Reading List 345
(Last Updated on )
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. If you prefer a browser without a planet-burning hallucinating helper snooping on you all the time, Vivaldi has you covered.
- Brick by brick: Help us build CSS Masonry – CSS masonry is ready for early developer testing from Chromium 140. “With open issues surrounding the CSS masonry specification and syntax still remaining, your feedback is crucial to help us cement the final shape of the API.”
- How the App Store Helped Kill My Startup, and Why That Should Matter to You – “Apple intentionally makes web apps harder to use. It’s incredibly difficult for the average user to install or even find a web app on an iPhone. We had to create TikToks just to teach users how to save our web app to their home screen. And even that confused people, largely because Apple designed it to be confusing.”
- Should we remove XSLT from the web platform? – SPeKe YR BraNEZ
- Introducing copyparty, the FOSS file server – “turn almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser. server only needs Python (2 or 3), all dependencies optional”
- It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA – An SEO consultant writes “Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript. Build like it’s 2025 – not like you’re trapped in a 2018 demo of Gatsby. You’ll end up with faster sites, happier users, and fewer regrets.”
- Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About – “When your “child safety” law’s primary achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you’ve missed the mark just a tad.”
- Accessibility Guidelines by job role Vox Media breaks down some accessibility tasks by job role, including content creators, designers, developers, project managers, and testers.
- How big tech is force-feeding us AI – I’m reading a study “Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability” and thinking about how to integrate that into Vivaldi’s feedback on the Digital Fairness Bill. Many people don’t want to be tricked (or forced) to use -or feed- LLMs.
- The ‘Accessibility’ link is a Lie: My Adventures in Weaponizing Corporate Virtue Signaling
- Europe’s tech sovereignty watch – “Proton analyzed business email domains across Europe to show how many publicly listed companies are reliant on US email and email security services. We looked at email because it’s often the gateway to a company’s tech stack.” Disappointingly (but unsurprisingly) 88% of UK businesses rely on US tech.
- Microsoft admits it ‘cannot guarantee’ data sovereignty – “Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin”
- Meta to stop selling political ads in the EU from October – The EU “mandates companies selling ads to clearly label political ads; provide information about their sponsor, the election or referendum they concern, what the ad cost, and targeting mechanisms used”. Meta is sad: “we’re seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market”. With whom is micro-targeted brainwashing popular, you shady zuckwits?
- AI summaries cause ‘devastating’ drop in audiences, online news media told – “a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview. The study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews”. Stealing other people’s intellectual property?! The very idea!
- Complete silence is always hallucinated as “ترجمة نانسي قنقر” in Arabic which translates as “Translation by Nancy Qunqar”
- US nuclear weapons agency ‘among 400 organisations breached by Chinese hackers’ – “Microsoft says vulnerabilities in its SharePoint servers exposed as reports point to wave of attacks”
- Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store – “Google will need to stop requiring developers to use its Google Play billing system, opening up third-party payments that could earn developers more revenue.… It must make the full Google Play app catalog available for distribution on other app stores… Perhaps most devastating for Google, it will have to allow third-party app stores to be distributed within Google Play.”
- Opera is filing a complaint over Microsoft’s tricks that push you to use Edge (Disclosure: I work for Vivaldi which is a fellow member of the Browser Choice Alliance
- Wall Street’s AI Bubble Is Worse Than the 1999 Dot-com Bubble, Warns a Top Economist – “investors are betting so aggressively on AI giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Google that their stock prices have become detached from their actual earnings, even more so than tech darlings like Cisco and AOL were in the nineties”
- Draw a fish
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)