God I'm so nostalgic for the old internet. Do you remember -- recommending people to follow because they were so interesting? Posting things you read because, they were (also) interesting? Asking legit questions because you wanted to learn from real humans who knew things about the subject? 😭

Typographische Monatsblätter, 12, 1972. Design by Wolfgang Weingart designreviewed.com/artefacts/ty...

Oh right, acceptance speeches. And then like, actually doing a great job and getting stuff done on behalf of people speeches. :) bsky.app/profile/atru...

The Baileys: Well, we don't technically live in the city, but we're actually really impressed by Zohran -- we love how he connects with everyday people and has new ideas and new energy for improving things, and would have voted for him if we could have!

Man it's been way too long since I've scrolled down and just liked 30 posts in a row. Congrats to the best city in the country and to America too frankly.

Real q: are there still scenes in the world where everyone and their mother (in a certain age group/neighborhood) is "trying to be an artist"? Could be totally wrong (it's been a while) but even Berlin seems to not be quite that anymore?

You know what is a delight? Encountering someone who cares deeply about the craft of their work in a realm that you know nothing about. Game recognize game I guess :) (Also if anyone needs a rec for a integrative bodywork/massage person in Boston, I've got one.)

Guys what am I going to watch to feel good when Zohran doesn't have to make campaign videos anymore?

Halloween 2025.

Curious: When I recently reentered the US and went through immigration, for the first time ever, I went up to the counter and the entirety of the exchange was, verbatim, "Look at the camera...Welcome back Stephanie." (No passport handed over) Is this a uniform change across all airports?

That's it, that's the day. After years of open collaboration, the Design Tokens Community Group delivers a production-ready, interoperable format for design systems. Goodbye disjointed workflows. Hello open standards. → tr.designtokens.org/format

169 969 Dev's kiss

Interviewee: "The other is a much deeper question -- it's a historical question" Avery Trufelman (host): "hell yeah, here we go!" Exactly why I love this podcast. Psyched for the new season on American outdoors clothes.

Incredibly hard for me to remember what it was like to not be able to instantly get a 95% of the way there translation of something on your phone. That was not that long ago.

Doing my first appliance repair (gas oven) in the age of LLMs and it is so pleasurable to have a real human being help you with your problems.

Holy fuck? Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson share.google/dgTT3kEVv6se...

UI Library/Design Engineer people: What is your source of truth for "correct" screen reader behavior with a MULTI-select combobox? (there is no W3C multi-select example) I look at ariakit.org and material.angular.dev/components/ (for, reasons), but that's 2 sources :)

If you are a dev + a Chrome user, have you enabled side-by-side view yet? It is SO GOOD. (chrome://flags) It is split-screen but in one browser tab so you can maximize your browser + not do the thing where for 5 seconds you have perfectly split screen windows + then have to move one and ruin it.

1. Cool work here from @jwolondon.bsky.social ! 2. If I could parallelize my life (lol), I would love to do some research on the aesthetics of imprecision in the current moment. (Or, in reality, would love to read some n+1 etc essay about this as a topic)

On the bright (eh, maybe that's not quite the right word) side: Thinking it's 8pm because it's dark and realizing that it's actually only 6 isn't the worst thing in the world.

Are there any typography people out there who can speculate about the thinking behind this font? This is one of those times where I'm like, "I don't get it and I'm pretty sure its me."

Almost forgot! I listened to this podcast with Mark Frost about the female characters in Twin Peaks in late September and it was an absolute delight. Meant to throw it on the internet with an "I recommend" stamp on it! mubi.com/en/notebook/...

A coup just took place in Madagascar. I wrote about it--and why it's the most interesting island you probably know nothing about.

Sigh.

Dear DevTools companies: Poorly styled / designed documentation is killing / will kill your product.

Making a small presentation for my community learning center Russian class about my recent trip to Latvia/Estonia and almost 10 yrs after finishing my PhD, I seem to be incapable of not saying, "In this presentation, I will..." 🤦

Things that are kind of cute and endearing: When someone in Oct 2025 tried to reassure you about the future being like, look at the past 10 years -- bad thing has never happened!

