snide

I've messed with a few. I really like Apache Echarts if you're looking for an all-in-one-can-do-anything solution with a good license. The downsides are that the docs can sometimes be a little obtuse. There are adapters for almost every front-end at this point.

Nivo is a much simpler system that is styled by default and works much easier with React. If you're not doing complicated charts, it's my goto for the "I just want a nice line/pie/bar chart".

Typically a company would post a contact channel for this type of stuff. The boilerplate is security@company.com, which is what my (small) startup does.

Barring that an email to the administrator through a contact form would work. If you're worried about how they will percieve this feedback, I'd start with a query before submitting the issue. "I noticed a potential security issue with your site. What is the best way to report it?".

I built a command line bookmark manager in Fish and FZF that stores data in Xata, which I then pull into my website as well. Source and demo available on Github from the article below.

https://www.davesnider.com/posts/bookmarks

I've been aboard quite a lot (typically outside my country twice a year, and lived in Japan a short while), and have worked almost exclusively with Europeans the last 10 years. It's pretty much why I wrote the caveats I did in my original post. I appreciate your view, and as I mentioned I also lived in cities for quite a while, so I understand the "lifestyle". It's just not for me, and that's totally OK. Be happy I'm happy :)

As I mentioned, my opinion is very American skewed.

I grew up in Maryland, outside the DC area. I now live in Annapolis, Maryland, in a suburb. In between I lived in California cities, and later in California suburb an hour and a half outside SF. There are about a dozen kids at the bus stop nearby, including my two kids. When I lived in a California suburb it was similar.

In the city I never saw kids. When I did it wasn't a good experience and they didn't look happy. I never saw them without parents, and when I did I wondered where they were.

In the suburbs I see kids without their parents all the time. They are climbing in trees or riding on bikes. I drive my pickup truck within 30 minutes all the time, for everything from general shopping to also picking up various house related things (lumber, mulch, whatever).

I've lived in places where everything was walkable, and lived in SF for 5 years without a car. I didn't care for it, for the reasons I mentioned. I love going into cities for day trips, but I prefer living around families and yards.

For years in my 20s I considered myself mildly depressed. Not a go-see-a-therapist or take medication depressed, but I felt a general malaise that something was missing. This was also the time when I was living alone in cities. Then I moved to the suburbs and started seeing kids go off to school again. I had a small backyard and had some agency in what my living arrangements were. I could reliably drive to a location and know I'd find parking.

Everyone is different, but man... I'm the guy that likes to fire up the bbq and chat with neighbors in the backyard while the kids are who knows where (but safe) in the sprawl. Seeing a teenager in their first job at an ice cream shop sort of reinvigorates my sense of community. These are things I recognize and grew up with, and everyone has different upbringings, but the suburbs are where I'm happiest.

I also realize this might be a very American skew. Living in cities with children feels a lot more normal in Europe.

I used to look at these last minute shutdown saves fairly cynically. It seems very much just a bunch of political theatrics and ways to skirt stuff in under pressure. I'm sure that's very much part of it, but there's a lot more impact then I realized and I now am happy to see these events averted.

Three years ago I moved to Annapolis (near DC) and almost every third family I met had someone working in a Fed job of some sort. They follow these sorts of things with a lot more rigor because if a shutdown happens, they are temporarily out of work and a paycheck. Most of the folks I know are a little older and this isn't too big a deal, but they explain how hard it is for younger coworkers who haven't yet factored shutdowns into "part of the job" and often need bridge loans to make it through the downtime.

I don't know why I never really thought of it with that perspective before.

I love to bring up this glossary whenever I see a post about sound subcultures. I'll admit that I have bought a variety of nice headphones over the years. I also admit that any group that needs a glossary this "muddy" for how to describe things is likely a little lost in itself. Like most religions, the first thing to do is invent some language.

https://headphones.com/pages/glossary

Been awhile with eleventy, but I really like the "islands" concept from Astro. It lets me break out into Svelte when I need for server stuff. Astro is also excellent at building shiki, TS and content generation together natively.

Overall it feels a little less bare bones, while still being flexible.

Comments coming from a years-long Astro user that loves it. I use it to power my own website. I'm familiar with this space because I also work at Xata (take that as a disclosure).

This looks like a pretty simple data solution that might work for Astro's audience (content sites and hobbyists). They've split the hosting into their studio product to provide a way to earn revenue. Essentially you host the DB with them and can access it remotely, but could also host it however you want, you'd just lose the Studio editor.

The Studio editor itself is pretty basic at the moment with a table view and a way to check SQL calls. You can't build schemas in the UI yet and what you get is mostly a dev wrap of existing tools (like Drizzle) that let you interact with your DB. Their demo shows the limitations here, with things like "email" not being able to validate in the studio editor. My guess is that's coming later, but I might have missed it in the docs. Either way, it's nice that your config is stored at the code layer.

