Links

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures (wheresyoured.et)

In simpler terms, you have a company (Oracle) building something at a scale it’s never built at before, using a partner (Crusoe) which has never done this, for a company (OpenAI) that regularly underestimates the demands it puts on its servers. The project being built is also the largest of its kind, and is being built during the reign of an administration that births and kills a new tariff seemingly every day.

This is an insane negotiation strategy — leaking to the press that you want to short-change your biggest investor both literally and figuratively — and however it resolves will be a big tell as to how stupid the C-suite at Microsoft really is. Microsoft shouldn't budge a fucking inch. OpenAI is a loser of a company run by a career liar that cannot ship product, only further iterations of an increasingly-commoditized series of Large Language Models.

This story is ridiculous. The facts, the figures, the people involved, everything is stupid, and every time you write a story without acknowledging how unstable and untenable it is, you further misinform your readers. Even if I’m wrong — even if they somehow pull off all of this stuff — you still left out a valuable part of the story, refused to critique the powerful, and ultimately decided that marketing material and ephemera were more valuable than honest analysis.

Look, I am nobody special. I am not supernaturally intelligent, nor am I connected to vast swaths of data or suppliers that allow me to write this. I am a guy with a search engine who remembers when people said stuff, and the only thing you lack is my ability to write 5000 or more words in the space of five hours. If you need help, I am here to help you. If you need encouragement, I am here to provide it. If you need critiques, well, scroll up. Either way, I want to see a better tech media, because that’s what the world deserves.

Scientists create 'world's smallest violin' (bbc.com)

The violin measures 35 microns long and 13 microns wide, with a micron being one millionth of a metre. A human hair typically ranges from 17 to 180 microns in diameter, for comparison.

Professor Kelly Morrison, head of Loughborough University's physics department:

"Once we understand how materials behave, we can start applying that knowledge to develop new technologies, whether it's improving computing efficiency or finding new ways to harvest energy.

"But first, we need to understand the fundamental science and this system enables us to do just that."

Ultimate Scroller (nerdy.dev)

Adam Argyle's talk from CSS Day 2025.

Talk description:

Slide by slide, CSS feature by feature, we'll incrementally enhance and craft a rad scroll experience. Normally a pain in the box; styling and managing scroll across touch, keyboard, mouse and more PLUS juggling each operating system's slightly different affordances, can be daunting. We’ll emerge victorious, nay, elegant! Learn terms like scroll hint, overscroll behavior, overscroll effect. Plus, when to use what, and a whole bunch of niche details about CSS and scrolling. It’s definitely something people do on your site right? Have you polished it or is yours a bit basic? Upgrade time.

Periodic Face-to-Face (martinfowler.com)

For people to work effectively together they need to trust each other, aware of how much they can rely on each other. Trust is hard to develop online, where there isn't the social cues that can happen when we are in the same room. Thus the most valuable part of a face-to-face gathering isn't the scheduled work, it's chitchat while getting a coffee, and conviviality over lunch. Informal conversations, mostly not about work, forge the human contact that makes the work interactions be more effective.

grid.js (gridjs.io)

It is developed to be used with all popular JavaScript frameworks include React, Angular.js, Vue or without any frameworks!

  • Small. Only 12kb with all plugins (minified and gzipped)
  • Fast! Grid.js has an internal pipeline that takes care of caching and processing data
  • Works with all web frameworks
  • Supports all modern web-browsers
  • No vendor lock-in
  • MIT licensed and Free!

How to generate color palettes for design systems (matthewstrom.com)

A 46-min long read about generating color palettes, headers, covers:

  • Why don’t the existing tools work?
  • So what makes a good color palette?
  • First steps with generated scales
  • Scaling up
  • Making scales expressive: Leveraging hue and saturation
  • In practice: Crafting colors with functions
  • Making scales adaptive: Using background color as an input
  • Making scales accessible: Building in the WCAG contrast calculation
  • Putting it all together: All the code you need
  • What does it look like in practice?
  • What we’ve learned and where we’re going

What happened to my confidence? (nikema.dev)

Lovely reflection from Nikema Prophet. Also screenshotted her webmentions; an inspiration and aspiration for my own site.

I recently had a job interview, and I stumbled and hesitated when it came time to talk about what I've built and projects I've completed. It was as if I hadn't done anything of value for the past three years. I need to take time to evaluate and quantify the work I've done. I need to remember why I believed that I deserve the opportunities that come my way.

Somehow, my confidence has been depleted. I'm going to work on getting it back.