Latest bookmarks (page 2 of 134)

"It’s an easy position to hold loosely, especially when the alternative means confronting the fragmentation of power, complexity of trade-offs, and inconvenient necessity of compromise in any functional democracy. To say both parties are the same is less an insight than an escape hatch.
But like all comforting myths, it only works until it collides with reality. 2025 has been that collision. And the wreckage is everywhere."

"...a community science monitoring project to study the effects of smoke on birds in neighborhoods across California, Oregon, and Washington. By observing birds in your neighborhood for just 10 minutes a week, you can help us learn more about bird responses to smoke. Together, we can safeguard birds through ever-smokier summers."

"TLS has exactly one performance problem: it is not used widely enough. Everything else can be optimized."

"If you or your organization has a website, try using it without a mouse. Use the keyboard instead. If you don't have a website, try a few of your favorite websites without a mouse, just using the keyboard."

"SolidOS is much more. SolidOS is showcasing the possibility of Solid for the future, and we mean:
- true data ownership: management of personal data & authorization control; - avoidance of vendor lock-in to services: easy moving to a different Pod or WebID provider; - data reuse between applications: with help of data interoperability and data discoverability."

A fascinating overview of historical expeditions to use transit of Venus across the disc of the sun, as observed from different locations on earth, to triangulate the distance to the sun. Halley came up with the idea, but knew he would be long dead by the time the next pair of transits in 1761 and 1769 came around. Multiple nations cooperated to set up observatories across the globe in time to measure the events. Enough of them got enough data to get a decent estimate, but the travel stories are just as interesting.

"It’s funny how useful a 34-year-old software design can still be."
Also, it was not a coincidence that it looked like QuickBasic.

Suggestions on how to fix various problems with onboarding, discovery, and usability.

"In this article we define cold emailing from our perspective, share concerns about its misuse, particularly in B2B communication, and highlight the organizations enabling it."
Sending an actual, personal, 1-to-1 cold email? That's one thing. But if you're scraping addresses and sending unsolicited bulk mail, using multiple domains, and tweaking the contents with LLMs to make the bulk messaging look personalized...it's spam.

18 years ago, the dev decided to put it on hold because he didn't have time for it with his 5 kids. Now, one of those kids is in college and asked him about programming operating systems, and he's dusted it off again.