I’ve been working at DuckDuckGo on their browser for Windows for a little more than 3 months now. Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO, recently shared a post with 10 surprising things about the company:
Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo you probably don’t know (Gabriel Weinberg)
This article by David A. Herron is a nice overview of some of the more recent CSS features for color themes.
Color themes with Baseline CSS features (web.dev)
The soul of public education is at stake. When the largest public university system licenses an AI chatbot from a corporation that blacklists journalists, exploits data workers in the Global South, amasses geopolitical and energy power at an unprecedented scale, and positions itself as an unelected steward of human destiny, it betrays its mission as the “people’s university,” rooted in democratic ideals and social justice.
Ronald Purser
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself (Current Affairs)
This week’s thing I like is Markdown. It is a syntax for adding formatting to plain text files in a way that is both still readable as plain text and that can be processed into rich document formats like HTML.
Markdown was first introduced just over 20 years ago by John Gruber and has evolved some since then as various pieces of software have added new features like tables to it. It became a popular format for software documentation that is kept in code repositories, but in general, it is just a good format for text documents. Because it is a standard, fairly simple, and readable as plain text it is easy to work with and can be opened and read by anyone with a computer.
Here’s a sample of what a Markdown file can look like and some of the features it supports:
# Header
This is just some text. You can specify that text is _emphasized_ or **bold**.
Lists are easy to add:
- Eggs
- Bread
- Cheese
- Butter
## Level 2 Header
Markdown also supports links, like [this](https://scottboehmer.com).
And you can add tables in some versions of Markdown too:
| State | Capital |
| -------------- | ------- |
| Michigan | Lansing |
| Washington | Olympia |
| North Carolina | Raleigh |In addition to using it as a format for code documentation, I’ve found that Markdown is my preferred format for taking notes or writing drafts. It lets my editing experience for those be simple with no worries about fonts, colors, or other style choices that might come up in a program like Word or Google Docs. I also don’t need to worry about a paste of copied text throwing off formatting.
Markdown Basic Syntax (Markdown Guide)
Simple.css, like its name implies, is a simple CSS framework. It includes styles for standard html elements with very little needed to make an html page look pretty nice and adapt to different screen sizes and light/dark mode. I stumbled on it years ago, and I have used it in one of my websites (FWTI).
A nice thing is that Simple.css is a single file, so it is easy to use in a project. It also is available as a nicely formatted version with comments to explain the various styles, so that you can figure out not just which styles it is going to apply but also why.
Because, yes: this “America by Design” page is shoddily made, and poorly written. But the authoritarian impulse — to erase histories, to control a narrative, to single-mindedly focus on image and aesthetics — shapes not just the site’s text, but its design as well. Its text erases the history and work of the people who quietly labored to create better digital services for the public; in their place, it proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country. And we find that new definition in the way the site’s constructed: it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”
All of this should and must be rebuked by the design community; it must also be actively, urgently dismantled.
Ethan Marcotte
A notional design studio. (Ethan Marcotte)
Adam’s parents say that he had been using the artificial intelligence chatbot as a substitute for human companionship in his final weeks, discussing his issues with anxiety and trouble talking with his family, and that the chat logs show how the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his “suicide coach.”
Angela Yang, Laura Jarrett, Fallon Gallagher
The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT is to blame (NBC News)
Programs should be valid as they are typed.
Graic
Left to Right Programming (Graic)
It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it.
Charlie Warzel
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event (The Atlantic)
On Thursday, I was in a hotel room using my laptop. It suddenly blue screened, and then when it restarted, something was wrong. After logging in, I got a bunch of error dialogs about various programs not being found or missing the permissions to access them. Then as I poked around, File Explorer claimed that I lacked permissions to open the main C:\ drive. Since I was on vacation, I just shut it down. I’d deal with it when I got home.
The next evening, back home, I opened it back up. I plugged in a USB hard drive and copied the few files that weren’t in cloud storage already. Then I ran through the Windows reset flow in an attempt to get things working again. After a wait, I went through the Windows setup experience and then after setting up my account, logged in, and got a similar set of error prompts. The reset hadn’t fixed anything.
At this point, I started digging in a bit more to see if I could figure out what the actual problem was. After a bit of poking around and comparing to my other computer, I came to the conclusion that the drive permissions had been messed up by the blue screen. At that point, I could either try to replicate the correct settings using my other computer as a template, or attempt a reformat of the drive.
Since I had already erased everything from the computer, I decided to go ahead with a reformat. I created a bootable USB to reinstall Windows and then started that process all over again. This time, Windows setup informed me that it lacked network drivers and couldn’t reach the internet. I briefly tried to find the right drivers on my other computer and then copy them over, but the right way to accomplish that eluded me. Luckily, I have a USB wifi adapter, so I grabbed that and Windows setup was able to work fine through it rather than the onboard wifi.
With the drive reformatted, Windows was finally working properly on my laptop again. The process of getting there was just a pain well beyond what a normal user could deal with. Reset should have examined and fixed the drive permissions, and with it not solving the issue, I think most people would just be stuck. If I wouldn’t have had a wifi adapter around, I’d have gotten stuck with no way forward without running to a store.
Going through Windows setup twice also drove home just how hostile Windows has become to users. Setup tries to get you into subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and Xbox and then leaves your computer littered with recommendations (ads) and unwanted software. The clean Microsoft install was better than the Lenovo-customized reset (which included more pre-installed software), but neither was a good experience. It’ll be a while before the computer feels properly personalized again.
Scott Boehmer 