Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

Derek Powazek - A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

The first thirty years of the web may have been an orgy of unregulated expansion, but that era is over. The EU has been a leader with the GDPR, but there’s more coming. And I’m glad. The big players have had plenty of time to get their shit together and they haven’t. It’s time to regulate them as much as we regulate a shot of bourbon.

The blind programmers who created screen readers - The Verge

A fascinating account of the history of JAWS and NVDA.

The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It…)

The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

An Idea from Computer Science That Can Change Your Life – Jorge Arango

Applying Postel’s Law to relationships:

I aspire to be conservative in what and how I share (i.e., avoid drama) while understanding that other people will say all sorts of unmindful things.

The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships – The Public Domain Review

Scrimshaws and sketches.

Feels like a Zooniverse project waiting to happen.

Our Last-Minute, Extremely Online Gift Guide - The New York Times

Chindogu gone wild.

The 3 Laws of Serverless - Burke Holland

“Serverless”, is a buzzword. We can’t seem to agree on what it actaully means, so it ends up meaning nothing at all. Much like “cloud” or “dynamic” or “synergy”. You just wait for the right time in a meeting to drop it, walk to the board and draw a Venn Diagram, and then just sit back and wait for your well-deserved promotion.

That’s very true, and I do not like the term “serverless” for the rather obvious reason that it’s all about servers (someone else’s servers, that is). But these three principles are handy for figuring out if you’re building with in a serverlessy kind of way:

1. You have no knowledge of the underlying system where your code runs.
2. Scaling is an intrinsic attribute of the technology; so much so that it just happens automatically.
3. You only pay for what you use.

Abstraction; scale; consumption.

Designing, laws, and attitudes. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan ponders what the web might be like if the kind of legal sticks that exist for accessibility in some countries also existed for performance.

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

The Eponymous Laws of Tech - daverupert.com

Dave has curated a handy list of eponymous laws.

Laws of UX

1. Fitts’s Law
2. Hick’s Law
3. Jakob’s Law
4. Law of Prägnanz
5. Law of Proximity
6. Miller’s Law
7. Parkinson’s Law
8. Serial Position Effect
9. Tesler’s Law
10. Van Restorff Effect

Not listed:

1. Murphy’s Law
2. Sturgeon’s Law

Back to Bradshaw’s / Paul Robert Lloyd

I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.

Setting up CloudFront and TLS (HTTPS) with Jekyll – olivermak.es

Remember when I mentioned that you can get free certificates from Amazon now? Well, Oliver has written an in-depth step-by-step description of how he got his static site all set up with HTTPS.

More of this please! Share your experiences with moving to TLS—the more, the better.

New – AWS Certificate Manager – Deploy SSL/TLS-Based Apps on AWS | AWS Official Blog

If you’re hosting with Amazon, you now get HTTPS for free.

The Tink Tank » Understanding screen reader interaction modes

Léonie gives a great, clear description of how screen readers switch modes as they traverse the DOM snapshot.

Bradshaw’s Guide For Tourists in Great Britain

Keep it under your hat, but Paul has soft-launch his Project Portillo. And very nice it is too.

Like A Rounded Corner (Bruce and The Standardettes) - YouTube

Bravo, Bruce, bravo.

I heard Glen Campbell’s “Like A Rhinestone Cowboy” on the radio and began absent-mindedly singing “Like a rounded corner” to it.

Google, Microsoft, Apple sued over preview icons | Business Tech - CNET News

Further proof, as if any were needed, that the patent system turns into a steaming pile of shit as soon as it has dealings with software.