Bruce Lawson's personal site

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’ve just released Vivaldi 7.7 for desktop and mobile, with features requested by our users instead of planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.

• Masonry Layout is Now grid-lanes
• Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud – Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
• related: Getting off US tech: a guide – Personally, I’m not comfortable framing it as “dropping US tech services”. It’s not about nationalism, or boycotting specific nations for me; it’s about controlling your own data (or your nation controlling its own data) rather than it being strip-mined by TechBros.
• 4 CSS Features Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2026 by Adam Argyll
• Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? asks Lea Verou
• Extracting books from production language models ^[PDF] – “We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude…substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so”
• EasySpeak Voice control for Linux desktops – Fully local, no cloud, Wayland-native, free and open source
• 5 accessibility checks to run on every component by Hidde the hunk from Holland
• Windows 11’s “Share with Copilot” Wants AI to See Your App Windows – “It sounds useful, but it also raises real privacy questions, especially since it shows up enabled by default.”
• European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy – The EU is working on what is in essence a new Open Source strategy for Europe, and the call for evidence is now open. If you’re a European hippie communist, you can provide input.
• the Delayed Message Timing API – “Making complex web apps faster”
• The Secret Life of Custom Elements by Brian from the Internet
• [Range] Multi-handle necessity and scalability guidelines (3+ Thumbs) – That nice Brecht De Ruyte of the Open UI group (that gave HTML new fancy <select>, not the AI snakeoil merchants) wants your use-cases for multi-handle range controls
• The Curious Case of the Shallow Session SPAs by Big Al
• Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot – “its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it’s not making much money from its AI products. That’s because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful”
• Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit – The three-judge panel the lower court’s ruling that barred Apple from charging fees on purchases off the AppStore giving Apple a chance to make a claim to a reasonable commission on those
• Should we turn the internet off? – Guardian readers give their answers.
• Court in Zwolle rules couple not married after ChatGPT-written ceremony

Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)

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