Awesome finds - March 2024

Some things I liked in March'24.

Culture things

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: Smart and funny, even intellectual. Sometimes you feel too close, like unnecessarily close, to the characters and their thoughts, but it works, even if it makes you feel a bit shrunk and shrink-ed. But this is a really good read: the story of a dysfunctional family, where each person's perspective is equally heartbreaking, but oh so ordinary. It should also be noted that although it was published in 2001, I don't think it has aged badly at all.

The Zone of Interest: It's strange to say this about a film like this, but it didn't live up to my expectations, although I'd still recommend it to anyone. It's uncomfortably normal, sure, but while it was supposed to be about the chillingly ordinary life near the epicentre of the henocide, you a) can't shake it off to even try to see this as ordinary for them, b) know so much already about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss and whatever that you're not chilled or surprised to see this, though of course you're appalled anyway.

Music

• Love is a Killer by Love Fame Tragedy: is a nice little album, though not Murph's best effort (Don't You Want To Sleep With Someone Normal is a banger though, so cannot complain)
• King Krule + Mount Kimbie, a match made in heaven, alwayyys ❤️‍🔥
• Run fast 🏃‍♀️, break things with girl in red: hella awesome girls riot
• Genuinely feel sorry for Hozier, whose whole cool and conceptual and deep and beautiful album went under every radar last year, but easygoing, almost flimsy songs like this one get picked up by the charts cause TikTok babeeeyyyy! It is playful and rather fun though, but I still feel for him...
• Charlotte Day Wilson the voice! the drama! the guitar! everything is just perfect

Tech stuff

CSS :has() Interactive Guide: I want to show this to pretty much everyone writing css these days, because it is AWESOME! All the examples are close to real life problems, brilliantly explained, incredibly easy to understand. Such a great guide, you'll want to drop everything and rewrite your old styles to :has().

A great talk on CSS performance (what? yes!): a bunch of handy tips on what browsers do to figure out your styles, how to test CSS performance and what to look out for to improve the performance of your selectors, classes, and styles.

Accessibility foundations: a very down-to-earth, user-friendly and non-ableist short but comprehensive guide to digital accessibility. It is full of the principles that, if applied, will make your site more accessible than probably 80% of the sites out there. I really liked the language they used throughout the guide, giving examples of groups of people for whom this or that particular criterion will be important.

For example, reading this section I learned that <header> and <div role='banner'> are interchangeable: obviously, you should use semantic header whenever possible, but if you don't have control over your html structure, this might come in handy!

⚠️ AI zone! ⚠️

ChatGPT is a really mediocre as a travel agent, at least if you're looking for new experiences and something more than just "following the tourist guide": it's designed to give you the most (mathematically even) average response for pretty much everything, so while it sort of works (well, you'll certainly see everything you NEED to see, and according to your preferred options and needs), you'll probably be trying to enjoy it with thousands of tourists at the same time.

AI education in China: while Western parents are increasingly trying to restrict the use of gadgets for children and teenagers, in China it's quite the opposite. Parents, especially from less developed communities, literally feel FOMO if their children (as young as 5 yo) don't have access to the best AI hardware and software for learning, as they may fall behind their more tech-savvy peers.

TILs

• There's a sound captcha, an accessible version of captcha for visually impared users, that asks you to listen through several cat meows to choose the "fake" one, where fake one is just literally a person saying "meow" in a normal voice! There're no recordings unfortunately, just these comments.
• CSS :has() has been the most requested and pushed feature among ad blockers creators: in one way or another, they've been implementing and using their versions of :has() for years.

Beauty corner

This french illustrator draws sky every single day, and I think that is really, really pretty. 💗

And I miss Venice a lot:

Have a nice April 🌸