This is absolutely wonderful!
There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.
This is what the web is for!
Heydon’s latest video is particularly good:
All of my videos are black and white, but especially this one.
This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.
Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.
Very good writing advice from Dan:
Use plain language. Tell the truth.
Related:
The reason why LLM text for me is bad is that it’s insipid, which is not a plain language word to use, but the secret is to use words like that tactically and sparingly to great effect.
They don’t write plainly because most of the text they’ve been trained on isn’t plain and clear. I’d argue that most of the text that’s ever existed isn’t plain and clear anyway.
This is a terrificly entertaining level-headed in-depth explanation of AI safety. By the end of this year, all three parts will be published; right now the first part is ready for you to read and enjoy.
This 3-part series is your one-stop-shop to understand the core ideas of AI & AI Safety — explained in a friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated way!
( Related phrases: AI Risk, AI X-Risk, AI Alignment, AI Ethics, AI Not-Kill-Everyone-ism. There is no consensus on what these phrases do & don’t mean, so I’m just using “AI Safety” as a catch-all.)
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
This isn’t just a great explanation of :has(), it’s an excellent way of understanding selectors in general. I love how the examples are interactive!
Everyone is quite rightly linking to this great interactive explainer on colour. It does a great job of describing complex concepts in a clear accessible way.
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
This is an interesting idea from Scott—a templating language that doesn’t just replace variables with values, but keeps the original variable names in there too.
Not sure how I feel about using data- attributes for this though; as far as I know, they’re intended to be site-specific, not for cross-site solutions like this.
The fascinating pre-history of steam power, illustrated with interactive widgets.
This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.
This is a terrific interactive explainer!
Generative AI: What You Need To Know is a free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.
You can read all the cards on one page, print them out, or print to PDF.
Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.
I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:
if ('audioSession' in navigator) {
navigator.audioSession.type = "playback";
}
The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!
The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.
If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them. You are dependent.
But if you only use plain text, you can use any program on any device, forever. It gives great flexibility and peace of mind.