Cool Links

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.

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.

Incredible video essay going deep into the use of George Orwell’s 1984 by the entire political spectrum as something that validates their ideals. It also goes a bit into Orwell’s life explaining the context around the book’s original publication and how it was never prophetic, but reflective of a perpetual feeling in Orwell’s mind (and ours).

If you use a Mac, you probably know that Spotlight (the search box/launcher that opens when you press ⌘+Space) is shit. It’s slow, inconsistent, slow, and tries to do too much at once. (did I say it’s slow?)

TinyStart strips out all the useless stuff and keeps just the essentials, which means it’s really fast. You can launch apps, links and folders, and also pick emojis (it’s better than the built-in emoji picker too!). It’s a €5 one-time purchase, with free updates forever.

It does less than alternatives like Raycast (which is free) on purpose, but has the added bonus of never having to deal with features you’re not interested in, because it’s not trying to sell you anything extra. (plus, it’s just inevitable that Raycast will enshittify eventually…)

A great explainer (as always) from Josh Comeau going over the now safe-to-use CSS Scroll-Driven animations, which allow animating elements based on their scroll position on a page, such as entry/exit animations, scroll progress and more, without a single line of JavaScript!

I tried this out a while ago and loved how simple it is, but I always feel like those kind of animations are a bit too much for the type of stuff I build. 😅 Good to have the know-how, though.

… and glass breaks (or scratches). Short and sweet video by MKBHD explaining how smartphone brands achieve their yearly “more scratch resistance” or “more shatter resistance” claims, while the end product always seems the exact same.

If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a spoiler: Glass cannot be both more resistant to scratches and to shattering, they gotta choose one. So they just alternate every year to be able to make one of those two claims.

I think it’s worth noting that when people don’t seem interested in the distinction between real and not real it may not be that they don’t care about what’s real. It may be that their capacity, their energy, their ability to distinguish is less than yours.

A very heartfelt piece about information burnout.

Ever wondered why, in software development, a group of characters is called a “string”? This won’t provide you the answer, but will make it easier to understand.

We may have tools that allow us be “100x more productive” now, but our brain is the same lump of meat it was thousands of years ago. What happens when it can no longer keep track of the things we are doing?

This bottleneck is what’s happening in our brains. When you ask a machine to build infinite apps, it will do that. When you ask a machine that generates more tasks, it will do that. […] You didn’t fix the bottleneck, you moved it downstream.

[…]

At the end of the chain of 10,000-watt GPUs sitting in a data center in Iowa is the 40-watt lump of meat inside your skull. It’s an incredible, efficient, miraculous lump of meat that has millions of years of bio-engineering behind it… but understanding is the new bottleneck. If brains are a scarce resource, then we should take care to not over-produce inventory.

The Brazilian Amazon now has a brand and a logo, with the intent of promoting the 9 states it occupies as a tourist destination! And wow, that logo is a thing of beauty.

The entire branding is pretty neat, but the logo is especially stunning. Each letter is based on real curves of the Amazon river (the longest river in the world), and each letter is also from a different state! Great taste and great execution, here. And all made in Brazil. 🇧🇷

And not only the logo, but they also made a type font called Igaratype, and you can play around and let the Amazon river spell out whatever you want in this live playground.

Another great article by Josh explaining a neat little trick on how to make the header of a website dynamic… by having it not do anything at all. Don’t worry, it’s quite simple and he explains it way better than I ever could.

Bonus points for not requiring a single line of JavaScript.

A world map where people can anonymously write about memories they’ve had in specific places. You can write your own or just roam around reading the memories of other people. It’s fun to look around places I know and see what kind of experiences people had there.

in a world looming with the threat of ai stealing your job, save humanity by stealing ai’s job.

Fun little website where you can play the part of an AI answering prompts made by humans. Remember to tell people they’re absolutely right!

Miss the feeling if watching TV as a kid? This site allows you to surf channels on a retro TV, and you can even choose the decade you want!

Unfortunately it seems it only has US TV, so I can’t really relate to anything there. Would love a Brazilian version of this!

Fantastic video essay about loneliness, technology, and the loss of our ability to do.

Beware that there’s some (I assume mild?) spoilers of Death Stranding 1 & 2 in there.

This is amazing! This is a pixelated sandbox that allows you to experiment with all kinds of materials and elements, and see how they interact with each other. Each material interacts with others differently, as they would in real life. For example, oil won’t mix with water, but ink will.

A lot of time-consuming potential here, so don’t open it if you have something else to do 😅

This is pretty cool! Terry built a RSS reader that rethinks how to approach a continuous feed — or rather, a current — of articles and links. I particularly love how it aims to solve the noisy feed problem, where a source that posts 20 news items a day might drown a really cool article from someone who doesn’t post often, which is a problem I’ve had on every single RSS reader I’ve used (and that I “solved” by unsubscribing from noisy feeds).

It’s a one-time-purchase and on iOS/iPadOS/macOS only, and I haven’t tried it out yet because I just renewed the annual plan for another RSS reader 😅

This is both funny and incredibly infuriating. A PR was declined on GitHub for an open-source project because it was made by an AI agent and… the AI agent (or the anonymous person behind it) wrote up a defamatory blog post targeted specifically at the project’s maintainer.

If being an open-source maintainer was already a thankless job, now there’s one more hell to endure.

Fantastic piece wielding the power of common sense and highlighting all the struggles that software engineers have with using generative AI on our jobs.

I also use LLMs as a spicy autocomplete (or even a spicy search) and they can be very useful at times. But I can’t replace my thinking with machines, because machines don’t think.

HTML is getting more powerful! Now you can add some predefined commands to HTML elements that can do things like open (or close) modals, for example, without a single line of JS. This article explains really succinctly how that works. The custom commands thing is neat as well.