Cool Links Vol. 23: May, 2026

Hey there! I hope the month of May has treated you well. Here in Italy we are (hopefully) at the tail end of a major heatwave that has made life a tiny bit worse for me; I never lived anywhere this hot! 🥵

Fortunately, I was able to do a bunch of cool things! The main ones being me launching the new version of my blog, and launching Carousel Pilot, something I built at work but have open sourced so other people can benefit from it.

Oh, and I also collected a few cool links for your enjoyment:

Fun

Artemis II Photo Timeline, by Hank Green

A nicely put-together timeline with a lot (all?) of the photos from the Artemis II mission that orbited around the Moon. The sequence of the spacecraft approaching the Moon is breathtaking!

Old'aVista, by Eric Mackrodt

This is like a landing page + search engine for the old internet! It allows you to search for stuff on the Internet Archive without having to necessarily know the URL of every website you wanna visit.

I found some forum threads from 1998 of people discussing the imminent launch of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Fascinating stuff.

Parallel Cities, by Victor Naumik

This website allows you to find the latitude of your city (or whatever city you want) and shows all the cities in the same latitude all around the world (or in the mirrored latitute i.e. opposite hemisphere).

My home city is opposite to Cairo, which is neat. The one I'm currently living in is parallel to Vancouver, which is also neat.

Optical Toys, by Tim Holman

A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.

I found out later that this is just one out of many other "toy" collections. I recommend checking those out as well!

AI

Is AI Profitable Yet?

Will it ever be? Probably not. What will happen then? Nothing good for us probably.

Deep Read

Why Socialism?, by Albert Einstein

Never thought I'd be linking to Einstein here, but this is a great essay about what constitutes humankind and society, how they differ, and how they mold each other (though this relationship is far from balanced).

The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

Still a great read even if "socialism" is a trigger word for you, by the way.

Dev

Better fluid sizing with round(), by Ahmad Shadeed

I've been using clamp() for fluid text sizing for a while, and this article highlights the pros of using the round() CSS function to make the fluidity more predictable! I love the card height examples too, as that's something that's consistently a pain in almost every project I work on.

Design

UX Case Study: Waze, by Built for Mars

If you drive, you've probably hopped around between Waze, Google Maps and even Apple Maps at some point. Each has their own pros and cons, and while Waze used to have the edge on real-time information, that edge was stolen by Google Maps (not literally stolen; they're literally developed by the same team).

But besides that, this case study goes into the differences between the 3 apps and how each displays similar things differently in order to highlight their own strengths.

Not that you asked, but my favorites are Apple Maps for actual navigation and Google Maps for everything else.

Wrapping up

Thanks for sticking around, hope to see you next month!