bugs being exploited. With full privacy, the argument goes, you would never be able to discover the bad stuff going on. I'm undecided on this topic, I can see reasons for both. I'd like to know which would be better in a scenario where people needed to escape enslavement? If you were enslaved by people who were using encryption, would you want backdoors? Also isn't it a moot point if it's possible to enslave people in the open? Isn't the at infiniti scenerio for allowing encryption backdoors something like that bizare film where people are secretly inhabiting John Malcovich's consciousness? Except with AI it would happen to everyone all at once, and then who knows, like a massive consciousness traffic jam apocalypse of race conditions. What is the one thing that absolutely has to be solved by this technological decision? I would have thought averting enslavement, but are there even worse scenarios? It's such a difficult problem.# www.eff.org

  • 18:00:00 +07:00 The World’s Last Internet Cafes - I featured this article in last week's newsletter issue #125. In some ways it's strange that the internet cafe era is coming to an end because it feels like only yesterday to me that the trend had started. In reality though it's been a while since mobile phones have become pervasive. I hope we find a way to carry on the community aspect of these spaces. I know there are co-working spaces, but we also need spaces that aren't specifically for work, where the vibe is more casual. # restofworld.org

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