Latest bookmarks (page 38 of 95)

Perspective on how social media works today:
"You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible. I came up with a term for the human version: beef-only thinking." "A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage."

"Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”."

"The history of a notebook everyone knows and loves, from 19th century Europe to a contemporary minimal redesign."

"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."
Slightly older article. More research hsa been done since then: https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue59/3/index.html

This sounds like a cool idea

"It’s a mistake to judge The Fediverse as though it’s a Valley startup" - 2018 article about how all the "Mastodon is doomed!" articles going around at the time were based on evaluating it on completely the wrong criteria.

"Where do hands and fingers fall on the device? This question is the linchpin for every form factor this book examines, and the answer tells you how to design your layout for comfort and efficiency. Since we hold phones, phablets, tablets, and laptops very differently, it’s no surprise that each of these touchscreen variations has its own UI needs."
Older article, but the length of the human thumb hasn't changed in the last decade. Though it has been a while since I've seen the term "phablet."

"Six months ago I inhaled a rare, flesh-eating bacteria that nearly killed me.
Naturally, I went back and interviewed my doctors (among others) about what might have happened, had I been uninsured."

"There are two dangers of measuring happiness along just one axis. The first is that you will be easily disappointed, because the unbalanced approach to maximizing a single variable increases the chance that you will end up behind.
And the second is that you might actually succeed in hitting a limit. And then where will you find your happiness?"

"Instead of worrying that emoji is replacing competent language use, we can celebrate that emoji are creating a richer form of online communication that returns the features of gesture to language."