Most of these small websites that Astro is great fit need small CMS systems, and studio doesn't look to provide any way to deal with images (at least on first check) so that's sort of a bummer. You'd need to wire up some references with Cloudflare I guess. Still reading here, but it'd be cool if that came natively. Storing, retrieving and resizing images is a pain. The column types allowed are pretty small (text, number, bool, date, json).

While simple. It looks like it'll be relatively speedy with retrieval because of it.

Right now though, as an actual CMS editor (which my guess is what most Astro folks really want) Studio feels way to simple to tell a client to use. I'm interested to see whether they go more in the direction of a generic database store (implied from the name) or more of a CMS to compete with the natural pairings of Contentful, Statamic and others. Webhooks as a launch feature is great! That'll help folks out.

Either way. I love this team and their perspective. They build cool stuff, open source a lot of it (check out Starlight for docs), and I'm excited to see where this one goes over time. Congrats on the launch.

Now I need to update my Astro site to 4.5 :)

Vatsim is one of those communities that reminds me a lot of the early Internet. You have this smallish community of hobbyists that are all volunteering differing amounts of time and skills to come together over a shared goal that seems impossible when you write it out as a sentence.

> What if you could fly flight simulators with real ATC, talking to real humans?

It's a super friendly place and the barrier to entry for learning these types of skills is typically extremely high in real life. After COVID grounded me during my pilot's training I moved to VR and a virtual cockpit with Vatsim. Little did I realize I could "fly" at home at such a level of fidelity with other people. I ended up realizing I was getting my license only because I was interested in learning the systems. I could do that safely (I have kids, and was a bit worried) at home. It's not the same, but it's close.

Always appreciate a minimalist, simple website with high quality content. Lots of the illustrations are fantastic.

I'm old an immediately assumed this would link to historical retrospective of GEnie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie

I'm one of those people that tries as best I can to use Google products while also managing my privacy. One fun thing is watching how privacy controls roll out across Google products. As an example... I turn my watch history off on YouTube. That stuff rolls out immediately on youtube.com, but took months to make it to the Android version on my Shield TV. There were definitely gap months where I'd see settings that were supposedly turn off in some places, weren't actually turned off in others.

The design patterns can get pretty aggressive. Google right now makes my youtube.com homepage blank, asking me to turn on my watch history. A lot of time this is presented in a way not to mention privacy, but to instead promote a "feature". "Turn this feature on", not "Turn off your privacy". You get quite a lot of roadblocks when you turn off settings like this, making the products pretty hard to use.

It's nearly impossible to keep up with and figure it all out, and I'm a UX designer by trade! A lot of these dark patterns are the reasons I've moved more and more to alternative tools like Kagi and Fastmail...etc.

This is big. Basic functions are a large reason we've had so much tooling around CSS for a long time. First with preprocessors, then with with CSS-in-JS. Making this native, and able to run at the browser level will solve a large portion of the theming and CSS-at-scale problems that most of us have jumped to extra tooling to solve.

Over the past few years CSS is getting better and better. They're really pushing back on removing reasoning for using anything but the vanilla defaults.

I have no need for an email sender at the moment, but I just wanted to say that I found your website and premise super simple to understand. I think the thing that often gets lost in large companies is that "tone" gets neutered. This copy reads like a person wrote it, rather than a large committee. Cheers.

Bookmarked for when I do need it!

Seeing Sports Illustrated fall is a bummer. This was a mainstay, important read for millions back in the day. As a kid I grew up with SI, and the brand was so large there were even offshot magazines (SI for Kids...etc).

My childhood was spent pouring over Sports, Nature, and Gaming magazines. While the web has provide a lot of that information in a much easier to search way, the discovery mechanisms that a smaller, but more focused set of media brands created were fantastic. You could rely on people having read / scene the larger touchstones of culture and it led to more connection.

There are a lot of great things about the Internet and the specification of news / knowledge, but part of me worries that the division we're seeing in society are a direct result of folks not having reliable sources of shared experience.

I don't know how to solve it. I worked in publishing for over a dozen years, and it only seems to be getting worse and worse.

Can't a specialized use case exist? RVs are not great homes, but they are great homes on the go...etc.

The older you get the more you realize that every popular piece of software got that way not because it was necessarily the best, but because it was the best documented. Often the tail wags the dog here as well. The software becomes better as it is documented.

I can't wait to sing my region's corporate anthem before sporting events just like Rollerball[1] foretold.

[1] Rollerball is kind of a hidden dystopian film. More people should watch it.

  I also think that there is a place for sharpening one’s tools just for its own sake

Everyone forgets this. I use Vim, GNOME, Arch and other less common toolchains because they are fun and hackable. I KNOW they make things harder for me, but I also program and design for a living and it is my primary vocation. I BETTER have fun using my tools.

