The Boring Internet | Terry Godier
You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.
Link tags: ie
2652
Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I really like the thinking that goes into this approach. It seems so counter-intuitive at first, but there’s no arguing with the snappy resilient results.
Turns out, if you have a website and you think of the browser as a way to navigate documents — rather than a runtime to execute arbitrary code and fetch, compile, and present them — things can be a lot simpler than our tools often prime us to make them.
No-stack web development – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)
A stack is also technical debt, non-transferable knowledge, accelerated obsolescence, and vendor lock-in. That means fragility and overall unnecessary complication. Popular stacks inevitably turn into cargo cults that build in spite of the web, not for it.
The web platform does not require build toolchains. Always default to, and regress to, the fundamentals of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Those core standards are the web stack.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Apple at 50: my top five Apple moments
Never forget:
- The time Apple lied to the UK regulator
- The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers
- When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down
- When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath
- When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps
CSS or BS?
We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it’s real or if we made it up. That’s it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy.
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier
Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.
It’s maintenance.
(optional.is) SXSW 02006
Brian takes us back twenty years (which is when we first met):
To gather so many like-minded, energetic people in once place and not have it ruined by corporate greed felt unique.
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.
Webspace Invaders · Matthias Ott
There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.
Smaller and dumber - daverupert.com
The principle of least power expressed nicely:
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
To be clear, I think AI will be ultimately extremely helpful. I still am using it on my projects. I am going to use it at my next job. I, personally, don’t hate AI.
But I can’t deny that the vibes right now are awful.
Not just bad, awful. It’s not just the “chat we’re cooked you’re the permanent underclass” stuff influencers say. It’s not just the “everybody is fucked” hyperbole CEOs sprout. It’s the actual, day-to-day experience with the technology. I’m a programmer—AI actually helps me a lot. But for normal people, their interactions are profoundly more negative, and none of the people behind this technology seem to care.
The Mythology Of Conscious AI
This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.
The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.
How to raise children
It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.
There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.
Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.
Permacomputing principles
Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.
Progress Without Disruption - Christopher Butler
We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.
The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.
We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?
Jeremy Keith – beyond tellerrand Podcast
I really enjoyed this chat with Marc:
I recently sat down with Jeremy Keith for a spontaneous conversation that quickly turned into a deep dive into something we both care a lot about: events, community, and why we keep putting ourselves through the joy and pain of running conferences.
39C3 - Persist, resist, stitch - YouTube
A fascinating talk looking at the history of the intersection of knitting and stitching with wartime cryptography and resistance.
The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
Well, this is horrifying.