Notes
Short write-ups, posted as I go.
Mostly bugs that taught me something. These are rough by design: I write them once and move on. The polished version of an idea ends up in the guides.
Echo chambers are a product people want
Conversation runs two objectives at once — information and cohesion — and most rooms weight cohesion higher. What that costs the truth-seeker, and what to do instead.
EvergreenHelp that helps
Help given unasked creates debt only in your own ledger. On unrequested contracts, fake help, and why the best help is infrastructure.
EvergreenThe undocumented protocol
Social convention is a protocol, the protocol is undocumented, and if you weren't born with a working implementation, the answer is reverse engineering.
EvergreenYou were never too much. You were uncompressed.
The problem is not your output. The problem is where you're sending it — a signal-processing view of being 'a lot'.
EvergreenA date string is not an instant
Field notes published a day early for everyone west of Greenwich.
Rough noteClosing a script tag by accident
JSON.stringify does not escape angle brackets, and JSON-LD lives inside a script tag.
Rough noteFour charts fighting over one gradient id
Sixteen SVG elements shared four ids. The page looked fine, which was the problem.
Rough noteStarting the field notes
Why short notes live separately from the long guides.
Rough noteThe skip link that vanished
A rewrite dropped the skip-to-content link, and no test noticed for months.
Rough note