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• Post #4374233

  Insightful look at how many big tech companies currently treat their employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI_YoB3tYu4 “Workers’ loyalty to their companies is essentially gone. But loyalty to fellow workers and co-workers is growing stronger.” I find worker co-ops an interesting option: https://www.workers.coop

• Post #4374232

  I don’t know why, but I always thought bronze was a metal. But it’s actually an alloy “consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloids (such as arsenic or silicon)”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze

• Post #4374231

  It’s scary how many free resources are disappearing at the moment. Ironically, that’s also bad for LLMs. For example: In recent months, two Chinese-related reference sites disappeared that were incredibly useful for language learning. And one is now behind Cloudflare’s usability-degrading AI protection.

• Post #4374230

  RE: https://mas.to/@assaf/117015195499776343 #MacOS: The Phosphene app lets you use arbitrary videos as video wallpapers (which are shown on desktop and lock screen).

• Post #4374229

  “This game keeps you up all night.” Only true until people start counting!

• Post #2338548

  It’s shocking how many small businesses are still using Facebook. And Facebook is becoming increasingly hard to access for non-members. I’m wondering what an open alternative would look like—maybe: • Support for a few simple web pages. Maybe not even fancy layouts but only Markdown-based text (with links, images, tables, etc.). • News updates could be provided via ActivityPub. IIRC, Mastodon has plans to let you subscribe to those via email. Anything else?

• Post #2172103

  Using variables in npm run scripts (package (a)rauschma/env-var must be installed locally or globally): { "scripts": { "hi": "env-var echo {{npm_package_config_hi}}" }, "config": { "hi": "HELLO" } } Works on Windows and Unix: npm run hi More information: https://exploringjs.com/nodejs-shell-scripting/ch_package-scripts.html#using-environment-variables-in-package-scripts...

• Post #2075825

  I often read that Mastodon is too complicated for “normal” people. I’m curious: How tech savvy do you consider yourself to be? I’d especially love to hear from #1 people. My list of upcoming Mastodon improvements: https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html :mastodon: Boosts appreciated, to get as varied a sample as possible! UPDATE: So much great feedback. Thanks everyone!

• Post #1940675

  Wasm 3.0: https://webassembly.org/news/2025-09-17-wasm-3.0/ “With these new features, Wasm has much better support for compiling high-level programming languages. Enabled by this, we have seen various new languages popping up to target Wasm, such as Java, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Scheme, or Dart, all of which use the new GC feature.”

• Post #1802372

  #YouTube: Subjectively, there are many bots in the comments that spread negativity and division. However, you can never be sure because YouTube doesn’t let you look at their comment history or provide other tools for detecting them.

• Post #1802371

  Firefox Tab Groups [1] really shine with vertical tabs [2]. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-sidebar-access-tools-and-vertical-tabs I’d expand this to more universal support for a tree of tabs (think tree-style tab FF extension): • Tabs opened in background become children. • Any tab with children can be expanded and collapsed. • The tree structure can by changed by dragging&dropping tabs. • Blank tabs can be named and bec...

• Post #1802370

  This is a matter of taste, but when someone explains a new concept to me, I prefer them staying in the subject area as much as possible vs. using too many analogies. For example, to explain molecules and chemical bonding, one book compares the former to a group of children in a playground. One child uses Super Glue—which is an analogy to bonding. I’d prefer a different approach. But it’s tricky: Very few texts find a good middle ground between too abstract and too concrete.

• Post #1802368

  In the 1990s, we had Tamagotchis: • They had to be fed regularly if we didn’t want them to die. • They demanded our constant attention. Nowadays, that’s just how most devices work (charging, software updates, notifications, …). 😬 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi

• Post #1802366

  Shell programming question: Consider the following shell command. pbpaste | my-script | pbcopy Problem: If an error happens the the clipboard is empty afterwards. Solution(?) If an error happens, my-script sends what it read from stdin to stdout. Not particularly elegant but it does the job. Is there anything better, more “idiomatic”?

• Post #1802365

  We had a very long phase of tech constantly coming up with new things. The expectation is that that’ll continue forever. Right now, however, I’d appreciate a shift in focus from mostly new features to more maintenance: Cleaning up what’s already there, fixing bugs, etc.

• Post #1783257

  Node’s new built-in support for TypeScript https://2ality.com/2025/01/nodejs-strip-type.html #TypeScript #NodeJS #2ality

• Post #1744421

  “Is Turbopack really 10x Faster than Vite?” by Evan You https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussions/8

• Post #1622852

  EGOT: a person who has received all of the following awards: • Emmy for television • Grammy for music and recording • Oscar for film • Tony for Broadway theater There are not many of them: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/14/entertainment/gallery/egot-winners-list

• Post #1622851

  Safari: Sometimes a web app hangs (it subjectively feels like a service worker issue to me—but I can’t prove it): I can’t visit the web site in “normal” mode, only in private mode. Solution: • Go to “Settings > Privacy > Manage Website Data…” • Search for the web app and click on “Remove All”.

• Post #1622850

  In the future, front lines may well consist of robots fighting robots. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/fighting-robots-give-ukraine-hope-in-war-with-russia

• Post #1622846

  How can you gain an intuitive understanding of surface areas such as 1.22 million m²? I’ve seen many attempts such as how many football fields would fit into it, etc. My favorite is still: It’s equivalent to a square whose sides are about 1105 meters long.

• Post #1304575

  • Demos für erneuerbare Energien • 18. April 2026 (Samstag) • #Berlin, #Hamburg, #Köln, #München https://erneuerbare-energien-verteidigen.de/demos/

• Post #1085248

  The ActivityPub standard (by @cwebber, @tsyesika, @erincandescent, @rhiaro, @evan) is a joy to read. Initial impression: “Like email” is actually a good initial mental image for how it works. https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/

• Post #969056

  Interesting take on whether John Giannandrea “failed” at Apple: He bet on local AI – which may yet turn out to be a good thing for Apple. https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/12/02/apple-owes-its-greatest-strength-in-ai-to-giannandrea

• Post #765433

  New in Firefox Nightly: vertical tabs (h/t @mconley) I love vertical tabs! Two benefits: • Titles remain readable if there are many tabs. • They work well with smaller widescreen displays (think notebooks) because there is more vertical space for content. The Tree Style Tab extension adds one more benefit: Child tabs are indented underneath the tabs from which they were opened. Benefit: Automatic grouping of related tabs (coming from search results etc.). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firef...

• Post #745791

  “Beyond the Hype: WebAssembly – from the browser to beyond” with Colin Eberhardt, Bailey Hayes, and Sean Isom https://blog.scottlogic.com/2023/08/04/beyond-the-hype-webassembly.html #WebbAssembly

• Post #427474

  “How ‘Liquid Design’ Broke the iPhone and Forced Apple’s Great Reset” https://webdesignerdepot.com/how-liquid-design-broke-the-iphone-and-forced-apples-great-reset/ “[…] the Battery Tax has been devastating. Data suggests a 10–15% reduction in real-world screen-on time because the phone is effectively running a physics engine just to show you your calendar.”

• Post #315128

  Interesting news from around a year ago: “Lenovo cuts the Windows tax and offers cheaper laptops with Linux pre-installed” https://itsfoss.com/news/lenovo-cuts-windows-tax/