Remembered the Athens Charter and CIAM the other day (most of this stuff has been removed from my brain's RAM at this point) and was like, could you imagine that happening now?!?!!!!?! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_...

My oral history interview with Ken Thompson -- of Unix, C, Go, computer chess, and other fame -- for the Computer History Museum and the ACM is now online! computerhistory.org/blog/a-compu...

Yes, and....feels like a good time to say that if I can ever be of service to mutuals here (via like, a 1:1 meeting) or you just think it would be super great to talk, I'm down for that! (DM!)

Is the best part of going away coming back and seeing what is way too familiar to you with new eyes? Well, actually it definitely is not, but it's still a nice, temporary side benefit.

Life update: I am doing a learning project in React and for a while i really wanted to avoid higher-level libraries so that I could really grapple with the fundamentals/React itself. I have given in and just installed React Query. :)

Some thoughts from the Tallinn airport: 1. Truly not ready to go back to the US. 2. Odd to me how much Tallinn reminds me of Singapore -- ungodly clean, very safe (8 yr old kids without parents everywhere), very e-convenient. Also uncomfortable weather for the most part (though still nice now).

Bluesky, but for things that are just interesting to people, rather than topical. (Yes indeed I AM hoping for a return of ye olde internet. Also, I recognize how this is difficult in the world we live in.)

Letting you regular morning news podcast routine run while on vacation: 0/10 do not recommend

In Riga and actually shed a tear over the Art Nouveau architecture here. The first one is by Mikhail Eisenstein, Sergei's father. Other two I don't know...the little green guy is among the more quotidien of the AN buildings here but checkout those little I-beams! (And how the web is scalloped)

Is this the worst year for the United States in your lifetime? Genuinely curious what people think. Also does this *feel* the worst to you?

Things I have been wrong about: - (2018) Adobe is kind of a juggernaut in design, XD is a good bet - (sometime during the 2nd Obama admin, debating with friends) Actually, I think the world is overall becoming a better place - (early 2025) I'll be ready for authoritarianism, I lived in Singapore!

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"If the anti-German press of Paris, London & New York...or the democratic governments in Western Europe, should now again complain about the lack of freedom of opinion in Germany it does not matter, 'for after all during the last year the Fuehrer reconquered 10,000,000 Germans for the Reich.'"

GPT stop using the word "signal" challenge (impossible).

Today I heard someone on The Daily say the words, "more left-wing than Charlie Kirk." This is like saying, "more Communist than Donald Trump." Anyway...

How long before companies start rolling out a new editing bar paragraph style button that bolds the first semantic unit of your line of text to easily match ChatGPT outputs?

Omg, this happened!!!!! (Pretty sure I have never recommended to my boomer parents and if I have, it was in like 2021.) CC: @weisenthal.bsky.social

Random but if anyone has been to/spent time in Riga or Tallinn and you are feeling inclined to give me tips, the tips comment thread is officially open! Will gladly reciprocate for cities I know! (Films/podcast eps/books I should consume beforehand; things incl. buildings to see; things to eat)

There are two types of people in the world: those of us who are psyched when the local college radio station's show featuring different renditions of the same song for two hours is on, and normal people. www.wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show...

Doing some late night learning/side work and, a thought: Is the current trend of slightly off-white backgrounds a way to essentially have elevation in a design system while still having flat design? (If the bg is slightly off-white, white elements will appear to sit on top w/o a box-shadow)

A 2-pixel tall pixel font. (!) joefatula.com/twoslice.html (And a quiet celebration of redudancy built into languages.)

I know that there was already at least one book (and definitely multiple podcast interviews) about why government software projects are structurally kind of doomed, but you know, were the world to need another one, I've definitely got pages of thoughts.

Thankful for when people get back from PTO in a good mood and decide to take initiative and submit PRs for things they think are important. :)