Reading list

• The platform era is slowly dying, going fediverse, nudged along by the likes of ActivityPub protocol and others. Here are some pointed perspectives on the resurgence of a POSSE world. If it sounds too buzz wordy for you, just click the link and let The Verge explain.
• The reading list isn't getting any funnier with this shout out to Vercel explaining How to Think About Security in Next.js.

Design of the week

• USB-C cables are not all made the same. Lumafield literally reveals just how crazy life is inside of the darling connector. How in the world that ended up in the design of the week section remains a mystery, though. Design in a broad sense, perhaps. Or maybe the cool interactive 3D models.

Tech of the week

• The tech world is great at spending old money on new tech, which Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr, clearly shows when acquiring Texts, "a startup that’s been building a one-stop destination for managing your many chat and messaging apps in one place." The clue is ActivityPub.
• A serial topic here revolves around copyright and intellectual property management in visual arts in lieu of AI training models unapologetically scraping everything and anything. Nightshade is a new tool that lets artists literally poison the pixels, causing the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. MIT has a review of it.
• Bram.us, a technology blog to follow, has a story on how to style a scroll-driven element based on active scroll direction and speed. Neat.
• Yes, Flash is making a comeback, thankfully sandboxed for security and memory safety, through Ruffle. Time to fish those old hard drives out of the attic.
• Datawrapper shares some learnings from migrating their web app to SvelteKit.
• Trumpets out, Next.js 14 is here, turbo charged and packed with features.