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401 bookmarks by garrettc
The history of humans being confounded by color photography. Photograph of two young men and a young woman under a Christmas tree and above a Munsell color chart, American. c. 1947. Rijksmuseum.
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Ordering a bagel in NYC is like cracking a code. What kinds of bagel are there? Do you call it a bagel or a sandwich? Is it wrong to put egg and cheese on a Cinnamon-Raisin bagel (I hope so)? You’re somehow expected to just know, and if you don’t, then you’re clearly new to the city.
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Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” straight white men freak out, like, I said then, “vampires being fed a garlic tart.
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Despite being hyped in expensive Super Bowl ads, cryptocurrency is now having a difficult moment. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world went into a full meltdown this week in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.
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I have been lucky to collaborate with more than a hundred teams building PWAs and consult on some of the world's largest sites. Engineers and managers on these teams universally want to deliver great experiences and have many questions about how to approach common challenges.
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Last year, the team behind The Simpsons produced a video for the French luxury fashion house Balenciaga that debuted in October at Paris Fashion Week. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
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Before we became part of the Co-op Content Design community, Marianne worked in marketing and communications, and Mary was a copywriter. Like most content designers and content strategists at Co-op, we moved into this discipline from roles that also demanded strong writing skills.
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Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech.
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Getting assigned to your first sub doesn’t make you a submariner and once you become one you’ll find yourself in a social structure unlike any other. Living in a machine with over 100 sailors requires a person to be flexible socially and sometimes physically.
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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. For the most part, I don’t remember things. My memory is not so much vague as it is glitchy; a generally blank screen that sometimes blinks to life and performs basic recall tasks.
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Okay I ended up making this write-up waaaaaay too long, so before I get into any of the jargon, let’s take a look at the finished product: Orbiting around the equator of a supermassive black hole, with an off-axis accretion disk.
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“いらっしゃいませ.” An elderly man, perhaps the owner of the camera shop, bows almost imperceptibly towards me. He holds back a chuckle as he watches me stumble clumsily across the shop’s entrance. Amused, the man gestures towards a glass cabinet.
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On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading Mac’s Club.
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When you work on a browser, you will often hear remarks along the lines of, Why don't you just put [popular framework] in the browser? This is a good question — or at least one that illuminates how those who make browsers make decisions. Spoiler: it's gnarly.
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I’ve talked at length about the benefits and virtues of progressive enhancement.
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If what makes words good is people agreeing on their meaning, then transformation is not a very good word, is it? Transformation means many different things to different people, and if you work in government, you hear it spoken about a lot.
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I started noticing it sometime last year: the conversations I was having about work were changing. During the first year of the pandemic, I’d had plenty of coaching clients express feelings of stress or loneliness, of course.
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Octobers excite us at Halide HQ. Apple releases new iPhones, and they’re certain to upgrade the cameras. As the makers of a camera app, we tend to take a longer look at these upgrades.
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What exactly is the World Wide Web? There’s a technical answer that involves protocols like HTTP and standards like URLs. But Jim Nielsen has a somewhat different answer to the question What is the Web?
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Over the last two decades, the web has woven itself into the fabric of our lives. What began as a research project has become the world’s most important communication platform and an essential tool for billions of people.
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researched and established new service definitions. We expanded the scope of the Service Standard accordingly. And we developed new tools to create a holistic understanding of end-to-end service offerings.
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Welcome to Galaxy Brain—a newsletter from Charlie Warzel about technology, media, culture, and big ideas. You can read what this is all about here. If you like what you see, consider forwarding it to a friend or two.
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Carbon is one of the most fascinating elements in all of nature, with chemical and physical properties unlike any other element. With just six protons in its nucleus, it’s the lightest abundant element capable of forming a slew of complex bonds.
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When El Salvador officially made Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, José Bonilla was one of the first citizens to sign up for a government-backed digital wallet that lets anyone use the cryptocurrency.
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It’s not surprising that video games — a reliable vehicle for escapism and stress relief — experienced a pandemic popularity boom. This was especially true for Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, which saw 141 million active monthly users during 2021.
