I’ve been attending great and inspirational IndieWeb events for several years now, have even helped co-organize a few. Sometimes CSS and HTML questions come up that seem to call for a deeper dive into those things and imply deeper questions. My idea for Front End Study Hall is an open hours / office hours type open format Zoom meeting.
Here’s my description for the first one, which will be held April 24, 2024:
If you’re a maven of markup or stylesheet superstar, or a newbie novice with nth-of-type, all are welcome to learn together at Front End Study Hall
The foundation of a flexible, good IndieWeb website is markup (the “M” in HTML!”) that doesn’t drive you batty to debug and CSS that works with it to have it look, sound, and interact how you want, whatever device or format the website is displayed on.
Front End Study Hall is an HTML + CSS focused group meeting to learn from each other about how to make code do what we want.
Even if we don’t know, or don’t have a quick fix or plan for what you’re trying to do with your markup and stylesheets, we can probably point you toward resources that can help.
Hosted by Joe Crawford
If it’s successful, expect more. If not, well, maybe not.
I’ve gotten so much from so many people over years to learn my trade on Usenet, mailing lists, forums, Stack Overflow, various Slacks, group chats and the like I am happy to attempt to give back to whomever might want to learn too.
the practice many browsers have adopted of truncating URLs in the address bar to the hostname is emblematic of the decline and commercially driven infantilization of the web.
understanding URLs — their roles and the ways and whys of how they are constructed — was an elementary skill of the original view-source web.
hiding complete URLs encourages people to become ignorant consumers of mysterious information services, rather than informed participants in a public forum.
I fully agree, and it reminded me of learning to read bus and train schedules as a kid:
In 8th grade in San Diego we had few days of a pseudo home-economics. Among the tasks was to learn to read and understand a bus schedule and a train schedule. This was in the 1980s and one needed to do these things manually. Reading the timetables and their legends and doing work to plan a trip on X day at Y time was complex. A URL address has–to me–analogous complexity. But useful for wayfinding. Essential even.
danah gave us an important concept to consider for the rapidly expanding, emergent uses of AI, using the ways the USA regulates air travel as a useful prompt. When the ability to make decisions has shifted to a private industry without accountability, beware.
In airplanes, humans must remain in the loop, but sometimes the automated systems can get in their way, as with Boeing and the Max 8 disaster – long before the current rash of problems with the aerospace giant. danah noted that when it comes to Captain “Sully” and the Miracle on the Hudson, he has to make objections to save people’s lives.
Citing Madeline Elish, she talked about “moral crumple zones,” citing Madeleine Elish’s evocative concept that describe “how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system.”
When there’s no ability for pilots to override systems, it results in crashes. danah says the pattern is consistent: people would have been saved if pilots could override a technical system that wasn’t up to snuff. She’s concerned that we currently don’t have structures in place to hold tech companies accountable over time for similar issues.
The question of who gets to define acceptable outcomes in policy, programs, and services is always about power and whose values are reflected in them.
It sounds like it was great talk. I hope Georgetown is able to put it up somewhere.
Analyzing several high-profile accidents involving complex and automated socio-technical systems and the media coverage that surrounded them, I introduce the concept of a moral crumple zone to describe how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system. Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component–accidentally or intentionally–that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions.
Worked late, hit the beach before sunset. Saw @quantumprimordial in the water and told him about the sale on fins at the OB @birdssurfshed; saw dolphins. Fun quick sesh.#stoke
Hello I am Olivia from Alliance recruitment groups US. Would you be interested in a remote position?
Joe Crawford:
I prefer email for professional contacts: joe@artlung.com – thanks
+1 (206) 804-8090:
The person in charge currently sends business related information via WhatsApp, so sorry for the inconvenience.
Now, maybe this was legit, but to me, vague out-of-the-blue text messages that say business will be done only via WhatsApp don’t signify “legitimate,” rather, they signify “scam.” Alliance International Services has a dedicated page with this notice:
In the last few days, we are getting a lot of messages from the candidates who received fake job letters, email, phone calls and messages in which our company logo and name is mentioned. And the word claims a lot of money from the candidate for giving jobs. So, This informs you all that Alliance Recruitment Agency comprehensive recruitment process which includes a personal interview and we don’t make employment offers on the basis of a candidates’ CV. Moreover, recruitment to any post under the Alliance Recruitment Agency is done through our own HR department, and we don’t outsource to any external agency or individuals.
