Notes

Web platform features operate under a whole different set of requirements and constraints:

• They need to last decades, not just until the next major release.
• They need to not only cater to the current version of the web platform, but anticipate its future evolution and be compatible with it.
• They need to be backwards compatible with the web as it was 20 years ago.
• They need to be compatible with a slew of accessibility and internationalization needs that userland libraries often ignore at first.
• They are developed in a distributed way, by people across many different organizations, with different needs and priorities.

Usually, the result is more robust, but takes a lot longer. That’s why I’ve often said that web standards are “product work on hard mode” — they include most components of regular product work (collecting user needs, designing ergonomic solutions, balancing impact over effort, leading without authority, etc.), but with the added constraints of a distributed, long-term, and compatibility-focused development process that would make most PMs pull their hair out in frustration and run screaming.

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.

Oh boy. Having read Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill last year, this doesn't surprise me. The genie is out of the bottle and I'm not quite sure how best to go about protecting ourselves from stuff like this.

I feel like a federal privacy law is a definite need, but I'm not sure how much that would go about stopping the dangers associated with this.

I look at some people’s personal websites and think, “Stupendous! If I ever reach that zenith of personal web design, I will call it quits.”

Then I read a post by them later and they say something like, “Gah! I just really don’t like where I’m at with my personal website.”

I'm not a design wizard. I can often tell good design from bad, but I'm always wishing I could do better, and try to.

It’s like our personal websites are a mirror to ourselves — a place where the mind’s eye must reconcile with the optical eye’s perception of reality.

It’s a torturous affair, to be sure.

And yet, people still publish those personal sites, those redesigns, those half-baked ideas.

I love this. Personal sites are awesome and I'm always trying to better mine. I love seeing others do the same.

On the Infrastructure bill allotting funding for broadband internet:

Unfortunately, a ton of that money is going to be given to giant telecom monopolies with a long history of empty promises and half-completed networks. But an impressive chunk will also wind up in the hands of smaller broadband ISPs, cooperatives, city-owned electrical utilities, and municipal broadband networks, allowing them to build fiber access out into areas that would have never seen service otherwise.

High speed internet is no longer a luxury. It powers today’s world and everyone deserves to have access to affordable, fast internet.

Monopolistic corporations have other ideas:

Cox is very upset that not all of the state’s share of infrastructure bill broadband money is going to Cox, so they’re trying to pretend the process was somehow flawed

You wonder how much they’re just going to pocket and say the did something anyway.

I’m for anything that will open up even a modicum of competition and give people access to the Internet.

Go to The Verge (just to poke at a site I generally like) without an ad blocker, open up the Network panel in DevTools and just let ‘er rip. I’m seeing 400+ requests. That’s tracking at work. You can even just sit there and watch it continue to make requests over time, even while you’re doing nothing. JavaScript is whirring, soaking up whatever data it can, setting cookies, and blasting data along with your precious IP address to god-knows-where. All those requests are slowing down the site, costing you bandwidth, laughing at your privacy, and causing legislation that at least you have to click a giant content-blocking banner with a “yes, this is fine.” button.

This is why I run an ad blocker. Contextual ads as Chris alludes to aren’t bad, they are often quite relevant to what you’re looking at. I however don’t need my web experience worsened and what little privacy I have on the web invaded for some random company to display some ad that might not even be all that effective.

The journey towards information is important. Humans retain information better they had to put effort in to get. Aimlessly browsing to find things you may not have heard of yet is as important as discovery is exciting.

I love getting lost on Wikipedia, going from one weird fact to another.

I used to love that on YouTube before everyone and their pet wanted to become an influencer and follow formulaic and manipulative patterns to create their content.

I remember first getting the internet at home in the mid-1990s and aimlessly browsing different sites on a super slow dialup connection. I’ve continued to do that of late, checking out the various blogs of the developer communities I follow on Mastodon and Bluesky. The web needs more of this.

It’s a scary thought that with some of the escalating conflict in the world, the GPS system we and the economy as a whole relies upon is vulnerable and a backup unavailable.

And because of course Congress is Congress, here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

GOWARD: Russia and China both have terrestrial systems that can give them GPS-like information in the event that signals from space are not available. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010, and we have no sign of starting up something like that again.

WONG: Before GPS, the United States had a system called LORAN. That's an acronym for Long Range Navigation. It was a relic of World War II - a couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals - not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done. In 2004, the Bush administration not only wanted to keep LORAN as a backup to GPS. It wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise.

GOWARD: The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement.

HEGYI: That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They had a completely different view than the Bush administration and called LORAN obsolete in the era of satellite navigation. But then, a few years later, they said, oops, our bad.

GOWARD: We shouldn't have shut down that old system. We should have upgraded. We're going to do that. But again, nothing happened.

WONG: So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS by the year 2020, but then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that.

Sigh...

Months later, marketing and management requests have continued non-stop and (of course) you’ve had no time to lace everything up. You think back to that fateful decision to implement a quick fix, not anticipating that the organization would utilize it on a daily basis, requiring constant updates for every unique sales avenue. In your haste, you built a system that is functionally not operable within the rest of the ecosystem—and you are now subject to that decision. As the requests take longer and longer to work, questions start to arise: “Is our developer losing his touch? Why is this taking so long when it used to take minutes?”

I feel this on a deep spiritual level. All too often we are asked to get features out the door as soon as possible to meet an immediate business need and are not always given the time later to clean the code up to make the system better.

Tech debt is real, and eventually comes for us all.

If you need to change a line of code, simply ask yourself two questions:

• Where did I get the inputs?
• Who relies on the outputs?

Answering these questions might not be simple; but, considering the code in this light removes the air of mystery and reduces the problem down to a set of quantifiable values.

Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body.

Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

I listen to my music and no calls can interrupt me. No notifications can interrupt me. No in-the-moment actions can pause my music. I can take an earbud out and there's no algorithm that pauses or unpauses my music. I can't ask Siri about a song.

This is calm.

I definitely understand where Tom is coming from. While there is definitely some awesomeness to AirPods and the like, there’s still something awesome about the old school iPod.

This is why "give us your email address for 30% discount" popups and account signup forms are suddenly everywhere. Email addresses are stable, long-lived reidentifiers. Overt mechanisms like this are already replacing third-party cookies. Make no mistake: post-removal, tracking will continue for long as reidentification has perceived positive economic value. The only way to change that equation is legislation; anything else is a band-aid.

I’m kind of curious as to how much email aliases can help with this, and I don’t mean the ‘+’ in the email trick. I use FastMail for my email and can create truly unique emails for services I sign up for. Granted they all share the same domain, but they’re still different. It’s obviously not a panacea, but maybe something?