Wherever I can I prefer to work in the browser vs. tools like Figma. As the web platform grows (we seem to be in a sort of golden age at the moment) it becomes easier and easier to do my job with only the raw materials of the web.

Recently I’ve been working on a project at the day job that requires the use of something akin to layout grids in Figma. I was curious how difficult it would be to recreate this on the web.

It took longer than I’d like to admit to figure out the math, but with a single repeating-linear-gradient we can overlay a representation of our grid onto the page. I whipped up a class for this with support for specifying your own number of columns and gutter width.

In the spirit of blogging the things I want to remember:

.grid-overlay {
  --n: var(--columns, 12);
  --g: var(--gap, 16px);
  --c: var(--overlay-color, rgb(255 0 0 / 0.08));
  --column-width: calc(((100% + var(--g)) / var(--n)) - var(--g));

  position: relative;

  &:before {
    content: '';
    position: absolute;
    inset: 0;
    z-index: 1;
    pointer-events: none;
    background: repeating-linear-gradient(
      to right,
      var(--c),
      var(--c) var(--column-width),
      transparent var(--column-width),
      transparent calc(var(--column-width) + var(--g))
    );
  }
}

Slap that class onto your grid container and presto, you’ve got some rails in place to keep everything lined up nice and neat.

Once again I’m left marveling at the humble power of CSS, and feeling grateful that we live during times when such an expressive yet simple visual language is spoken so ubiquitously.

Check out the demo on Codepen.

We’re seeing a surge of platforms self-sabotaging and choosing to suddenly restrict access to their content. These are all blatant attempts to trap users by digging a moat around the communities that they’ve created.

I can think of 3 obvious reasons why this might all be happening now as opposed to any time over the past decade:

1. The content on social media platforms is valuable for AI training, and platforms want to capitalize on or keep that value for themselves.
2. The recent, high-interest-rate environment has companies cutting costs in ways they might not before, and subsidizing API access for third party developers is no longer a bill they’re willing to foot.
3. The bad behavior of platforms is creating a more competitive environment as new challengers spring up (Bluesky, Posts, Mastodon, and Threads all come to mind).

Those seem obvious, but are they really the cause? Is it one more than the other? Or something else entirely?

I wonder how much of this trend is really just a domino effect of CEOs realizing that they can get away with screwing over their users because they saw Elon Musk (or some other robber baron) get away with it.

Humane (the mysterious company founded by ex-Apple executives) has finally revealed the name of the product they’re hoping to ship this year: the Humane Ai Pin.

I’m as skeptical as the next person about AI and wearables and really anything with as much hypebeast marketing as this product has received. But if I put my skepticism aside for a moment I’m able to appreciate this for what it is—a group of people trying to create a new kind of computer and computing paradigm.

There’s a bit of footage out there of the device in action, but regardless of the specifics I think it’s essential that we never stop asking ourselves what a computer could or should be.

In the new book Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, Steve talks about his love for books and also their shortcomings:

The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

Steve Jobs’ speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado on June 15, 1983

For all the work we’ve put into creating ways to capture our lives digitally, it doesn’t feel like the ritual of passing that information down to future generations is considered much.

I wonder if this might be a common use case for conversational AIs in the future. You can imagine a ChatGPT trained on the works of Aristotle, waiting to answer new and novel questions. Like Steve says, we won’t always get the right answer, but maybe we will.

The digital book is lovely and full of wisdom—definitely a recommended read.

I’m finally getting around to playing Ghost of Tsushima which is impressive all around. But the thing that has impressed me most is… wind??

The game rejects the normal interface of a minimap to guide players, and instead uses the wind and the environment to show the way forward.

When The Guiding Wind blows in Tsushima, the entire game world responds. The trees bend over, pointing you onward. The pampas grass ripples like the surface of water. Leaves and petals swirl around the scene. The controller emits the sound of gusting wind, and the player can swipe the touch pad to blow the winds and set the environment in motion.

Such a simple mechanic is so unexpected and beautiful and calming in a world of cutting edge graphics and 4K 60FPS VR madness. Video games (and everything else) today are so over the top, but in the end it’s something simple like the wind that gets you.

🍃 Let the guiding wind blow 🍃