Netizen | Derek Sivers
1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.
Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.
Link tags: history
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they told me the internet was forever | sam’s internet house
The link rot is a symptom of the larger rot that is taking place on the web. This intentional hiding of our world’s past is intended to disorient us. If the big tech internet places are continuing to exert their control over us by making their online spaces more and more oppressive, by hiding history they can trick us into believing that what we’re experiencing now is Just How Things Have Always Been.
The AI Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web | Techdirt
Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience:
But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.
Fray was what made me want to make websites:
I distinctly remember sites like prehensile tales, 0sil8 and the inimitable Fray triggering something in my brain that made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life.
What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
Gas Town and Bullet Hell – Petafloptimism
Matt has some smart reckons on the relationship between time and technology:
The factory bell, the railway timetable, the telegraph wire, the always-on smartphone — each imposed a new temporal discipline, each produced its own characteristic form of exhaustion, and each was eventually (partially, imperfectly) domesticated through a combination of regulation, design, and collective action.
The Artisanal Web | Another Rodeo
I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:
There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.
Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization — Den Odell
The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.
Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.
The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.
39C3 - Persist, resist, stitch - YouTube
A fascinating talk looking at the history of the intersection of knitting and stitching with wartime cryptography and resistance.
Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
What happened to the comment section? - The History of the Web
I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.
There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:
A blog without comments is not a blog.
That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:
Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.
That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.
I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.
My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)
This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.
Decentralizing quality || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
Hack to the Future - Frontend - Matt Hobbs
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Welcome to Medieval Murder Maps
CSI London, York, and Oxford:
Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.
Beautiful Public Data
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
Frame of preference – Aresluna
Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!
While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.
Bravo!