my bookmarks
this is stuffz that i liked. i hope you like it too. Please like it. NOO i'm not insecure what do you mean??
Interesting things read
- History of the browser user-agent string
- Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?
- We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
- Wesley's Notebook
- Cool desktops don't change 😎
- My grandpa was a Nazi
- They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo
- "One Weird Trick" for effective strategic political communication campaigns
- I wish my web server were in the corner of my room
- The Linnaean Instinct and List-Making
- Did you lose your AirPods?
- The myth of technological inevitability
- The 29th, and Other Calendar Quirks
- Metaphorical browser tabs and spoon theory.
- There are no statistics in the Kingdom of God
- One Device to Do it All
This blogpost by Ava Zeldman touched me in particular: Schmile.
Human-computer interaction
- On Compositional Window Management
- Imagining better interfaces to language models
- Local-first software
- The Spreadsheet is a Simulation Machine
- End-user programming
- End-programmer programming
Short films
- nothing, except everything.
- All too well
- you're on your own, kid
- "FRICK!"
- Later Als Ik Groot Ben (Mis Niks)
- for her
- your boring life is beautiful.
- The Neighbors' Window
Videos I particularly enjoyed
- Wat (lightning talk)
- Unlimited Ricepudding
- Line Goes Up — The Problem With NFTs
- The Art of Code
- Let's Ban Cars! (Seriously)
- The Shape of Infinity
- The Rules for Rulers
- history of the entire world, i guess
- Games that Don't Fake the Space
- Welcome to the Internet - Bo Burnham
- BBS: The Documentary
Rants I enjoyed
- A New Theory of Everything Just Dropped!
- Forget Technocrats — Let's Get Some Realitycrats
- Software disenchantment
- PHP: a fractal of bad design
- Wayland breaks your bad software
- What if best practices were the norm?
- Flatpak — an insecurity nightmare
- RSS readers make me want to jump into a vat of acid!
- The String Type is Broken
- There's a place for everyone
The State of the Web
The Web has gotten unwieldy and bloated. Webbrowsers have become operating systems. Who thought it was a good idea to add support for running crypto miners to a glorified document reader? Websites are becoming bigger, slower and less useful every year. Please stop.
- Quirksmode Stop pushing the Web forward
- Drew DeVault: The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
- Thomas Millar: Glory is only 11MB/sec away
- Dylan Beattie: The Web That Never Was
- The Jolly Teapot: The struggles of the web browser
- Drew DeVault: Web browsers need to stop
- Rek Bell: Leaner Web
- Idle Words: The Website Obesity Crisis
- Pixel Envy: The Bullshit Web
- Tonsky: JavaScript Bloat in 2024
But then again, it looks like software bloat is an issue in general:
- Patrick Dubroy: Cold-blooded software
- Drew DeVault: Hello World
- StackOverflow: Is software getting worse?
Corporate Web
Websites have turned from useful documents written by humans, meant to share information, into full applications meant to track and manipulate their ~readers~ users, with as goal finanicial gain for the owner. Welcome to the Corporate Web.
- Parimal Satyal: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
- Tom MacWright: A clean start for the web
- Jeffrey Zeldman: Nothing Fails Like Success
- Tom Scott: Why The Web Is Such A Mess
- The Verge: The Perfect Webpage
- Chris Coyier: Everything about SEO is obnoxious
- thefoggiest.dev: How to annoy a developer
- Tom Scott: This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN
- Suboptimalism: good news, the internet as we know it may be doomed
Small Web
The Web used to be more small-scale, made by people because they liked and wanted to share stuff.
Luckily these smaller, content-rich websites written by humans, out of passion, are still here. They're just not on the first page of Google (thanks SEO!). All these sites together are often referred to as the Small Web:
- Parimal Satyal: Rediscovering the Small Web
- Max Böck: Make Free Stuff
- Matthias Ott: Into the Personal-Website-Verse
- Tom Scott: This video has XXX views
- Ploum: Splitting the Web
- Rachel Kwon: The internet used to be ✨fun✨
- Marginalia Search & Wiby
Social media
- Jules: Gen Z's Unique Oversocialisation
- Malik Peace: This Video is About Brain Rot
- Drew DeVault: Social media and "parasocial media"
- Ploum: Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
- Subconscious: Protocols as Weberian Bureaucracy
- Manton Reece: The web is the social network
- Subconscious: Freedom to exit
- A list of site deaths (this is why you should self-host or pay for your services)
Counter-movements
Algoritms and AI
I'm planning to write down some of my own thoughts on the recent AI hype. For now, here's a bunch of other people's thoughts:
- Rubenerd: Language analysis in a post-LLM world
- Cathy O'Neil: The era of blind faith in big data must end
- Eddy Burback: AI is here. What now?
- Anil Dash: Today's AI is unreasonable.
- Drew DeVault: AI crap
- Wesley: Scattered ChatGPT thoughts
- Phil Edwards: Stop worshipping The Algorithm
- Dave Rupert: A dozen thoughts about AI
- Manuel Moreale: If a human does it
- Matt Birchler: I think people still care about effort
- Ben Werdmuller: Exploring AI, safely
Also fun: Does Offering ChatGPT a Tip Cause it to Generate Better Text?
Tildes / pubnixes
I'm a big fan of the concept of a pubnix: a public access unix server. It's basically a shared *nix computer that a bunch of people have access to. Tildes are small communities on these pubnixes, inspired by tilde.club.
- tilde.club
- tilde.town
- rawtext.club
- {du}punkto (which I maintain :)
The State of Society
- sizeof cat: The kind of tired sleep can't fix
- Tom Scott: YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is.
