Nicolas Hoizey - Links

Look, just fucking use Mastodon already

2026-06-18T11:24:08Z

Arilin Thorferra
https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/

Who could have predicted Bluesky could ever have run that risk? I mean, apart from everyone warning us that it was launched by weirdo alt-right blockchain-shilling AI-loving shitbird Jack Dorsey, and that their current CEO came from a weirdo alt-right blockchain-shilling AI-loving shitbird background. You know. Besides them.

AI Economics for Dummies

2026-06-12T13:24:51Z

Andrew Singleton
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies

As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it’s only natural to have questions about their finances, like “Do they make money?” and “How?” Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI.

Core Mobile Vitals: Understand how your users feel about your app

2026-06-09T09:07:43Z

Tammy Everts
https://embrace.io/blog/core-mobile-vitals/

if you ask a mobile team “is your app healthy?”, you’ll probably get a 20-minute technical briefing that involves crash rates, ANRs, Apdex scores, CPU utilization, and a handful of other metrics that make total sense to engineers and mean absolutely nothing to everyone else in the building.

To be clear, those metrics are useful! But they don’t do what Core Web Vitals do.

Store Speed and Conversion: What the Data Shows

2026-06-09T08:52:13Z

Mateusz Krzeszowiak
https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/blog/store-speed-conversion

Speed matters—but it's one of many variables. Our data shows a clear correlation between performance and conversion, though not direct causation. Every store is different, and factors like product catalog, marketing, and where your store is in its journey all play a role.

The speed of trust: How slow pages hurt your brand

2026-06-09T08:30:46Z

Tammy Everts
https://www.speedcurve.com/blog/brand-perception/

Never underestimate the fragility of trust online. Users are constantly evaluating whether a site feels safe enough to enter personal details and complete transactions. Slow load times or janky interactions can subtly undermine that trust. When pages lag, people start to question other things […]

Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently

2026-05-14T10:15:40Z

Den Odell
https://denodell.com/blog/browsers-treat-big-sites-differently

Standards were supposed to eliminate browser-specific code. We dug ourselves out of the IE era, celebrated, and then built exactly the same hole again around a different browser. Only now the browser-specific code lives in the browsers that aren’t dominant, patching over a web built for the one that is.

MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

2026-05-14T10:06:16Z

J.D. Hodges
https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/macbook-neo-benchmarks-analysis/

The MacBook Neo is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering at an unprecedented Apple price point, strategically timed to exploit a market in crisis. The A18 Pro is not a compromise chip. It is the same core architecture as the M4, running at M3-to-M4 class performance for single-threaded work. Apple reused mature iPhone silicon at massive scale, eliminated incremental R&D cost, and shipped a product with healthy margins at $599.

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

2026-05-11T08:07:41Z

Siddhant Khare
https://siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-fatigue-is-real

If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you. You're not imagining it. You're not weak. You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist. And if someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone.

Lazy and Prompt

2026-05-07T15:47:25Z

Matthias Ott
https://matthiasott.com/notes/lazy-and-prompt

The story of Chrome 148 is that Google – in the very same release – shipped the Prompt API, a feature that was met with explicit opposition from both Mozilla and WebKit, that the W3C TAG raised deep concerns about, and that the web community has been vocally and overwhelmingly against.

Scroll-Driven Animations

2026-04-30T08:12:03Z

Josh W. Comeau
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/scroll-driven-animations/

The CSSWG deserves a lot of credit, in my opinion, for repurposing/extending CSS keyframe animations for scroll-driven animations. Rather than invent an entirely new thing from scratch, they built it on top of existing structures, which means a bunch of our pre-existing skills and knowledge can immediately be applied!

The Decline of WebPageTest After the Catchpoint Era

2026-04-22T15:34:34Z

Florian Thoma
https://www.innoweb.com.au/blog/the-slow-demise-of-webpagetest

The spirit of openness, clarity, and technical depth that defined it has been overshadowed by commercialisation and integration. I understand how this happens - it’s a familiar story for beloved tools after acquisition - but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.

The importance of people who care

2026-04-21T12:21:29Z

Rachel Andrew
https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2026/04/21/the-importance-of-people-who-care/

Design systems and editorial style guides need people who care. They need people who care about the small details, who obsess over consistency. They need people who are willing to push back, and who are happy to say no to the endless requests to ignore the guidelines just this one time. Yes, we’re sometimes very annoying to people who just want to ship the app or publish their blog post, but we know that consistency matters. The problem for us is that it’s very difficult to demonstrate the impact of it until it’s gone. Even then, people may not connect the fact that support requests have gone up with poor quality documentation, or poor reviews with an unintuitive UI.

Ephemeral Media

2026-04-10T18:16:43Z

Tyler Sticka
https://tylersticka.com/journal/ephemeral-media/

[…] I’m a fan of physical media. You buy the work once, you get a nice little souvenir to enjoy, lend to a friend or sell to someone else. As long as you possess the artifact, you’re free to access its contents whenever you’d like… be it paper, tape, cartridge, disc or diskette.

That’s the idea, anyway. The reality can be surprisingly complicated.

“This Is Not The Computer For You”

2026-04-09T14:51:52Z

Sam Henri Gold
https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.

I was that kid.

He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. It never did.

The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.

Obs.js – context-aware web performance for everyone

2026-03-30T14:02:42Z

Harry Roberts
https://csswizardry.com/Obs.js/demo/

Obs.js reads a handful of browser signals (Navigator and Battery APIs) to infer connection strength, battery status, and device capability. It exposes those signals as CSS classes on the <html> element, and as properties on window.obs, so you can adapt delivery accordingly: serve lower-resolution media, forgo web fonts, disable auto-playing video… you name it.

Low- and Mid-Tier Mobile for the Real World (2025)

2026-03-30T13:30:08Z

Harry Roberts
https://csswizardry.com/2025/08/low-and-mid-tier-mobile-for-the-real-world-2025/

It’s important to remember that ‘low-tier’ does not mean old. Likewise, ‘mid-tier’ does not mean ‘a flagship from 2018’. They are a device class in their own right and it’s perfectly possible for your users to be using brand new low-tier devices. As such, we needn’t look to the past for our benchmarks.

Endgame for the Open Web

2026-03-30T13:05:08Z

Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited.

The 49MB Web Page

2026-03-17T16:07:52Z

Shubham Bose
https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

Good UX is highly desired and once you get it right, it feels almost natural, intuitive. The current state of news UI assumes that the reader is an adversary to be trapped and monetized. Choosing between a profitable publication and a fast, accessible user experience is not an either-or decision. I guarantee you the engineers at these publications hate this as much as we do, but they are trapped by business models that prioritize short-term CPMs over long-term readership. We just need to stop letting third-party marketing scripts dictate the website's architecture.

Templater snippets (for Obsidian)

2026-03-12T12:53:13Z

Zach Young
https://zachyoung.dev/posts/templater-snippets

Snippets I’ve written for the Templater Obsidian plugin.

A.I. Policy

2026-03-01T09:16:09Z

Christopher Kirk-Nielsen
https://chriskirknielsen.com/ai-policy/

I wanted to outline my take on “artificial intelligence” on this page as a more “pinned statement”, albeit non-exhaustive. While “A.I.” is a misnomer (which tends to amalgamate large language models, neural networks, and machine learning), that ship has sailed, so I will refer to it as such from here on out.