Mozilla published a new State of Mozilla. It’s absolute slopaganda. A mess of trippy visuals and corpo-speak that’s been through the slop wringer too many times. I read it so you don’t have to.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated with slow delivery and high costs. Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of software work.

In the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything—when we washed our mail, when everything seemed dangerous, when nothing was available—I made masks. Hundreds of them, a sewing machine permanent on the only table in our small house. I'd bag them and take them to friends and neighbors, tossing them onto their porches and stoops. Eventually, when I felt OK going into the post office, I'd mail them to groups that needed them. The Navajo Nation got packs from me, an org in Chicago for homeless L

“The Open Web” means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web’s Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.

I recently added a rule to my reset style sheet UA+ that I wanted to share with you. When you add a popover to a page and open it, it looks similar to a dialog in terms of its styling. It's positioned at the center of the viewport.

Over the past year, I’ve made a change to how I consume content. Everything is at 1x now: podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks. All of it.

Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention.

The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.

Each year, three people die waiting for Cloudflare and Google to verify they are human.

My concern is that Mozilla is too excited about a technology that has inherent downsides and ethical problems, and I would like to see better defaults and clearer risk mitigations.

We used to think that grieving went through five stages: denial, protest, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We no longer really believe in that theory, but when it comes to dealing with the US, many Europeans are however currently busily negotiating with reality.

“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane.”

Tech talk ahead. Short version: I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things. (Bots are automated programs to scrape data from the internet. Little do they know this is a personal website of no consequence.)

What’s going on, Internet? If a song isn’t available on Spotify or Apple Music, a lot of people these days assume it isn’t an official release. I reckon that idea is wrong.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and checked my news app while still in bed. The headlines from ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian loaded instantly: a curated stream of stories updated overnight. I scrolled through, tapped on a few pieces, then switched over to my podcast app to queue up something for my morning gym session. I queued up three new episodes: one from Search Engine, the first episode of the new ProPublica Narrated podcast, and an episode of Revolution.Social.

Elon Musk’s X platform has blocked the European Commission from making advertisements, presumably in response to the €120 million fine for its misleading verification system and overall lack of transparency. We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

I think I have an idea why we're so extremely divided on AI: it's because we have an intuitive sense of who it stands to benefit, and who stands to pay the costs. I think whether you see reason for optimism has a lot to do with which group you see yourself in.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

It’s a common adage amongst us Internet weirdos that you should really have your own website. Your own digital space where you are free to express yourself without being beholden to manipulative algorithms or hostile user experiences. We espouse the virtues of owning your data and breaking free from walled gardens and all that, but I think we often forget that the majority of Internet-users are put off by the massive resistance such things come with.

I’m interviewing fellow Indigenous metalheads at a heavy music festival on the Blackfeet Nation, with Russel Daniels (Diné and Ho-Chunk descent), a photographer who’s not into metal.

I've been trying to write this piece for years, really ever since I finished the first version of Open Source Explained (a v2 will drop early next year). Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the commentariat accusing me of WrongThink.

By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads.

Alchemists in medieval times apparently believed it was possible to transmute matter into gold—or, at least, were attempting to find out if it was possible to do so through an early, rudimentary version of what would eventually become chemistry.

Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.

Music is super important to me and has been for as long as I can remember. I grew up "fighting" with my parents for control of the radio on long roadtrips (we didn't exchange blows - "name that tune" was the ring of choice). I raided my dad's library of CDs he'd get sent (he was a youth pastor at the time). I'd exchange mix tapes (on actual cassettes) with my older cousin whenever we saw him. In college napster was a revelation (followed by the attempt to do the right thing with all-of-mp3.com).

It took me by surprise to learn that this post was now a decade old: Last week I decided to leave Spotify. I've been using the service for almost 2 years now, and overall I've really liked it... It's hard to explain why [I'm leaving], but I guess I feel apprehensive about Spotify being in control of how and where I listen to music in ways I haven't been before.

I’ve been thinking about a note from Alex Russell where he says: any time you're running JS on the main thread, you're at risk of being left behind by progress. The zen of web development is to spend a little time in your own code, and instead to glue the big C++/Rust subsystems together, then get out of the bloody way.