- SHAUN: Andrew Tate: How to be a Real Man (or: why patriarchy should be abolished)
- Dave Karpf: Silicon Valley runs on Futurity
- Terence Eden: The Joy and The Pity of making your own stuff
- The Future, Now and Then: What Should We Have Learned from the Collapse of the New Economy (1998-2000)?
- Kevin Simler: Ads Don't Work That Way
- Cariad Eccleston: .io considered harmful
- The Future, Now and Then: The Gravitational Force of Tech Money
Computers & Programming
Here's some interesting videos: (Yup, I'm a huge fan of Dylan Beattie and Tom Scott)
- Sebastian Lague: Exploring How Computers Work
- Kevlin Henney: Lambda? You Keep Using that Letter
- Dylan Beattie: Computational Creativity
- Computerphile: Floating Point Numbers
- Tom Scott: The Worst Typo I Ever Made
- Posy: Segmented Displays
- Dylan Beattie: Ctrl-Alt-Del: Learning to Love Legacy Code
- Posy: Scifi Hifi
- Computerphile: The Problem with Time & Timezones
- Posy: Mouse Cursor History (and why I made my own)
- Circuit Rewind: FreeBSD: A Successful Failure - Linux: A Failing Success
Also interesting:
Text & Encodings
Explainers
Science
- Veritasium: Why Gravity is NOT a Force
- Veritasium: The Science of Thinking
- Veritasium: The Logistics Map
- Veritasium: Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect
- Veritasium: The Universe is Hostile to Computers
Math
- Veritasium: The Simplest Math Problem No One Can Solve — Collatz Conjecture
- Numberphile: The Golden Ratio (why it is so irrational)
- Numberphile: e (Euler's Number)
- Veritasium: How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented
- Veritasium: Math's Fundamental Flaw
Psychology
Interesting mini docus
- The Beatles: Now And Then — The Last Beatles Song
- LEMMiNO: The Great Silence
- LEMMiNO: Cicada 3301: An Internet Mystery
- VOX: Why the Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats
Interesting video about how the Titanic was designed, and why it ultimately sunk.
Food for thought
These are some interesting things to think about:
- Drew DeVault: Should private platforms engage in censorship?
- Veritasium: How An Infinite Hotel Ran Out Of Room
- jan Misali: the five kinds of paradox
- Jacob Geller: Fear of Big Things Underwater
- exurb1a: And nothing can ever ruin this
- Tom Scott: Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords
I think these two videos by Wren particularly get you to think. They really offer some perspective and sense of scale. Plus, the editing is sooo good!
- Wren Weichman: VFX Artist Reveals the True Scale of Atoms
- Wren Weichman: Using VFX to Explain Why COVID-19 Surprised Everyone
Fun things around the web
Just a bunch of things that I thought were fun or interesting. The Web is vast and full of surprises :)
- Sans Bullshit Sans: a font that replaces buzzwords with a "bullshit" label, using black font ligature magic
- Octodex: an octocat fanclub
- JSFuck: an esoteric and educational programming style which exploits JavaScript weirdness
- GifCities: The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine (from the Internet Archive)
- LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
- Asshole.fyi — A public service.
- The League of Moveable Type: open-source font foundry
- The Useless Web
- xkcd—A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
- Every Noise at Once
- Windows 93 (see also: sketchy website)
- Pointer pointer (Show this to your friends. Guaranteed laugh.)
- Grumpy Cat: The world's grumpiest cat!
- Map of Reddit, or: reddit big
- The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme
- Emoji Painting Gallery
- Nutshell & Telescoping Text
- Federated wiki, by the founder of WikiWikiWeb (the first ever wiki)
- After The Tone
A few games as well:
And some sketches, philosophy, language theory videos too :)
- Tom Scott: Ə: The Most Common Vowel in English
- Aaron Parecki: The vowel "R", and other linguistic curiosities
- Paralogical: I removed most of the syllables from english and it's 30% faster now
- RobWords: Why E̱NGLISH shoul̆d start ūsing accėnt màrks
- exurb1a: Letter to Marble 3
- 4096: first person shooter
- Tom Scott: Danger: Humans
- exurb1a: Meaning is a Jumper That You Have to Knit Yourself
- exurb1a: You (probably) do not exist
- Tom Scott: I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.
- 4096: error [レッドゾーン]
- Alan Becker: Animation vs Animator (2, 3, 4)
- LetsNot Media: Harry Potter — The Rap (2, 3, 4)
- BritMonkey: ENTER THE PLEASURE CUBE
- Johny Harris: Junk Mail, Explained
- 4096: Introducing Windows 95 Mobile
- BritMonkey: Willn't
- Johnny Harris: Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast
- exurb1a: 27
Creative stuff & stories that I love
- Robin Sloan: An app can be a home-cooked meal
- Akshay: Plain Text Journaling
- Evan Boehs:
npm install everything
, and the Complete and Utter Chaos That Follows - Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
- Trey Harris: The case of the 500-mile email
- Jeff Huang: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
- Mario Wolczko: Unix Recovery Legend
- Anders Jensen-Urstad: Screenshots from developers & Unix people (2002)
Link directories
Here are some link directories that contain a bunch of links to cool things. The internet is beautiful, isn't it :D
- vole.wtf
- href.cool
- XXIIVV webring
- demlinks.com
- diagram.website
- ooh.directory
- blogroll.org
- aboutideasnow
- The Forest
- BlogDB
- Hacker News
- Lobsters
- IndieSeek
Tools
- TabFS: manage browser tabs as files in Unix.
- GridLover: Establish a typographic system with modular scale & vertical rhythm.
- Font style matcher
- Lowdown: simple markdown translator
- IPv6 + security audit
- randoma11y: generate accessible and good looking color combinations
- jsfxr: video game sound effects creator (there's also a free pro version)
- Explain xkcd: "It's 'cause you're dumb."
- Old school filters for pictures
- Kamala Holding Vinyls