This Wednesday (the 9th) we’re celebrating CSS Naked Day. You see, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is basically the “clothes” of a website — a super simple yet powerful language for styling web pages. Take a look at ours.
I thought I’d jump in on the fun! Just for today. Tomorrow (the 10th) the site will be back to normal.
Who needs Photoshop for simple things? The free website Curved Text Generator does what its name suggests: create curved texts. There are two creation modes, a free draw one and other with the “pen”, in which points and curvatures are spread on the canvas as if they were coordinates. And, of course, some customization options, such as font family and size, colors, and spacing.
WordPress is switching from three major releases a year to just one. This new cadence kicks in for 2025 — with WordPress 6.8, scheduled for next Tuesday (April 15th), set to be the only release for the year.
The change was announced during an online meeting with core contributors on March 27th, as reported by The Repository. Some of the contributors who attended the meeting shared their frustration, feeling that Matt Mullenweg, the project’s lead, had already made up his mind to slow the release cadence ahead of the discussion.
Earlier this month, Automattic let go of 16% of its workforce — about 280 folks spread across 90 countries.
It’s worth noting that the cascade of bad news for WordPress seems to have started when Matt impulsively got himself and Automattic tangled in a legal battle with WP Engine over… well, who knows what exactly.
368 Chickens is a logic game, like “tie three equals together to eliminate them”, but with an end: the goal is to rescue… 368 chickens. It’s harder than it seems. Cool detail: the site saves the state of the match, that is, you can close the tab, come back later and continue from where you left off.
It’s not new to me to feel uneasy when I find out some software I use has just gone through a “major update.”
Take the case of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS.
On March 26th, a major update — version 3.0.0 — was released, which the developers themselves dubbed as “😵💫The ‘Will Someone Please Explain To Me What Is Going On’ release 🤷”. Not a great sign. According to the changelog, it was based on a fork that’s quite different from the previous stable version it replaced.
I don’t follow the development of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS, so I got a bit of a shock when I turned on the TV and saw this update. It’s, well… different. The elements are all crammed on the screen, the exposed filters are way too distracting (and the “not played” filter is never remembered), and overall, it just looks off — subjective, I know.
By the way, I found out today that the old app was re-released on the Roku store as Jellyfin Legacy on April 1st. What a relief to go back to the old UI! The reason for keeping it available is that version 3.0.0 doesn’t work with older versions of the Jellyfin Server (10.7 and below). I couldn’t help but wonder if someone who’s been running a three years old outdated Jellyfin Server version will have the foresight to check the project’s repository when faced with an incompatible Roku OS app update, only to eventually discover that there’s a new — actually, the old — app available for download.
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Back in the day, I used to get excited about “major updates.” “Ooh, check out those Windows 7 visual effects!” “App XYZ is now easier to use!” and so on.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed. I tend to think that’s not really the case. There was a lot of room for improvement back then, and developers and designers, alongside us users, were all learning how to navigate new digital interfaces for a wide range of everyday activities. Today, it feels like most UI and UX changes are done for their own sake with little reasoning or obvious benefit to the end user.
Apple has been on this trend for a while now; the Settings apps debuting in macOS 13 Ventura, in 2022, was the pinnacle (so far) of this dumb, even hostile, trend. (Here’s a good analysis.) The possibility of a complete system overhaul this September, as the rumor mill suggests, already fills me with a huge sense of dread.
It’s interesting how this issue affects both proprietary software (like Apple’s) and open-sourced ones (like Jellyfin), though it feels like it happens more often with proprietary/closed software.
Is it too much to ask that they don’t mess with what isn’t broken? Or — even better — that they favor iterative improvements over abrupt changes?
With progress on large language models (LLMs) stalling, techbros in the industry have had to come up with new ways to signal progress and keep billions of investors’ dollars flowing while “artificial general intelligence” (sic) remains nowhere in sight.
This led to the emergence of nonsense such as the new “magic” version of ChatGPT that’s supposedly great at “creative writing,” autonomous “agents,” and more models that can “think” or “reason.” (All in quotes because these simulations are, at best, mediocre and often non-functional.)
Amid the parade of new applications for generative AI, “vibe coding” emerged — a term coined in February by Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI.
In broad terms, vibe coding is a complete abstraction of software development. Instead of writing… code, the developer writes prompts in natural language to an AI, describing the software it hopes to achieve. The AI then spits out code which, if it doesn’t meet expectations, is reworked in the same way: with more natural language instructions given to the AI. In this setup, the developer essentially becomes a guesser. In the end — and with some luck — the session wraps up with a working application.
Programming is a powerful skill, even outside contexts like startups and world-changing ideas.
Does your phone run Android? If so, you might have noticed a new app called SafetyCore. Announced by Google in October 2024, the company has been rolling it out recently (at least here, in Brazil).
SafetyCore is designed for devices running Android 9 or later, takes up about 2 GB of storage, and according to Google “provides common infrastructure that apps can use to protect users from unwanted content.” The documentation also notes that “the classification of content runs exclusively on your device and the results aren’t shared with Google.”
