Highly valuable for all affected, and yet still completely absurd to think about. Technology Is People (and is also a complete nuisance).

Simon Katan on teaching peripheral skills around computing, computation, and code. I agree wholeheartedly with his description of tools that shield users from complexities to the extent of hiding how things actually work. I also loved his idea of "flour babies for looking after code properly".

Filed away as a nice introduction to computational sensing, vision, and how computers don't see.

"That struggle story — Man against company, or Man against Billionaire — is a crowd-pleaser. The actual struggle that interests me is against the current horrifying imbalance in global power and wealth, which is kind of abstract, doesn’t have a chiseled cartoon-villain billionaire in the cast, and is frighteningly large in scale.

Seriously; basically every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is."

Tim Bray on monopolies and multi-millionaires, but really, on capitalism. Symptoms, causes.

I actually write READMEs a bit like Sam describes – onwards, never erased, first-person diary accounts of what I'm trying, where I'm typing it, and what happened. But the case for pen is a good one. (Also: I enjoy Sam's writing).

Excellent description of configuring OBS et al for streaming code/development.

"That demo got the attention of venture capitalists. And when a cool-looking magical thing gets the attention of venture capitalists, discourse tends to spiral out of control." Good, even-handed look at GPT3. It's both impressive and unexciting for me – there are so many underlying issues besides the 'magic', not to mention the relative failure rate, the complexity of any real-world deployment, and as ever, a lack of nuance in a lot of media about discussing text-generation. This lays out some of the points with the latter well.

Open-source e-reader hardware. I particularly love the back of the circuitboard – reminded me of George and Adrian's work on the Museum In A Box pcb.

Lovely writeup of a chonker of a matte painting – the final pullback in Die Hard 2. Love hearing about the very end of the pre-digital matte era.

Always love seeing the state of modern CSS explained clearly, and this is great from Una Kravets. Also: new to me is "clamp", which is a lifesaver…

Curated and ongoing set of links to resources around the topic, from the Serpentine. Will be highly useful for future teaching, although god, my ongoing exhaustion around much of the AI discourse doesn't seem to be dissipating. Most excited to go over some of the interviews an and lectures.

Queerness, masculinity, Icarus, Breughel, Pro Wrestling, David Cage, and fumblecore, wrapped up in a single game, and this marvellous essay by Robert Yang about his latest creation, _Hard Lads_. I love Robert's essays about his own work.

Nice-looking CSS framework; I like that it's at least a little bit semantic, as oppose to the mess that is Tailwind. (For a bunch of what I do, shortcuts like this are handy).