Axel Rauschmayer

“How ‘Liquid Design’ Broke the iPhone and Forced Apple’s Great Reset”
https://webdesignerdepot.com/how-liquid-design-broke-the-iphone-and-forced-apples-great-reset/

“[…] the Battery Tax has been devastating. Data suggests a 10–15% reduction in real-world screen-on time because the phone is effectively running a physics engine just to show you your calendar.”

It’s scary how many free resources are disappearing at the moment. Ironically, that’s also bad for LLMs.

For example: In recent months, two Chinese-related reference sites disappeared that were incredibly useful for language learning. And one is now behind Cloudflare’s usability-degrading AI protection.

We had a very long phase of tech constantly coming up with new things. The expectation is that that’ll continue forever.

Right now, however, I’d appreciate a shift in focus from mostly new features to more maintenance: Cleaning up what’s already there, fixing bugs, etc.

In the 1990s, we had Tamagotchis:
• They had to be fed regularly if we didn’t want them to die.
• They demanded our constant attention.

Nowadays, that’s just how most devices work (charging, software updates, notifications, …). 😬

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

I don’t know why, but I always thought bronze was a metal. But it’s actually an alloy “consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloids (such as arsenic or silicon)”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze

Insightful look at how many big tech companies currently treat their employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI_YoB3tYu4

“Workers’ loyalty to their companies is essentially gone. But loyalty to fellow workers and co-workers is growing stronger.”
I find worker co-ops an interesting option: https://www.workers.coop

I often read that Mastodon is too complicated for “normal” people. I’m curious: How tech savvy do you consider yourself to be?

I’d especially love to hear from #1 people.

My list of upcoming Mastodon improvements: https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html

Boosts appreciated, to get as varied a sample as possible!

UPDATE: So much great feedback. Thanks everyone!

“This game keeps you up all night.”

Only true until people start counting!

RE: @assaf@mas.to

#MacOS: The Phosphene app lets you use arbitrary videos as video wallpapers (which are shown on desktop and lock screen).

Interesting take on whether John Giannandrea “failed” at Apple: He bet on local AI – which may yet turn out to be a good thing for Apple.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/12/02/apple-owes-its-greatest-strength-in-ai-to-giannandrea

The ActivityPub standard (by @cwebber@social.coop, @tsyesika@mastodon.nu, @erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net, @rhiaro@toot.cat, @evan@cosocial.ca) is a joy to read.

Initial impression: “Like email” is actually a good initial mental image for how it works.

https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/

This is a matter of taste, but when someone explains a new concept to me, I prefer them staying in the subject area as much as possible vs. using too many analogies.

For example, to explain molecules and chemical bonding, one book compares the former to a group of children in a playground. One child uses Super Glue—which is an analogy to bonding.

I’d prefer a different approach. But it’s tricky: Very few texts find a good middle ground between too abstract and too concrete.

Firefox Tab Groups [1] really shine with vertical tabs [2].

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-sidebar-access-tools-and-vertical-tabs

I’d expand this to more universal support for a tree of tabs (think tree-style tab FF extension):
• Tabs opened in background become children.
• Any tab with children can be expanded and collapsed.
• The tree structure can by changed by dragging&dropping tabs.
• Blank tabs can be named and become parents.

#YouTube: Subjectively, there are many bots in the comments that spread negativity and division. However, you can never be sure because YouTube doesn’t let you look at their comment history or provide other tools for detecting them.

How can you gain an intuitive understanding of surface areas such as 1.22 million m²?

I’ve seen many attempts such as how many football fields would fit into it, etc.

My favorite is still: It’s equivalent to a square whose sides are about 1105 meters long.

In the future, front lines may well consist of robots fighting robots.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/fighting-robots-give-ukraine-hope-in-war-with-russia

New in Firefox Nightly: vertical tabs (h/t @mconley@fosstodon.org)

I love vertical tabs! Two benefits:
• Titles remain readable if there are many tabs.
• They work well with smaller widescreen displays (think notebooks) because there is more vertical space for content.

The Tree Style Tab extension adds one more benefit: Child tabs are indented underneath the tabs from which they were opened. Benefit: Automatic grouping of related tabs (coming from search results etc.).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

• Demos für erneuerbare Energien
• 18. April 2026 (Samstag)
• #Berlin, #Hamburg, #Köln, #München
https://erneuerbare-energien-verteidigen.de/demos/

Node’s new built-in support for TypeScript
https://2ality.com/2025/01/nodejs-strip-type.html

#TypeScript #NodeJS #2ality

Shell programming question: Consider the following shell command.

pbpaste | my-script | pbcopy

Problem: If an error happens the the clipboard is empty afterwards.

Solution(?) If an error happens, my-script sends what it read from stdin to stdout.

Not particularly elegant but it does the job. Is there anything better, more “idiomatic”?

Safari: Sometimes a web app hangs (it subjectively feels like a service worker issue to me—but I can’t prove it): I can’t visit the web site in “normal” mode, only in private mode.

Solution:
• Go to “Settings > Privacy > Manage Website Data…”
• Search for the web app and click on “Remove All”.

Wasm 3.0: https://webassembly.org/news/2025-09-17-wasm-3.0/

“With these new features, Wasm has much better support for compiling high-level programming languages. Enabled by this, we have seen various new languages popping up to target Wasm, such as Java, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Scheme, or Dart, all of which use the new GC feature.”

Using variables in npm run scripts (package (a)rauschma/env-var must be installed locally or globally):

{
"scripts": {
"hi": "env-var echo {{npm_package_config_hi}}"
},
"config": {
"hi": "HELLO"
}
}

Works on Windows and Unix:
npm run hi

More information: https://exploringjs.com/nodejs-shell-scripting/ch_package-scripts.html#using-environment-variables-in-package-scripts

#NodeJS

“Is Turbopack really 10x Faster than Vite?” by Evan You
https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussions/8

“Beyond the Hype: WebAssembly – from the browser to beyond” with Colin Eberhardt, Bailey Hayes, and Sean Isom
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2023/08/04/beyond-the-hype-webassembly.html
#WebbAssembly

EGOT: a person who has received all of the following awards:
• Emmy for television
• Grammy for music and recording
• Oscar for film
• Tony for Broadway theater

There are not many of them: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/14/entertainment/gallery/egot-winners-list