The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
Well, this is horrifying.
Link tags: rad
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Belfast TradFest | Traditional Music Belfast
Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!
Illustrated Talk: The Session.org with Jeremy Keith
I’m giving an afternoon talk during Belfast Tradfest—come along if you’re around!
Join Jeremy Keith for an insightful talk about his pioneering work with TheSession.org—the world’s leading online hub for traditional Irish music. Discover how Jeremy helped build this vibrant digital community that connects musicians, shares tunes, and preserves Ireland’s rich musical heritage. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of creating an online space where thousands of players worldwide can collaborate, learn, and celebrate traditional music together.
6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2025 · 19 January 2025
- Springy easing with
linear()- Typed custom properties
- View transitions for page navigation
- Transition animation for
dialogandpopover- Transition animation for
details- Animated adaptive gradient text
DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies | Ian Betteridge
This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:
What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason
The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.
Tim Paul | Automation and the Jevons paradox
This is insightful:
AI and automation is often promoted as a way of handling complexity. But handling complexity isn’t the same as reducing it.
In fact, by getting better at handling complexity we’re increasing our tolerance for it. And if we become more tolerant of it we’re likely to see it grow, not shrink.
From that perspective, large language models are over-engineered bandaids. They might appear helpful at the surface-level but they’re never going to help tackle the underlying root causes.
The global fight against polio — how far have we come? - Our World in Data
I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.
The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement - Anil Dash
What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow. Even the biggest companies in the world can’t displace these kinds of systems once they find their audiences.
12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades | Modern CSS Solutions
I love how straightforward these bits of CSS are—time to rip out some of those old complicated hacks and workarounds!
Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs
Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).
This is true of software, networks, and organisations.
When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.
Explore the In Our Time archive | Braggoscope
Matt made this lovely website for spelunking and hyperlinking through the thousand episodes of Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time programme.
He’s also written a little bit about how he made it using some AI (artificial insemination) for the categorisation code.
I don’t care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps – Baldur Bjarnason
The problem I’ve regularly encountered in my work is that I don’t get to do my job the way I think is best for both me and my employer or client. The employer, who isn’t the web development expert, almost always has a clear idea of what real web development is supposed to look like: Single-Page-Apps and React (or React-like frameworks).
An intimation that it wouldn’t be the right solution for this particular problem is taken as an admission of incompetence.
I’ve experienced this. And I think this observation is even more true when it comes to recruitment.
Reinventing W3C Governance
To be honest, I’m not all that convinced by Robin’s arguments here about overhauling the governance model at the World Wide Web Consortium (partly because the way he describes the current model sounds pretty okay to me). But I’m very interested in what he has to say in the broader philosophical sense about using values to solve problems:
A value is worth something if it’s there to help you when the rubber hits the road and starts hydroplaning. Sure, you’ll need a handful of high-level lofty values as reminders, if only because there’s always a vocal guy (it’s always a guy) who thinks it’s just outrageous to put people before profits. But mostly you want Values You Can Use.
That might be the best description I’ve come across yet for design principles: values you can use.
When we say that engineering is about trade-offs, we’re saying that engineers solve their hardest problems using values (which they call “heuristics” because everyone’s entitled to be fancy some). In implementing a system, you might need to decide between an option that provides people with the best experience, another that delivers the greatest value to the shareholders, and yet a third one that makes the control centre blinkenlights dance in the prettiest way.
Which color scale to use when visualizing data - Datawrapper Blog
A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:
Playlist J (part 2) – The Irish Mandolin – a website from Aidan Crossey
I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.
The Botanist Who Defied Stalin - Issue 99: Universality - Nautilus
Lysenko vs. Vavilov feels like the 20th century version of Edison vs. Tesla.
The Lords of Midnight
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
Age of Invention: The Paradox of Progress - Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
If you make an improvement, it’s not going to be to the industry as a whole — it’ll be specific. And actually improvements have always been specific; it’s just that the industries have since multiplied and narrowed. Inventors once made drops into a puddle, but the puddle then expanded into an ocean. It doesn’t make the drops any less innovative.
BBC Radio 4 - Under the Cloud
James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:
It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.