The Limits and “Good” of Public Goods

henryzoo.com

22 points·mankins··3 comments

A lovely read. Full of old chestnuts made fresh with seasonal seasoning. Great to see Illich reconnected to some much more contemporary tags.

Nice to see another technologist who laughs in the face of "inevitability", and the relentless assault on the vitality of language (colloquial and technical) by the machine of big-tech/advertising.

The sidenotes are truncated to the right if my screen width is less than 1920 pixels. Given that I use Tree Style Tab for Firefox, it's about 1700, and I already need to zoom out to see the right-side sidenotes while there's a huge empty margin to the left at the same time. Adding `padding-right: 25em;` to `div id="layout"` works around the issue for me, but I shouldn't need to add anything like that.

Please, stop assuming that everyone's non-mobile viewport is 1920 pixels wide.

I think this doesn't work well even if you have a really large screen. It's doing a style somewhat like https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ but doesn't scale the content to be sure it can fit on the screen, nor center it without having to scroll for sidenotes.

Just in case the author sees: with the way the sidenotes are specified relative to the parent, this is [probably] better:

@media (min-width:760px) { #layout { max-width:min(80ch, 55vw); margin-left: 4%; } }

(you can fuss with another clamping function for the margin-left to make it center properly on Very Large screens if that's a concern, but, uh, I don't want to bother)

[probably]: I mean, it might be an expressive choice to make the sidenotes something you have to page back and forth for, but then typically footnotes would be simpler, so I'm guessing this wasn't intentional.

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