104 / Markdown images are an anti-pattern

Hey everyone, I’ve been sick for most of the week, hope yours was better ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

What if we all just started using `trunk` as the go-to main branch name rather than `main` or `master`. — @emerald@mecha.garden

Culture

• Same Stop (engineersneedart.com)

  John Calhoun shares their experience of coming back to programming after retirement.

Software

• How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks? (pkolaczk.github.io)

  Piotr Kołaczkowski tests concurrent tasks in 8 technologies up to 1 million tasks, with interesting findings (Python is faster than Go‽).

• Markdown images are an anti-pattern (daverupert.com)

  Dave Rupert argues that you should use the HTML <img/> tag to be able to set attributes like height/width and decoding.

• A Well Known URL For Your Personal Avatar (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

  Jim Nielsen is suggesting a .well-known URL for avatars.

• You don't need a modal window (youdontneedamodalwindow.dev)

  Deniz Akşimşek lists reasons why you should not use a modal window and instead make a separate page.

• Single Line Comments in CSS (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

  Jim Nielsen explains why we’ll probably never get single-line comments with // in CSS.

• Add Opacity to an Existing Color (chriscoyier.net)

  Chris Coyier experiments with transparent variants of colors in CSS.

Large Language Models

• We deserve to know if something was generated by AI (ntietz.com)

  Nicole argues that text generated by LLMs should be marked as such, for a multitude of reasons.

• OpenAI says it could ‘cease operating’ in the EU if it can’t comply with future regulation (theverge.com)

  James Vincent about OpenAI’s response to the AI regulation process in the EU.

• Generative AI: What You Need To Know (needtoknow.fyi)

  Baldur Bjarnason has a nice summary website about generative AI.

Cutting Room Floor

• A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you (aeon.co)

  Clifton Mark about the implications of a meritocracy and it’s effect on your world view.

• Noise Is All around Us—and It’s Affecting You More than You Think (thewalrus.ca)

  Bojan Fürst about noise pollution, the anthropause during the pandemic and ways to live with noise.

• Writing summaries is more important than reading more books (andreasfragner.com)

  Andreas Fragner explains why it’s better to take time to write summaries than to blindly pick up the next book.