MOST IMPORTANT ALLIANCE RECRUITMENT AGENCY DO NOT SOLICIT ANY PAYMENT IN TERM OF SECURITY DEPOSIT OR VISA/ WORK PERMIT PROCESSING FEE etc. FROM CANDIDATES AT ANY STAGE OF RECRUITMENT PROCESS.
…
All are hereby alert that potential job-seekers corresponding with individuals and recruitment agencies will be doing so at their own risk and consequences and that Alliance recruitment company will not be liable for any loss or damage that may be incurred directly or indirectly as a result.
To try and make your writing sound more insightful or profound.
I have done this sometimes: it can be effective maybe! But it always reads self-important. And when you have that attitude as you write it’s probably a bad sign. It makes me curious to try to write code (today I’d write it in Python, 3 weeks ago, PHP, but given my site ultimately lives in a database SQL might be best) to find when I’ve been guilty of it in blog posts. Most of my writing hubris is just sloth–I love a run on sentence, an emdash, or a semicolon. Oh, and sentence fragments. Alas.
There’s more than ever to read, but it’s harder to find good stuff to read, maybe. Clarkesworld closed submissions indefinitely because so many of their submissions were AI-generated drivel. How on earth do you wade through an infinite slush pile? AI is just spam:
Clarkesworld Magazine is no stranger to tales of artificial intelligence impacting society, but in a sad and wild case of life imitating art, the Hugo Award-winning magazine has had to temporarily close its doors to submissions due to it being bombarded with people filing science fiction stories ostensibly written by ChatGPT.
We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.
As an IndieWeb stalwart, the small, slow, and IndieWeb has been here all along. But newspapers are dying. Journalism is being starved. We don’t have much shared space to find out how our world works.
I read the other day a person I worked with a few jobs back who has been out of work more than a year got hired. Made me happy.
This site stillhiring.today appears up to date and includes listings of folks still hiring. Though I do see a fair number of notices of layoffs every week across industries. Seems like I read Tesla did some layoffs yesterday. years ago I was offered an introduction to a manager at Tesla, but I declined. I’d read enough about Musk as a manager to know that it would not be a place I would like to work.
I had not heard of Hillfit but I’ll be checking it out. I am deeply suspicious of most workout stuff. I do love a vigorous ocean swim. It might look like “habitual drowning risk” but to me it’s fun. It feels purposeful that doing a static thing like a pushup or working a machine doesn’t. But from MAS’s 2013 post: Hillfit 2.0: A Zero Budget Approach to High Intensity Training he includes a quote I really love:
“train as much as necessary, not as much as possible” – Perhaps the best quote was ever written on fitness.
And this:
how adults can benefit from getting on the floor and engaging in movement patterns we stop doing as infants
In my bodysurfing, I am basically dancing with the water, when I’m doing it well. I am attempting to shape my own ungainly, overweight body into shapes that can harness the energy of waves to travel with speed and some grace. The movements are not ones I do on land. But doing this as regularly as I do has meant that the way I can move on land has changed.
My name is Mike. I sell funnybooks at my comic book store Sterling Silver Comics, located in Camarillo, CA. I used to work for Ralph’s Comic Corner (later Seth’s Games and Anime) in Ventura, CA. I’ve been at it since 1988, and yet I am still alive.
I lived in Moorpark and Simi Valley for a bunch of years, I think I went to Ralph’s Comic Corner many years ago. Somehow I never ran across his blog. I was following him on Twitter for several years. He’s funny you see. And insightful. Now he’s still both, but on Blue Sky at @mikester.bsky.social. And now I’m gonna read his blog.
Happy Tuesday gang. It’s rough out there. Chin up.
Maybe I’ve not mentioned Ukraine lately. But Ukraine must win. Most, if not all things, Timothy Snyder recommends ought to be read carefully: Congress must let Ukraine win:
The Ukrainian armed forces are defending basic American interests. They are doing things that Americans cannot do for themselves. By absorbing the entire Russian attack, they are making other wars in Europe impossible. They deter China without in any way provoking Beijing. By showing that a nuclear power can be resisted, they teach other countries that they need not build nuclear weapons. For two years, Ukrainians have protected us as well as their own people.
