Mid-month roundup

Fancy being stuck on ~~the phone~~Zoom with me several times a week? The W3C is looking to hire a Privacy Lead. You could have an enduring impact on the web as a platform that’s secure- and private-by-default.

If you’ve never engaged in standards work before but are curious about what it’s like, the upcoming Breakouts Day sounds like an excellent opportunity to peek behind the curtain. It’ll be in mid-March.

The coming storm, by Charlie Stross. The world in 2025 might look a hell of a lot worse than the world in 2023. I’m hopeful but scared.

The two proposed amendments to the Constitution of Ireland are a ray of sunshine, though:

Which reminds me, it’s way too hard (1, 2) to amend the US Constitution. I think Jefferson had it about right (from a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816):

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and [incorrectly] deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched[…]
Each generation is as independent as the one preceding[…]. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness; consequently[…] a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years, should be provided[…]
This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law[…]; and this declaration can only be made by their majority.

The US Constitution was last amended 32 years ago, in 1992.

A cloudy day at Apple Park.
Between the main ring building and the camera is the entrance to Steve
Jobs Theater.
Because the walls of the theater entrance are entirely glass, it looks
like the entrance’s roof hovers above the main ring building like a
spaceship.
Numerous trees, bushes, and shrubs are visible. — Apple Park, March 2019

Soupault is an SSG built around extracting information from each page’s DOM. In that, it somewhat resembles my own SSG, philosophically anyway. (h/t Leah)

Where have all the websites gone? by Jason Velazquez (h/t Baldur Bjarnason)

From Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse by Joan Westenberg, also via Baldur:

In every garden, seasons of growth require seasons of care - cultivating, pruning, and even fallow periods to replenish the soil. May we embrace this fertility cycle of information - rather than seek to dominate and control it.

My ideal frontend interview, by Chen Hui Jing (h/t Karl)

Weird things engineers believe about Web development, by Brian.

As a kid, I was a huge Hanshin Tigers fan, Kitaru explained. Went to their games whenever they played in Tokyo. But if I sat in the Hanshin bleachers and spoke with a Tokyo dialect nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. Couldn’t be part of the community, y’know? So I figured, I gotta learn Kansai dialect, and I worked like a dog to do just that.

— The Breezy Kansai Dialect from Language Hat

Next time you’re looking for a pithy name for a command line utility, and with apologies to the monolith aliens: All these single-letter commands are yours — except r & w. Attempt no aliasing there. In addition to [a-qs-vx-z] the characters @, ^, =, and ‘,’ are available, as are all single characters in other writing systems, though they might not be easy for you to type.

Man, @ would have been a great name for a command-line Twitter client. Too bad the site got run into the ground by a jackass.

While I’m here, isn’t it weird how /usr/bin/yes exists but /usr/bin/no doesn’t? I suppose it’s just an alias away: alias no='yes n'

What’s in a name? I recently wrote up an explanation of mine—where it comes from, what it means, how I render it in other languages, etc.