A properly short linkblog today!
Web development
Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS - Signal v. Noise
One of a couple of recent articles that talks about how web design has turned into front-end development, which has turned into JavaScript development. The conclusion is good:
Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be this maze of impenetrable complexity. We’re making it that! It’s possible not to.
Help! None of my projects want to be SPAs | Jason Goldstein
While there are certainly some projects that, if they’re going to be web apps, have to be SPAs, for the vast majority of projects, making an SPA means making life harder for yourself and going against the grain of what your project requires. Contrarian opinion: if your app does demand that it be an SPA, maybe it ought to be a native desktop app instead.
Social media
Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops - Motherboard
Imagine a social network that consists almost entirely of old white people who are scared of their shadows, doing nothing but calling the police on their neighbors for walking on the street. That describes Amazon’s Neighbors, it describes NextDoor, and it describes my local neighborhood’s group on Facebook. That was one of the reasons, before the latest round of privacy scandals, that I disabled my Facebook account.
Fact-Checking Facebook Was Like Playing A Doomed Game Of Whack-A-Mole
This is worth a read, but the take-home point for me was that Facebook’s algorithmic approach to moderation wasn’t any better than its algorithmic approach to surfacing posts. Apparently the algorithm for presenting posts to fact-checkers kept aggressively missing the point and keeping the fact-checkers from doing anything substantial.
Environment, or, We’re All Going To Die Horribly
Plummeting insect numbers ’threaten collapse of nature’ | Environment | The Guardian
The collapse of insect populations is likely to lead to collapse of ecosystems and massive crop failures. Next to the collapse of ocean ecosystems, this is what I worry about more than anything.