Reading List 335
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’re self-funded, with no external investors demanding we turn fascist or send them your data, and studies show that regularly browsing or emailing with it increases your innate elegance and gorgeousness. Or your money back.
- The Digital Markets Act: Europe’s Digital Competitiveness at Stake – a joint open letter to EU bigwigs, co-signed by Vivaldi
- Tech firms, publishers and Which? raise fears over new boss at competition regulator – I had a meeting with my MP, Jess Phillips, last Friday to raise my (and Vivaldi’s) concerns
- Apple Resumes Advertising on X – fun fact: the ASCII code for “X” is “88”. Strange co-incidence.
- Tech continues to be political – “And the politics aren’t looking great”. A really good personal article by Miriam Suzanne
- The Atkinson Hyperlegible Next™ Font – 2025 edition of the very nice highly-legible font made by the Braille Institute, free for personal and commercial use
- Open letter to EU PDF – “Europe must not be bullied by the likes of Musk and Trump into weakening its DSA and DMA enforcement. At the same time, the actions taken by X and Meta are a stark reminder of how vulnerable Europe is in our dependency on the largest online platforms … Now is the time to double down on EU tech sovereignty. This is not a clash between the EU and the US, but rather an attack from Big Tech against everyone else.” – a really great open letter to EU from EDRi and chums.
- Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants – “Conducted over a month, the study saw the BBC test four prominent, publicly available AI assistants”
- What We’re Fighting For – “We do not “use” the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.”
- The Protesters’ Guide to Smartphone Security
- Why the ‘none of the above’ checkbox pattern worries me by Adam Silver, who wrote the best book on HTML form design ever.
- Revisiting CSS Multi-Column Layout – multicol in a world of
:has(),calc()andclamp(). By Andy Clarke - Transitioning Top-Layer Entries And The Display Property In CSS – by Brecht De Ruyte
- AltStore pokes the bear – “The first ‘Apple approved’ porn app for iPhone is rolling out in Europe, via AltStore PAL’s alternative iOS app marketplace” – or is it “Apple approved”, but by Schrodinger’s Cat?
- iconic.app – Free, “do wtf you want with” pixel-perfect icons. New icons added every week.
- Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads -‘the free apps you install and use collect your precise location with timestamp and send it to some 3rd-party companies’. What could possibly go wrong while ICE agents are hunting people?
- Role Reverser is a tiny utility that will replaces unsemantic HTML and ARIA roles with the simpler native HTML elements.
- Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even’ -“The Wall Street Journal reports banks are close to selling some of the $13 billion in debt they took on while helping Musk buy Twitter in 2022.”
- Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages – “What a noble vision”
- AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism – “It’s embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)