Cool Links

If you use any adblockers (you should!), this website is a neat way to test how effective your setup is. The higher, the better, but if you get a green result you should already feel safe browsing online. I got 98% with my NextDNS + UBlock Origin combo!

This is a spot on overview of how pretty much every tech company now has no clear direction besides making more money. No vision, no goals, no passion, except for making the number go up.

Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.

The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.

In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive’s opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?

He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?

Fantastic piece that highlights how much of a distraction AI has become to creating value, simply because everyone is too focused on the tools and not on the work.

But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

If you don’t care, it’s miraculous.

I’ve had this talk with my wife a few times already. Around us, it just feels that nobody cares about anything. Everything is hastily produced so it can be ignored by other people. It’s just disheartening to be the only ones noticing AI slop everywhere and see people not only believing it’s real, but also not really caring if it’s real or not.

This article also reminded of this one that I posted back in December: Care Doesn’t Scale.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

This site collects all kinds of designs for 404 pages found in the wild. Pretty cool source for inspiration or to admire other people’s creativity!

The author here worries that so many people on Reddit are interacting with posters that are nothing more than robots, without any idea of that being the case. Even worse, some people are aware of that, but don’t care.

I saw a comment in a brazilian forum that deeply resonated: “Maybe the biggest pain this realization causes is that, deep down, almost nobody cares about anything. We’re the ones who are wrong for searching for meaning in environments dominated by chaos”.

Amazing step-by-step explanation on building Card components, with a special focus on accessibility. I love this kind of articles that explain the thinking behind every step and every line of code!

Card elements are everywhere and we all do them a bit differently. I’ll pay much more attention to the things mentioned here to ensure they’re as accessible as possible.

We rely too much on software companies nowadays, and most of the popular ones are USA-based. With the USA becoming increasingly less trustworthy on an almost daily basis, people have started gathering EU-based alternatives to the most popular services.

This is interesting even if you’re not based in Europe, as companies there are forced to respect your data and privacy by law.

It’s like image lazy loading, but for page elements! I’ve got to try this out sometime and measure the effectiveness of this technique. Depending on the results, this might end up as its own blog post ;)

This website simulates a TV schedule (with CRT-style filters!) with multiple channels, each featuring an interesting indie website. The programming changes often (just like shows on a tv channel), so it’s an interesting site to keep on your bookmarks and visit a few times a day.

Great article pointing out that “Views” are an useless metric and that the platforms that count it have zero incentive to not lie about them.

This is an incredibly well-articulated rant about how recommendation algorithms are changing how our brains work. Automation is good for us and it’s everywhere, but what about when thinking, the very thing that makes us human, starts being automated?

Letting recommendation algorithms (that, as we all know, prioritize revenue) decide the information we get, the tone of that information, and the context of every social interaction is pretty much giving up on our autonomy.

The entire video is worth watching, but this part about context collapse was one of the most interesting bits. It makes perfect sense, but I had never thought of it this way:

Algorithmic feeds on social media are unfortunately quite good at fostering something known as context collapse. To understand this, imagine you’re dining in a restaurant and you’re close enough to a table of people to hear snippets of their conversation. You don’t know who any of the people at that table are, but if you manage to overhear them talk about something you’re really interested in, you might feel tempted to join their conversation. But in the context of a restaurant setting, that’s considered very rude, so it rarely ever happens.

On social media, though, the same kinds of quasi-private conversations between parties who know each other are happening all the time, but since the platform is just one big space and it might decide to put that conversation in front of random people, that social boundary of etiquette which is normally respected is just not there. And lots of conflicts happen as a result.

A really common one you might accidentally step into on social media happens when you stumble across a conversation among friends making sarcastic jokes with each other, but since you don’t know who those people are, you don’t have the context you need to recognize they’re joking. And so, if you reply with a serious critique, well, that’s a social misfire which some will react poorly to.

And that’s a pretty mild form of context collapse. It can be much, much worse when people want to discuss things like politics. And unless we realize recommendation algorithms are what’s fostering these reactionary conflicts, they’re going to continue so long as we use platforms in the ways that we do. It’s for all these reasons that I believe algorithmic complacency is creating a crisis of both curiosity and human connection.

Ahmad’s blog has been featured here a few times already, and here’s another gem! A fully interactive, well-written and just a plain joy to read article explaining different strategies to handle colors in CSS, focusing on all those little color variations we need to handle when building something.

In times where software “needs” to stand out rather than be familiar, we lose our heroes. Rest in peace, square checkboxes!

pretend to be on your phone so that you pass as human, but actually do essentially nothing instead

Do you feel pressured to be on your phone all the time, so you can pass as a human? This neat web app allows you to do just that, but while doing absolutely nothing instead.

(honestly, it’s a better use of your phone than scrolling through social media…)

Sooo many times I’ve had to debug something in a npm package dependency of a project I’m working on, only to realize I need to change some of the code to make it work.

That’s usually a pain though, since you either have to open a pull request with a fix and wait for it to be merged, or setup your own fork of the package and host it somewhere.

This package aims to avoid that. It applies patches to other packages in your project, so you don’t have to go through the process of setting up a fork.

Really nice article that pretty much sums up the iPad situation: it is interesting hardware but that has pretty much no software that showcases what it does best.

The best iPad apps are… web apps. And the iPad’s only available browser being Safari doesn’t make things better.

Customizing <select> elements is something every web developer has had to do, probably. And the thing about that is that… you really can’t customize it. Or couldn’t, until now.

Having to implement a custom look on this field was always, to me, the perfect definition of “reinventing the wheel”. You gotta pick up this element that works reliably, is accessible, natively supported by all browsers, and users have been using for 30+ years, and then… build it from scratch, with JavaScript (which already kills the accessibility for some people).

Now, as of Chromium 135, you can finally customize them as you always expected you could! This will probably take a while to get to Safari and Firefox, but here’s the cool thing: if those browsers don’t support this new thing, the <select> will just look like a normal field and work just as well. A perfect example of progressive enhancement!

I’ve written about Container Queries before, but this article by Josh Comeau is great at giving even more examples of its utility. It’s always nice to see what use cases other developers find for it.