Issues › Section
8 posts across all issues
Issue #811 · Sep 25, 2026
Most of the blur people credit to CRTs came from cheap PAL and NTSC TVs fed by RF or composite signals. On a good RGB monitor, pixels stayed plainly visible. Old pixel art looked good because artists used dithering, anti-aliasing and careful palettes. Modern pixel art that skips those techniques looks blockier than the originals ever did.
Issue #810 · Sep 18, 2026
Jo Sprague, a front-end developer who rebuilt Firefox.com with Mozilla and Lincoln Loop, says native CSS can now carry a full design system. The team shipped 70+ components and 25 page templates with no preprocessor syntax. Sprague calls it the CSS Zen Garden promise, finally met in production.
Issue #810 · Sep 18, 2026
About twenty properly sampled visual preference surveys since the 1990s found that most people prefer traditional buildings to modernist ones. Every survey found over 60 percent for traditional, and many found over 85. The preference holds across age, gender, politics and class. Architects and other experts are the one group whose taste often runs the other way.
Issue #808 · Sep 4, 2026
Being keyboard-driven is a weak argument for building TUIs instead of GUIs. Nothing stops a GUI from being fully usable by keyboard. Platform guidelines already ask for it. So a GUI that can't be driven from the keyboard shows a missing effort by its developer.
Issue #808 · Sep 4, 2026
Matt Dailey, founder of Ref, argues that AI-generated product design looks the same everywhere. He blames agents that pile on extra elements, and teams that spot-fix complaints one at a time. His fix is to write down the design constraints first and cut whatever the agent adds that isn't needed. He then iterates on several variants in a real design tool before touching the codebase.
Issue #808 · Sep 4, 2026
Fully justified monospace text looks bad because spaces can't be split evenly and hyphens stand out. In the late 1990s, rs1n avoided both in a Super Metroid guide by picking words so every line ended exactly at the margin. He did it by hand, for 17,000 words.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Reverse engineering shows that Windows Paint and Photos stamp every AI image they generate with an invisible pixel watermark. That includes images made by a local model on the device. The watermark carries a unique ID that Microsoft's servers issue for each generation when they moderate the prompt. Turning off the visible Copilot watermark does not remove it. Microsoft's disclosures never mention the ID.
Issue #806 · Aug 21, 2026
IKEA names its products with real Swedish words chosen by category, such as place names for sofas and men's names for bookshelves. Each name must pass a check for bad meanings in other languages. The company names 2,000 to 3,000 new products a year.