I reckon Musk should’ve been put in charge of mass deportations—I mean, just look at the amount of people he’s already managed to get to leave Twitter.

Tuesday session

The same small dataset visualised in a hundred different ways, with notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

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The slides from Hidde’s presentation at Beyond Tellerrand.

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There are different kinds of buzzwords. Some buzzwords are useful. They take a concept that would otherwise require a sentence of explanation and package it up into a single word or phrase. Back in the day, “ajax” was a pretty good buzzword. Some buzzwords are worse than u...

Monday session

Sunday session

I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good. To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it. Like, when I went out to my usual Wed...

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes. When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregma...

Well, #FFConf today was a wonderful balm for the soul.

The talks were excellent, and it was really, really good to see people I hadn’t seen in a while—I needed that.

Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Remy.

I think it is beautiful if people have a purpose. But it should be valid to lead a purposeless life too. … Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being.

— Winne Lim

There’s a lot of great discussion at #FFconf about meaning and purpose, but I keep thinking about this terrific blog post by Winnie Lim on leading a purposeless life:

https://winnielim.org/journal/on-leading-a-purposeless-life/

The Shadow DOM discussion is happening outside #FFconf.

All the talks at #FFconf have been top-notch so far, but Pixel is a real highlight!

Thursday session

If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.

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Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

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When a country shows you who they are, believe them.

“I never thought the face-eating leopards would grab my pussy!”

Wednesday session

The slides from a lovely talk by Ana with an important message:

By having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets. That’s right. Whether you participate in the IndieWeb community or not: by having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets.

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Really hoping to speedrun the five stages this time.

Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.

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I was notified of a comment on Reddit that was intended as a warning but is in fact a huge compliment:

Gotta be careful about thesession.org. It has the same problem as Wikipedia: anyone can contribute and edit

Reading Polostan by Neal Stephenson.

I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year. Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Nata...

This makes sense:

Wrap everything in your CSS reset with a @layer rule.

When you place any styles inside a layer, these styles automatically have lower priority compared to all unlayered styles on the page. Think of it like an !unimportant block. You don’t need to worry about specificity or order of stylesheets at all.

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Sunday session

I think cats would be into The Cure. Dogs would probably prefer R.E.M.

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

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