Cool Links

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.