A real treasure!
Smashing Newsletter #292: JavaScript, Bundlers, Frameworks.
If you are writing JavaScript every day, perhaps you’ll find a couple of useful JavaScript gems in this newsletter issue. We’ve collected some useful resources for you to keep close — whether you are new to JavaScript, or found your way through the trenches of legacy code over the decades.
The edge of our existence: A particle physicist examines the architecture of society.
Strip away the technological bedazzlement, and one finds a cliched tale with two-dimensional characters. In The Wandering Earth, our planet is converted into an intergalactic spaceship, but its society and politics have barely evolved: The nation-state outlives the sun. An engineer by training, Liu, like many of his peers, is more comfortable bending the laws of gravity than reimagining the forms of government.
The Kilobyte’s Gambit (via javascriptweekly.com).
Can you beat 1024 bytes of JavaScript?
The technology industry is hurt at every level by toxic gatekeeping.
Toxic gatekeepers in tech are people with internalized cognitive distortions that either affirm one’s sense of superiority or project their personal insecurities–if not both things.
This is almost always directed towards the end of excluding women, racial or religious minorities, LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent people, and other vulnerable populations from the possibility at pursuing lucrative career prospects.
Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.
IMHO tremendously better than any of the Mars rover videos.
Spacewalks above, pandemic below – how the NASA astronaut Jessica Meir experienced 2020 on the International Space Station.
Why Your Company's Documentation Sucks.
Every company I have worked at has used a tree-based approach to organizing documentation, and they have all been absolutely horrible. Two of the most popular, and largest, sources of documentation, Wikipedia and the Arch Linux Wiki, both use a graph-based approach to documentation and are widely loved and easy to use.
The meme economy.
Capital is more profitable than labor, and the spikes of capital during the internet era, the crazy peaks of its reproduction rate, have more to do with entertainment, memes, and fandom than with revenue, productivity, or utility.
A dab of lipstick. Blondish victory rolls, deflated from exertion and wind and the gravity of defeat—the wartime German colloquialism describing the hairstyle, Entwarnungsfrisur, or “all-clear hair,” might be more apt here. Her clothes, by contrast, are flawless. A short-sleeved shirt, prim and neat, is tucked into dark hotpants. Over that, a gauzy white pinafore billows in the wind, baring the long, strong legs. A token pinup riff on the naughty schoolgirl look. Or, in the eye of lyrical upskirter Max Frisch, “a Degas seen from below.”
Static Frontend Hosting on DFINITY’s Internet Computer.
As of this moment, you can take your static front-ends and host them on the Internet Computer with Fleek! In just a couple of clicks, you can move your site further into Web 3.0 by hosting it on a computational blockchain network growing to become the trustless base layer of the new web.
Relevant: The Internet As We Know it Needs ‘a Complete Replacement’.