web development (and related) links

When IBM Built a War Room for Executives Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos showed how advanced computing could create a shared, collaborative environment of allied individuals, all direct users of the same system, befitting of a laboratory of computer enthusiasts in Menlo Park, Calif. Dunlop’s Executive Terminal demo showed how many of these same advanced technologies could be directed along another path, that of a strictly hierarchical organization, highly attuned to rank and defined roles and specialties. (Related: What Was The ‘Dowding System’?, CIC [Combat Information Center] Yesterday and Today. A lot of people in decision-making roles in 1960s corporations were WWII veterans.)

“Rules” that terminal programs follow Programs behave surprisingly consistently.

Pluralistic: Tech’s benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline (10 Dec 2024) [I]f progressives in your circle never bothered you about your commercial affairs, perhaps that’s because those affairs didn’t matter when you were grinding out code in your hacker house, but they matter a lot now that you have millions of users and thousands of employees. (There is also a long established connection between the direct mail/database/surveillance marketing business and cultural conservative politics—the more that the tech industry focuses on surveillance advertising, the more that the political decisions of tech employers feel unfamiliar and adversarial to employees whose assumptions weren’t shaped by the culture of direct marketing/right-wing organisations.

Nodriver: A Game-Changer in Web Automation Despite the existence of multiple plugins like puppeteer-stealth, rebrowser, real-browser and many more, they have been quite detectable by WAFs like Cloudflare, Imperva, and Datadome….Nodriver takes a different approach by getting in at the framework level itself. By minimizing the affected footprint and communicating directly over the Chrome Devtool Protocol itself, Nodriver leaves very little marks of its presence, if any at all. A side effect of this is that Nodriver is also one of the fastest scraping frameworks available. (The scraper bot will always get through?)

One Tiny Mod Makes A Cheap Mic Sound A Lot Like A Neumann - Aftermath A tiny, easy to solder mod discovered on forums makes the AKG Perception sound much closer to the legendary Neumann U 87.

“Modern Work Fucking Sucks.” Your company doesn’t just use one app; it uses all of them. Slack for chatting, Zoom for meetings, Notion for brainstorming, Trello for project tracking, Asana for workflows, and Jira for… something vaguely technical that no one fully understands. The end result isn’t streamlined productivity, it’s a Byzantine ecosystem of software where every app exists to talk to every other app while you stand in the middle, trying to make sense of the chaos. (Adam Smith would facepalm. Specialization of labor is a thing, especially for administrative and organizational tasks. Remember the ideal software development team in The Mythical Man-Month had two secretaries and a program clerk? I guess the good news here is that Simple Sabotage for the 21st Century is almost undetectable in the presence of normal IT friction.)

Consumer Solar Surge: Pakistan Shows you Don’t Need Government Programs to Green the Grid While no one was looking, the Pakistani public took matters into their own hands, adding 17 gigawatts of solar power this year. These installations are mostly in the form of Chinese panels for rooftop or ground level solar in towns and villages. (Yes, the grid power generally goes off when it’s sunny, and yes, there are a lot of people who are good at electrical work and in importing stuff from China.)

Whither CockroachDB? and RFD 508: what happens when an open-source dependency changes license?

Kill Oracle’s ‘JavaScript’ trademark, Deno asks USPTO (If this works, then what happens to twitter and tweet?)

What To Use Instead of PGP This section contains specific tools to solve the same problems that PGP tries to solve, but better.

Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content Text fragments are a powerful feature of the modern web platform that allows for precise linking to specific text within a web page without the need to add an anchor! (Related: Text fragments on MDN)

PAAPI Could Be As Effective For Retargeting As Third-Parties Cookies, Study Finds (The headline doesn’t include the interesting math here. In-browser ad auctions are 81.8% as effective as old-fashioned cookie tracking in conversions per dollar, but 49.8% as effective in conversions per ad. So if you multiply it out with the units and cancel conversions, dollars per ad comes out to 61.8% which is only a little above where you get with no tracking at all, and the real-world privacy risks and computing resource costs are higher. Stop putting advertising features in web browsers) Related: The Kids Aren’t Playing In The Privacy Sandbox | AdExchanger