Most Americans understand this, and want to help Ukraine. And most elected representatives do, too.
But we are letting the Ukrainians down. It has been more than 470 days since Congress passed legislation to support Ukraine. That is most of the time since Russia invaded in February 2022. During the period of our inaction, Russia has reconstituted its army. It is preparing a new offensive, testing Ukraine across the front and illegally using CS gas to drive Ukrainian soldiers from their trenches.
Contrast Rebellion is a terrific rant, but also a solid reminder about the importance of color contrast in web design for accessibility. via Alex Sirac
“There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!”–being the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Underdog: Canine Caped Crusader: The 60th Anniversary of “Underdog”. I loved Underdog as a kid. I liked it in the same way I liked Mr. Peabody and Sherman or The Mighty Heroes: all of them have an absurd quality but also are in some way heroic.
“He looked so natural streaking across the waves like a seal. I actually expected him to turn and swim out to sea when he was done,” said Greg Noll. “He was one of the best bodysurfers on the face of the earth. If you’ve ever watched guys get right in the pocket and do the roll deal, Buffalo was the guy who invented that.”
This is the kind of thing I write in response to a thing on Slack or Facebook and then decide not to post as a reply. I don’t know where this goes. I’ve been leaning into being a bit ranty lately. Gotta write this shit down:
It is indeed appalling that we must reckon when the fact that some people who suck also do things which are important. One would think Americans could understand this better than most people since we have the stellar example of one Thomas Jefferson to embody both profound achievement in human rights while also being an unrepentant slaver.
I didn’t participate in CSS Naked Day but I did make some improvements to my sidebar so that the inline backgrounds I set are done as CSS custom attributes (var‘s). This is site is pretty good without CSS, but viewing it that way is for you to do yourself.
How? Well: document.querySelector('head').remove() in the Developer Tools in your browser will do it.
gRegor shared Four Years of Blank, a heartfelt reckoning with COVID and how our public health response faltered and now has basically evaporated. I will admit to treating it with less acuity than I once did. Though I suspect I’ll never get on a plane without a mask again. And I’ll be masking whenever I am sick and anywhere indoors with strangers. Long COVID is not well understood but sure appears to have a strong basis in scientific fact.
I contributed one this year. ALL BOW BEFORE MODOK!
Speaking of drawing, I did do a map for No, Bridges Don’t Float and I have some works in progress in paper and in Procreate. But I’ve been busy.
I have a contract! Very enjoyable work, and challenging. It’s in the programming language Python and involves localization (L10n). Python is a language that’s been on my resume as a weak skill and after this I’ll feel confident putting it on with more weight.
When I look at my website, I see the product of efforts of years gone by. The weekends in the pandemic where I had nothing to do and asked myself what tiny things I could do with my website. The evenings where I have written under fairy lights the thoughts that have been on my mind. The days when I have felt inspired by seeing a moment that brought me joy and said “I should document this!” and did so on this website.
I think a lot about the limits of technology. Yes, of course, technology can in theory do anything. Technology allows people with broken eyes to have a laser applied such that they can see. We cured smallpox. We cut a channel across the whole of the thin part of the Americas to form the Panama Canal. Tech put a tunnel 30 miles long (50 km) underwater from France to England. And our TV and media is often about boffins solving the end of the universe with seconds to spare with SCIENCE!
“We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world.”
“We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:
I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
KA-Worlds abandoned that approach. Electric Communities is right, chat is out.”
Many folks are saying these days “A I” will soon solve many many problems. Sure, maybe. But where’s your evidence for that? It’s rather thin on the ground.
New Steve Martin documentary is great and like most biographical things about heroes of mine made me weep a bit. Among the great things are excerpts and screen captures of the notebooks he kept, to document his process of performing comedy. The one that made me tear up was this advice to himself, after presumably a difficult performance onstage, the kind of self-advice I have given myself more than a few times:
“Don’t shake. Relax.”
So to you, dear reader, I say, “don’t shake, relax.”
