Link archive: July, 2025

The sound of inevitability | My place to put things

People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.

This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

Addicted to Every Possibility by Nathan Beck

Find freedom not in infinite choice, but in working a single seam until you strike gold: conducting dozens, even hundreds, of iterations within a tight parameter space—not in search of more, but in search of better.

Welcome to Medieval Murder Maps

CSI London, York, and Oxford:

Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.

Designing a Grid-Aware Branch

Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:

The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.

I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.

And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!

A Friendly Introduction to SVG • Josh W. Comeau

A fantastic explanation of the building blocks of SVG, illustrated—as always—with Josh’s interactive examples.

A human review | Trys Mudford

Following on from my earlier link about AI etiquette, what Trys experienced here is utterly deflating:

I spent a couple of hours working through my notes and writing up a review before sending it to my manager, awaiting their equivalent review for me.

However, the review I received back was, quite simply, quintessential AI slop.

When slopagandists talk about “AI” boosting productivity, this is the kind of shite they’re talking about.

Butlerian Jihad

This page collects my blog posts on the topic of fighting off spam bots, search engine spiders and other non-humans wasting the precious resources we have on Earth.

It’s rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. … Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war. You engaged and replied – you’re as good as dead. The dead internet is not just dead it’s poisoned.

I think that realistically, our main weapon in this war is AI etiquette.

Beautiful Public Data

A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.

This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.

Vibe coding and Robocop

The short version of what I want to say is: vibe coding seems to live very squarely in the land of prototypes and toys. Promoting software that’s been built entirely using this method would be akin to sending a hacked weekend prototype to production and expecting it to be stable.

Remy is taking a very sensible approach here:

I’ve used it myself to solve really bespoke problems where the user count is one.

Would I put this out to production: absolutely not.

I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.

And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:

At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.

The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.

This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.

CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language — Smashing Magazine

This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.

Frame of preference – Aresluna

Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!

While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.

Bravo!

(optional.is) Latency and the Sea

Brian’s excellent comparison of network latency and the nervous system of animals:

If an earthquake occurs in California USA, halfway around the globe someone can find out faster than a blue whale detects something has touched its tail.

Nuberodesign > Blog > Designing for the Eye

I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!