Cool Links
Cool links are a collection of interesting things I find around the web. They can range from fun dumb websites to deep thought-provoking essays, or more commonly something in between. The feed here updates frequently, and I compile everything into a blog post on the last day of each month.

181 links
OverpAId — Fire Your CEO. Hire The Future.
OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else’s job was replaceable.
This is fantastic.
There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.
So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.
While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.
Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn’t only important to creative work; it’s important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.
Getting Started with Anchor Positioning
Another amazing Josh Comeau post that explains a new concept in a super easy to understand manner and makes me wanna try it out right now? Yes please.
The last time I saw the anchor positioning API, it looked kinda intimidating. Now it sounds so simple! I know there was work on the browser standards side to simplify it, so kudos to them for arriving at what seems to be a really sensible API.
There’s hardly a working day in which Safari doesn’t make my life harder. I’m not the only one who feels like that. Alex Russell goes in great detail on how shitty the situation of Apple’s browser is especially because they block any sort of competition in their main platform.
Apple is consistently out-engineered and out-invested by a non-profit with 1/40th the web-derived revenue.
These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it.
Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix
Don’t let the title turn you off in case these words mean nothing to you — Sophie’s website is a joy to open every time, with multiple fun themes to choose from. And she added a new dynamic element to one of them, making the background reflect the sky of the current time of day.
She noted it was hard to get to this result, but reading it, it feels pretty simple to understand. Which is the mark of a good developer and writer.
I Could've Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID.
Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.
Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.
I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.
A 3D museum in which you can walk on all about the history of WordPress, with displays for each release, some of the history behind them, all that. Really cool!
Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious
I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”
Yes! Me too! Lots of drafts got abandoned because I eventually caught myself thinking that while writing it. Past couple years I’ve been trying to detach myself from that way of thinking but it’s a slow process.
Sometimes a blog post will only have a target audience of one (the writer) and that is perfectly fine.
The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s
Incredible visual demonstration of how the absurd size of modern SUVs turns them into even deadlier machines. Not only the hood height makes them deadlier in a possible collision, but the vastly increased blind spots make collisions more likely to happen.
TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
This is so cool! TownSquare adds a small virtual square at the footer of a website, on which visitors can walk around, jump, high-five and talk to each other. And this can connect multiple websites together!
Strongly considering adding this somewhere on my website.
This is so good! Overworld is a gaming news aggregator that is actually usable. It groups together all news for a single topic under a single headline, and also curates gaming-related stuff (that’s not necessarily news) in a “worth your time” section. And it looks great too!
Gap decorations: Now available in Chromium
Yesss! I’ve waited for this for so long! One of the worst parts of my job is trying to implement those kind of separators (really common in designs) without this functionality being an actual thing yet. So many hacks, complex calculations, for something so visually trivial.
And even if it takes a while to get to other browsers, it’s mostly a visual drawback if not supported; so I can already start thinking about using it.
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!
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.
Will it ever be? Probably not. What will happen then? Nothing good for us probably.
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!
Better fluid sizing with round()
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.