Cool Links

Sharing links to albums or songs in streaming apps sucks because not everyone uses the same one. This neat website takes in a link (although named after Spotify, it works with others as well) and spits out the link for the same music on whatever other platform you want.

Great for when you share a link with others too!

Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year now, and I just found out about their public stats page. Pretty cool they have this info open out there!

The most interesting part is the Domain Insights, that ranks the domains that get most blocked/prioritized on Kagi (Kagi allows you to prioritize results from specific domains, or simply block some altogether). It seems people really hate getting Pinterest results 😅

I love Obsidian, and have been using it for over a year for taking notes about everything. The thing about his kind of app though is that you’re always looking for ways to tweak and improve your system. This article is great at explaining how Dave uses Obsidian for himself and as usual has a list of neat plugins.

One day, maybe, I’ll write my own post about how I use it. I’m just not confident enough on my system yet, probably…

This is a hypnotizing endless battle between two squares, pong-style. All built with JS, HTML and CSS! The source code surprisingly simple and a fun read too, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.

If you use any adblockers (you should!), this website is a neat way to test how effective your setup is. The higher, the better, but if you get a green result you should already feel safe browsing online. I got 98% with my NextDNS + UBlock Origin combo!

This is a spot on overview of how pretty much every tech company now has no clear direction besides making more money. No vision, no goals, no passion, except for making the number go up.

Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.

The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.

In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive’s opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?

He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?

If you don’t care, it’s miraculous.

I’ve had this talk with my wife a few times already. Around us, it just feels that nobody cares about anything. Everything is hastily produced so it can be ignored by other people. It’s just disheartening to be the only ones noticing AI slop everywhere and see people not only believing it’s real, but also not really caring if it’s real or not.

This article also reminded of this one that I posted back in December: Care Doesn’t Scale.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

Fantastic piece that highlights how much of a distraction AI has become to creating value, simply because everyone is too focused on the tools and not on the work.

But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

This site collects all kinds of designs for 404 pages found in the wild. Pretty cool source for inspiration or to admire other people’s creativity!

The author here worries that so many people on Reddit are interacting with posters that are nothing more than robots, without any idea of that being the case. Even worse, some people are aware of that, but don’t care.

I saw a comment in a brazilian forum that deeply resonated: “Maybe the biggest pain this realization causes is that, deep down, almost nobody cares about anything. We’re the ones who are wrong for searching for meaning in environments dominated by chaos”.

Amazing step-by-step explanation on building Card components, with a special focus on accessibility. I love this kind of articles that explain the thinking behind every step and every line of code!

Card elements are everywhere and we all do them a bit differently. I’ll pay much more attention to the things mentioned here to ensure they’re as accessible as possible.

We rely too much on software companies nowadays, and most of the popular ones are USA-based. With the USA becoming increasingly less trustworthy on an almost daily basis, people have started gathering EU-based alternatives to the most popular services.

This is interesting even if you’re not based in Europe, as companies there are forced to respect your data and privacy by law.

It’s like image lazy loading, but for page elements! I’ve got to try this out sometime and measure the effectiveness of this technique. Depending on the results, this might end up as its own blog post ;)

This website simulates a TV schedule (with CRT-style filters!) with multiple channels, each featuring an interesting indie website. The programming changes often (just like shows on a tv channel), so it’s an interesting site to keep on your bookmarks and visit a few times a day.

Great article pointing out that “Views” are an useless metric and that the platforms that count it have zero incentive to not lie about them.

This is an incredibly well-articulated rant about how recommendation algorithms are changing how our brains work. Automation is good for us and it’s everywhere, but what about when thinking, the very thing that makes us human, starts being automated?

Letting recommendation algorithms (that, as we all know, prioritize revenue) decide the information we get, the tone of that information, and the context of every social interaction is pretty much giving up on our autonomy.

The entire video is worth watching, but this part about context collapse was one of the most interesting bits. It makes perfect sense, but I had never thought of it this way:

Algorithmic feeds on social media are unfortunately quite good at fostering something known as context collapse. To understand this, imagine you’re dining in a restaurant and you’re close enough to a table of people to hear snippets of their conversation. You don’t know who any of the people at that table are, but if you manage to overhear them talk about something you’re really interested in, you might feel tempted to join their conversation. But in the context of a restaurant setting, that’s considered very rude, so it rarely ever happens.

On social media, though, the same kinds of quasi-private conversations between parties who know each other are happening all the time, but since the platform is just one big space and it might decide to put that conversation in front of random people, that social boundary of etiquette which is normally respected is just not there. And lots of conflicts happen as a result.

A really common one you might accidentally step into on social media happens when you stumble across a conversation among friends making sarcastic jokes with each other, but since you don’t know who those people are, you don’t have the context you need to recognize they’re joking. And so, if you reply with a serious critique, well, that’s a social misfire which some will react poorly to.

And that’s a pretty mild form of context collapse. It can be much, much worse when people want to discuss things like politics. And unless we realize recommendation algorithms are what’s fostering these reactionary conflicts, they’re going to continue so long as we use platforms in the ways that we do. It’s for all these reasons that I believe algorithmic complacency is creating a crisis of both curiosity and human connection.

Ahmad’s blog has been featured here a few times already, and here’s another gem! A fully interactive, well-written and just a plain joy to read article explaining different strategies to handle colors in CSS, focusing on all those little color variations we need to handle when building something.

In times where software “needs” to stand out rather than be familiar, we lose our heroes. Rest in peace, square checkboxes!