Correct. It was named (in fun) because of its general utility, but also because it was extremely difficult to pull off before we started to get tools like flex-box. Before flex came around, this type of layout was really only able to be built with tables. During this time there was a movement to stop using tables for layouts (since it wasn't semantic) but this particular layout was very difficult to pull off then (when floats were the more common layout mechanism).

The more modern grail (named so for their utility and difficulty to create) layout these days is the typical "docs layout" you'll see on a good docs page. These usually involve

- Three columns

- A left side fixed, scroll-able column

- A right side sticky, scroll-able column. Sometimes aligned to window, sometimes aligned to the inner column.

- An inner column that max-widths to a readable width

- A sticky header

- Content within the inner column that itself will scroll (think code blocks) and will respect the center column width, sometimes for stylistic reasons breaking outside of that width (images in article layouts).

- Responsive rules to drop the right column, and make the left column a togglable nav.

^^ the above is surprisingly tricky to pull off, though you see it commonly in well built documentation systems.

For an example, here's one I built https://xata.io/docs/concepts/file-attachments

Sat with Danny (old friend from Giant Bomb / GameSpot) at a wedding recently and we laughed about the surprise of how easy it was to rent the hockey rink for the shoot (he assumed it would be much harder).

Danny is doing some amazing documentary work about creatives. If you're not old enough to appreciate how special the NHL games were, you might like his documentary on Astroneer, a more recent game, that is just a heartbreaker of a watch.

Every time I watch one of his docs I think of how similar game creation is to working at a startup. They share an intense few years at full speed with a very boom-or-bust mentality.

And this is absolutely true in CSS now as well. I find a lot of people are needing to rediscover the standards now that they've upped their featuresets.

Excellent list and examples. Browsing through a dozen or so of these I'm amazed at the care and detail in the examples. They are not only functional, but provide very solid UI work as well.

As I've shifted away from platforms like React to smaller, minimalist implementations, I often have trouble finding ways for how to do complex patterns in standard JS. It's funny when you look at the code and think... huh, that's actually a lot easier than importing a huge library with way too many props :)

Thanks to the author for putting this together.

NNN has a lot more features and is very customizable. Most NNN users graduate to using it as a small file scripting system through use of plugins. Walk looks minimalist on purpose (which is nice for people that don't need all that NNN has to offer).

I made a quick tutorial on NNN showing off the power of its plugin system if anyone is interested. It's become a bedrock tool for me.

https://www.davesnider.com/posts/nnn

Yep. The Steam Deck is great and it's all about usecase. Like I said it's a different category of device. Myself, I was unaware there were other options out there and figured folks might be interested in things like the G Cloud and the Odin. Cloud-based gaming has gotten pretty nice.

I know it's not as popular, but when evaluating handhelds I decided to go with a Logitech G Cloud instead. I don't see it come up as often, so I thought I'd introduce folks to it. Here was my reasoning.

Ergonomics. It's a handheld. If it's not comfortable for long-term play then it really doesn't matter what capabilities it has. The core ergonomics and weight of the G cloud is the best of any handheld.

Battery life: Similar to the above. It's a handheld. Steam decks just don't have the capacity to last very long on the move. The G cloud, which is either doing light emulation or streaming games from someplace else doesn't need to do much. It's essentially a phone with a nice screen.

When I saw the battery life of the Steam Deck it didn't matter that I had two decades of games with Steam. I'm not carrying around something that bulky with a fan on a trip to Europe.The few times I need to go on the move without a good connection I'm happy enough to emulate something or play an Android game on it. I just don't see how people play SDs without having a power cord nearby, resting them on your knees. As an alternate to a gaming computer the Steam Deck is great, as a support device that targets being a handheld I think things like G Cloud and the Odin are a better target.

The downsides are that it's Android based and altogether a different category. For handheld gaming I wanted something portable that I could play casually. The minor, occasional input or stream lag isn't as big a deal in these scenarios. I'm not playing competitive Counter-Strike on this thing.

I also acknowledge that the G Cloud might not last long in production! The Steam Deck is popular, and the G Cloud might not get support 10 years down the road from Logitech. These portable devices all will need upgrades / updates and I figured I could wait till the next cycle regardless.

One missing observation from this article is the existence of the sidekick gang that normally follows these types. Unlike their leader, then tend to be generally good people, but tolerate their leader as a means to an end. We see this everywhere, and it helps destroy our business, politics and social lives.

What I've come to realize over the years is that good people are reluctant to take the job in power, but allow bad people to float into those positions without much thought. That's a simplification, but it takes a warped personality to be able to distance yourself from the social or civic responsibility of having that much control. Speaking a bit from experience, the times when I actually managed a team larger than a few dozens, I couldn't actually cope (internally, not outwardly mind you) without thinking about people's well-being every waking hour. Most leaders with more responsibility above me in work seem to be able to suppress those worries (or maybe hide it like I did). I've come to believe a little narcissism is somewhat required in those roles. You really need to believe in yourself above others. The good folks always seem to step down after they've achieved whatever manner of success they set out to achieve.