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A markup language that makes the authoring of interactive articles more accessible. You can see it in use on the Parametric Press, a new magazine experimenting with the dynamic capabilities of digital texts: The current generation of publishing technology mimics tools that were designed during the era of the printing press. Past aspirations for the […]

An overview of what goes into the computer processing of text: I don’t believe there is a single place where it’s all properly written down. I have some explanation for that: while basic text layout is very important for UI, games, and other contexts, a lot of the “professional” needs around text layout are embedded […]

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel on the New York Times: While innovation — the social process of introducing new things — is important, most technologies around us are old, and for the smooth functioning of daily life, maintenance is more important. […] It’s not just maintenance that our society fails to appreciate; it’s also the […]

Interesting take from Palladium Mag: Considered frankly, this trend reveals the internet to be a technology of centralization. One of the core functions of the internet is to record material of human interest in digital format. These records span everything from our trivial preferences and financial habits to the most intimate messages we send each […]

Redmonk: Most toolchains, from where the first lines of code are written through test, build, integration and deployment all the way out to production, are made up of a patchwork quilt of products and services from different suppliers. […] In order to make the life of a developer easier, rather than harder, a quality developer […]

This sounds like a saner way to handle privacy settings than having a banner on every single website (security UI doesn’t work).

A reminder that the best emails are plain text and nothing else. Not only they read well on any screen (even on a watch), they actually perform better: The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email. The plain, unstyled emails […]

I am pleased to find out I am not the only one frustrated by the behaviour of the back button in Photos or bewildered by where it will take me in Music. There’s a growing list of apps, developed directly by Apple, that would benefit from having proper navigation but have opted for an erratic […]

Here’s another aspect of the ebook reading experience Amazon has a monopoly on, and somehow lacks a vision for. From The New Stateman: Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched […]

A calming little website collecting 10 minute videos of someone’s else window. Displayed randomly, from anywhere in the world.

Andy Matuschak: Books are static. Prose can frame or stimulate readers’ thoughts, but prose can’t behave or respond to those thoughts as they unfold in each reader’s head. […] How might we design mediums in which “readers” naturally form rich associations between the ideas being presented? How might we design mediums which “readers” naturally engage […]

GPT-3 — let’s define it as the autocomplete tool by OpenAI trained on a large amount of uncategorized text from the internet — is quite impressive, comparable to what happened to AI image processing from 2012 onward. We can safely ignore the hype — it’s probably a dead end in terms of reaching artificial general intelligence […]

Los Angeles Review of Books: Does a text message conversation take place? It has a beginning, I suppose, though who can remember when it was. Does it have a middle? An end? An ever-expanding middle maybe, half-punctuated by a series of tentative ends — and perhaps one final, devastating one. […] When you receive a […]

Some insights on voice interfaces from Ian Bicking: Voice interfaces are voice interfaces. They are a way for the user to express their desire, using patterns that might be skeuomorphism of regular voice interactions, or might be specific learned behaviors. It’s not a conversation. You aren’t talking with the computer. I’ve been speaking with Alexa […]

Marc Andreessen: Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on […]

New York Times: Labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society […]