A Garland for Mayday

Radical bookstores don’t just sell books. In Chicago, Baltimore, and beyond, they host book clubs, training sessions, meetings, jail support work, and organizing that can shape entire movements. New from @leftiecowboy.bsky.social

I wrote about why I quit my job, and how weird and tiring tech feels these days.

Guy eating a perfect delicious grape: we should step on these with our nasty feet, let the mush ferment, then drink what comes off it

There are absolutely “character actors” of fonts. It’s not that you know the name, but you know what they’ve been in.

Responsive images are tough and often implemented incorrectly. With sizes=auto the browser will figure things out. Chromium supports it, Firefox 150 in two weeks, Webkit in tech preview. I can't wait for this! https://developer.mozill...

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Lizard, Spock

This React -> Web Components post by the MDN team touches on challenges and solutions I've seen dozens of times over frontend's lost decade. Kudos to them for the improvements in performance, and the bravery to tell the story in an unvarnished way: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/m...

“Chat,

I’m excited to announce the 1̶s̶t̶ 7th release candidate of Elena today! 🫶 Elena is a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components. Unlike most web component libraries, Elena doesn’t force JavaScript for everything. Crafted with love and care using HTML, CSS & plain JS: elenajs.com

love to see more people pushing back on goals of being “frictionless”. friction is a part of how we make meaning and build things that are worth building. messy, slow, human conflict has value

“They called Coney Island the playground of the world.”

This is where they store the web components.

“When building an app that relies on syncing local data with a server, make it seamFUL, not seamless. People should always know the status of critical data so they don’t experience any bad surprises.” — Aleth Gueguen #WebDayOut

Happy International Women's Day. 🏴

Happy birthday to the great revolutionary and theorist, Rosa Luxemburg, born on this day in 1871.

I'm at the beginning of my rope. I'm doing great.

I'm trying to think of something that would be less helpful to ADHD people than a machine that does boring tasks but randomly gets small details wrong and therefore requires extreme attentiveness to the boring tasks but I'm having a hard time. Appeals to our worst impulses and biggest weakness.

*adds “communal knowing” to personal lexicon*

I think the most pragmatic thing people can do, if they're being mandated to use LLMs, is to unionise. If by some miracle the bubble doesn't burst, there will still likely be lots of layoffs so get protecting yourself and your colleagues. @ethanmarcotte.com has got the blueprint for you here.

given the existence of skeleton and luge, i postulate the existence of two other, yet to be discovered, winter olympic sports

I dunno. I got my PhD from a lab called "The Stanford AI Lab" and I'm described as "an AI skeptic." Not an engineer, not a computer scientist, not someone who has built things that work and describes the harms of tech as a technologist, but as an "AI skeptic." Interesting.

good morning! apropo of nothing, here is a manga about Weird Al Yankovic that appeared in a 1984 issue of the japanese magazine “FM RecoPal”(translations in alt text)

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone who isn't a Nazi, and especially to the trekkies.

If you don’t love me at my “Horkheimer and Adorno predicted Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side”, you don’t deserve me at my “Is Yoda a bug or an insect?”

The trick to making perfectly poached eggs is always using at least n+1 eggs. Follow for more cooking tips.

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

bars

Hello again, everything is still scary and hard and the tech job market is wild right now, so here's my semi-regular thread of open jobs I've found where your work could make the world better (or at least, not make it worse)

hey Mom can you come pick me up. yeah everyone on the niche microblogging website is arguing about who has the correct emotional posture to the unknowable future again

To mark 25 years of Drowned in Sound I’m doing a series of interviews with some of my favourite acts of the 21st century Was thrilled to finally interview the techno / ambient / electronic icon Kelly Lee Owens about class, community, and clever ideas to save grassroots music #music #depechemode

Bandcamp bans AI music

Here is the wonderful dorky talk of Astrid Bin with which she was closing the 2025 edition of Berlin. Watch “Dork Patterns: The Story of Little Character” and kick off this week in the right way. youtu.be/6MYyRuSaNSY

it sucks that being a woman talking about this puts a target on me, but i‘ve had my head put on nude bodies that weren’t mine as retaliation before so whatever: if it happens to you, do not panic and definitely do not isolate yourself from friends and family. talk about it with someone you trust.

Pluribus poignantly explores the idea that “No one has to be able to work with everyone, but […] if we do not challenge ourselves to navigate some amount of discomfort, our political reach will have terminal limits.” (Let This Radicalize You by @mskellymhayes.bsky.social, @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Verschlimmbessern is German for making something worse while intending to make it better, and by introducing inherently non-deterministic tools like ChatGPT to problems where deterministic solutions already exist, you’re doing exactly that.

With a knock on your door, a kindly wizard invites you to join us on Shelved By Genre's LORD OF THE YEAR, in which we will consider the popular but contested works of JRR Tolkien, kicking things off with a long rumination upon the first four chapters of THE HOBBIT: rangedtouch.com/2026/01/02/t...

I like when a villain in a story says “my powers are stronger than ever before”, so that we know their powers are stronger than ever before

The belly rubs will continue until morale improves

The idea that autistic people lack empathy is still depressingly prevalent, partly because people conflate 'caring about other humans' wellbeing & wanting them to be happy' with 'reliably able to infer a stranger's motivation & emotional state based off observing a few external nonverbal clues'.

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars. www.404media.co/flock-expose...

Most of us did not choose to write or draw or design so that we could put products on the shelf. We chose to do it because it’s a set of skills we enjoy exercising, that give us fulfillment. It’s like asking a pro pitcher to just let a machine pitch for them. Fuck off and give me the ball.

we have a really good dev rel engineer here throwing himself to (i would say) a small number of very loud, hungry wolves because the new ceo did (i would also say) a very weird announcement that sounded like it was written in 2024 by an ai startup

To the person who came up with the idea to replace the knobs on a stovetop with a single touch panel, which is mounted flush with the same surface on which pots of boiling water are heated up; where are you, I just wanna talk!

A few notes on organizing: mattdpearce.substack.com/p/an-unsenti...

the way they’re also literally taking the place of the actual laborers who built this shit is quite on the nose

Most discussions about “misinformation” treat the problem as if people simply don’t have good enough critical-thinking skills. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not entirely accurate. The problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s the structure of the information environment people are placed into.

Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability lyra.horse/blog/2025/12... "CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"