onfocus

Excellent parody of Scott McCloud’s 2008 comic about the wonders of Google Chrome. This is about the danger Chrome poses to our privacy. (And I’m obligated to say modern Firefox is a good alternative.)

I'm so tired of hearing about crypto scams. This video takes the time to explain why that world of NFTs and crypto is such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. This explainer is well done and worth the time and I hope it can help our collective consciousness move on.

See also: David Rosenthal’s EE380 Talk

"Wirecutter continues to bring in record revenue for the Times, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash. Yet our members have seen next to no financial benefit from their vital contributions to this success. Times management has offered paltry guaranteed wage increases of only 0.5%, despite soaring inflation and cash flows."

I'm a big fan of Wirecutter and I'm sad that I won't be able to use the site this holiday season. It sounds like the people who produce it are not being fairly compensated for a stellar product.

"CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie."

more like post-apocalyptchas, right?

"Third party link-shortening tools can add unnecessary steps to your processes, create accessibility issues, threaten user privacy and undermine user trust – with no benefit to you as communicators."

Yes! The risks of using 3rd party URL shorteners outweighs any perceived benefit.

I'm trying out umami for visitor stats on my site and so far it's easy to install (yay, Docker all the things!) and looks great.

"So today I set out to actually see what it is one agrees to when they accept all."

Peeling back the layers on those cookie agreement dialogs helps us learn about how web advertising works (and how massive the industry is).

"Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works."

Good reminder that web design can fail without accessibility.

"But if folks make more money off of customers when they reduce latency, there has to be some power in increasing latency."

This is a hack I can get behind. If you can't slow down the velocity of information on social networks at least you can physically slow down the social networks on the piece of the network you control.

The web is becoming more and more ephemeral.

"Vanished are amazing pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture, and a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; gone are Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of dominance over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, disappeared."

This article includes some steps you can take that could help preserve what you publish. Complex frameworks, walled-gardens, and serverless publishing trade away endurance for convenience.