Almost no one reads these docs or even warnings, alerts of an app. What definitely catches your eye is a new icon among your apps that seems to appear overnight. Is SafetyCore something to worry about?
It’s published on the Play Store and, like any other app over there, it gets ratings and comments. Its average rating is 3.5, with the highest (5) receiving the most votes overall and the lowest (1) not being insignificant in number. One standout negative comment sums up the problem (in Portuguese, here translated):
“The app installed on its own and when I tried to open it, it just showed the app info. I’m not sure if it’s legitimate or not, and that worries me and many other consumers, breaking our trust in the security of the operating system. A quick question: if the app is legitimate, is it supposed to have an icon and do something, or is it supposed to be hidden? Like, for example, Google Play Services.”
If I had to sum the issue up even more, I’d say that the way SafetyCore was released is an example of a lack of transparency and a disregard for user autonomy. No matter how good Google’s intentions may be — which, judging by the history of big tech, is far from a guarantee — this isn’t the right approach.
Apple isn’t off the hook either. At the end of December 2024, someone noticed a new option in Apple Photos: “Enhanced Visual Search,” on by default. It identifies the location of photos even when there are no geo location in the metadata, by recognizing landmarks in the images. The documentation explains that it “works without sending your photos or videos to Apple and without Apple learning about the information in those photos or videos.”
In both cases, trust is lost when features like these are enabled quietly, without giving users the option to opt-out — a practice that remind what malicious parties would adopt if their intention were installing malware on millions, even billions, of devices.
What’s frustrating is that these are promising features that seem like good ideas. Scanning for unwanted or malicious content on your device without sending data to Google’s cloud? A real step forward, if true. Improving photo search without handing over your images to a big tech company? Sounds great.
However, note that both promises are extremely difficult to verify since all the code is closed source. That alone is a huge red flag. Enabling these features by default without any notice only worsens the situation.
I’ve been using the my work as a tech writer as an excuse to dive into some unproductive obsessions. And when I say “obsessions,” I mean it in a pretty serious, almost clinical way.
It’s not just my work’s fault, I think. My “information diet” — reading blogs who obsess over details like which app to use for this or that, watching YouTube channels that scrutinize phone models in such detail that a normal person wouldn’t notice the difference from the last five iterations etc. — pretty much created an alternative reality that initially seemed appealing but eventually turned suffocating.
I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about where to host my files and emails, looking into FOSS alternatives to apps that I already have and that work perfectly fine for me, keeping up with and testing new apps that promise to be better than the ones I currently use and enjoy.
The biggest and most recent manifestation of this obsession was trading my trusted iPhone SE for an Android phone.
Switching phones isn’t just… switching phones. Even though I’m getting along fine with Android, the switch has led to even more time spent on crazy excursions in search of things that, strictly speaking, I don’t really need. It’s fun, but it’s a bottomless time sink (which I think is a waste).
In a way, indulging in this feels like eating fast food: enjoyable in the moment, yet leaving you with indigestion later and proving dangerous in the long run.
To make matters worse, the Android phone I bought is huge and heavy. Having it in my pocket is annoying, my hands ache when I try to type even a slightly lengthy message, and there’s no comfortable way to hold it for reading.
I guess I needed to make that impulse decision to try and curb the obsession. It’s kind of like a drunk taking one last swig before committing to sobriety, you know? I think it worked, because I’m having a major hangover after having a blast setting Android up exactly the way I wanted. Even so, I’m going to abort the migration — not so much because of Android, which I actually found pretty cool, but more because I miss the human hands-compatible size of the iPhone.
All of this sounds pathetic, almost comical — or tragicomic, really; it affects both me and my work. If my goal in writing about tech is to achieve a healthy relationship with technology as much as possible, I need to take a step back and rethink some things.
The launch of Tapestry in early February has solidified a new category of apps — ones that attempt to create a unified timeline from different sources that, by their very nature, are like oil and water.
Tapestry joins a handful of other recent apps1 — Feeeed, the new Reeder, and Flipboard’s Surf — in tackling the main issue of decentralized social platforms, which is… well, decentralization itself.
The idea is pretty cool: it doesn’t matter if the people you follow are on Bluesky or Mastodon. With one of these timeline apps, you can keep up with them all at once on a single interface. It’s like centralizing the new social internet, but it’s done at the individual level rather than the platform level.
From the obvious to the outrageous, the list of concerns about artificial intelligence has grown long since late 2022, when ChatGPT took the title of “technology of the future” from the metaverse or NFTs.
I’ve been thinking a lot about one of these concerns: the excessive use of energy and water needed to satisfy the insatiable thirst of big techs and startups for more money.
What is the environmental cost of outsourcing thankless tasks to ChatGPT, like writing reports that no one reads or generating a happy birthday image for that aunt you haven’t spoken to in six years, in the family group chat?
Perhaps the most popular metric for this dilemma of the 2020s is the 500 ml water bottle for every ~50 questions to ChatGPT.
Is that a lot? A little? Is the trade-off worth it? As with everything in life, the answer is: “it depends.”
