O hai, passerby, and music with Zeal & Ardor, Spirit of the beehive, Leathers.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Le coût FARAMINEUX de la dissolution de l’Assemblée Nationale, Comment la France est sortie de la démocratie.

Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024, via Kottke.

Old photos of basketball games often have a pleasing blue haze ... because of cigarette smoke.

Oh the urbanity: Doug Ford’s terrible plan for cycling in Toronto.

SMBC: Neurons, Dared, Utilitarian.

The Onion: Amazon Update Says Package Now Arriving When The Sky Shatters, The Sun Shines Black, And Rivers Weep Like Men.

Games

GMTK: The secret to designing mysterious games.

Tech

Linus Akesson: Making 8-bit music from scratch at the C64 BASIC prompt.

Drew DeVault: Neurodivergence and accountability in free software.

If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed. Also, DHH: Automattic is doing open source dirty.

SPA by default.

Tech FUCK YES quote of the week

In addition to above-linked SPA by default, this tidbit from gov.uk’s service manual, via Simon Willison.

Using a client-side JavaScript framework can:

• increase the overall size of your code base and push processing to the client-side, causing performance issues for users with a slower network connection or lower powered device
• create a reliance on third-party code that your developers do not have control over, requiring you to make major changes to your service in order to stay up to date with changes in the framework
• make it difficult to find people with the skills required to maintain the code, if the framework’s loses popularity over time

If you use a JavaScript framework you should:

• be able to justify with evidence, how using JavaScript would benefit users
• be aware of any negative impacts and be able to mitigate them
• consider whether the benefits of using it outweigh the potential problems
• only use the framework for parts of the user interface that cannot be built using HTML and CSS alone
• design each part of the user interface as a separate component

Having separate components means that if the JavaScript fails to load, it will only be that single component that fails. The rest of the page will load as normal.