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The only thing we’d wanted to do was ensure that artists could make some money and have control over their work. Back in May 2014, I was paired up with the artist Kevin McCoy at Seven on Seven, an annual event in New York City designed to spark new ideas by connecting technologists and artists.
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Content strategy defines the process for enterprises to provide content that simultaneously satisfies customer and business needs. Its goal seems straightforward but can be challenging to realize.
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After 12 years of working on web infrastructure and Angular at Google, I’ve moved on to help build a better Web and Internet with Cloudflare, with my ultimate goal being to make the world a slightly better place.
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Although is pains me to reject advice from the late great Grace Hopper… this advice I do hereby reject. I understand the sentiment behind it: we are often held back by “rules” that don’t even exist.
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This is not a blog I anticipated writing. My plan was to let Women's History Month pass me by as much as possible. From March 2020 to August 2020, I started learning to code basically in isolation.
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Engage staff to play an active role in organizational change, keeping in mind this can be done in various ways. Be sure to align expectations for participation with the corporate culture and change context. Get comfortable with not being the expert, not having all the answers.
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Tim Maughan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His debut novel “Infinite Detail” (FSG, 2019) was The Guardian’s science fiction and fantasy book of the year and was shortlisted for the Locus Award for best first novel.
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People are increasingly hanging out in small, private communities. Global timelines and newsfeeds won’t come back. As covered by this excellent edition of Garbage Day, Twitter shows all the characteristics of a rotting online community.
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When developing real-time web applications, WebSockets might be the first thing that come to your mind. However, Server Sent Events (SSE) are a simpler alternative that is often superior. Recently I have been curious about the best way to implement a real-time web application.
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The Hypermedia Driven Application (HDA) architecture is a new/old approach to building web applications. It combines the simplicity & flexibility of traditional Multi-Page Applications (MPAs) with the better user experience of Single-Page Applications (SPAs).
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Back in 2012, when I was working on my long essay on Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0, I came to reflect upon the role of language in structuring how we think about digital technologies, their politics, and their inevitability. Was the "Web 2.
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In a previous article I gave a very broad-brush description of HTMX and Alpine and their place in the modern web application tech stack. It was pretty light on detail, and it's difficult to draw any conclusions from a few snippets of code.
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I have billions of pixels in my cellphone, and you probably do too. But what is a pixel? Why do so many people think that pixels are little abutting squares? Now that we’re aswim in an ocean of zettapixels (21 zeros), it’s time to understand what they are.
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These days so much of my free time is booked with calls to explain to people outside the software industry why crypto assets are such a destructive force and why I support forceful regulation to halt this financially corrosive enterprise from spreading further into markets.
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This post shares some fresh research on how PMs are feeling when writing PRDs followed by a practical tool to hopefully solve this problem. This should help you to auto-generate PRDs with less time, less effort and – most importantly – less anxiety!
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Things have been going hard for CSS in 2021. The CSS Working Group has cranked out a ton of work, polishing existing CSS features and specifying lots of new ones too — with experimental implementations already having landed in several browsers.
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This post has been in gestation for years. Whenever there’s a new flare-up concerning Twitter, which is comically often, I dip into my Drafts folder and dust off this post, but due to the exasperating complexity of the topic, never muster the polish to hit Publish.
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In order to responsibly develop new technologies, it is critical to ask “how will this be used for evil?” Technology companies employ red teamers, risk assessors, and ethicists to do just that, or at least so they can say they are.
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Some meanings of words change over time. Take ‘scan’ for example. That used to mean reading something systematically giving attention to every word in order.
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I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience.
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For an upcoming zine project, I‘ve been buried deep under articles and papers on the phenomenon of “hype”. (If you‘re interested you can follow the project along here).
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Megaphone.fm: Define 'Stable': A Wild Search for Te...
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There’s been a lot of talk about Web3 lately, and as the person who defined “Web 2.0” 17 years ago, I’m often asked to comment. I’ve generally avoided doing so because most prognostications about the future turn out to be wrong.
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