Since gradient.horse went online in January 2026, six months have passed, and more than 600 000 horses (and non-horses) were drawn. There are now more horses on gradient.horse than in the wild. The image model I trained to filter out vandalism works very well, but it also hides a lot of ingenious drawings. You could…
Anthropic is silently A/B testing Claude Code's plan mode on paying users. This isn't a consumer app. Stop treating it like one.
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica: Apple says that its goal […]
A blog about software craft and quality
Improving on a timeless recipe
Rebuilding Firefox.com with Mozilla and Lincoln Loop on modern, native CSS with no pre-processors, and what that means for design systems today.
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
A streamable 4D gaussian splat format with tunable error bounds. 16–58× smaller than raw; streams and seeks over plain HTTP Range requests.
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
A parallax effect built entirely in CSS with scroll-driven animations, no scroll listeners required.
I spent too much time looking at too many colo(u)rs to try and optimise them for csskit. Here are some interesting findings.
(I don't plan on doing lots more of these Windows UI blog posts. I just happened to come across this and found it interesting. Besides, it's super hot where I live and I can't do anything meaningful anyway, so here we go.)
An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document…
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
We trained an MLP that predicts 58 body shape parameters from 8 questionnaire inputs. The trick: a differentiable physics loss. Mass accuracy: 0.3 kg mean vs 3.9 kg for Ridge. No GPU at inference.
Friends, this post has been in the making for maybe, 20 years.
Do you notice a difference? The image on the right appears “yellower” than the image on the left, which looks more goldenrod by comparison.
Hi! Long time no see, huh? :) It’s been three years since my last State of the Windows article, which was about the inconsistencies in the Windows 11 user experience. Since then, Microsoft (a…
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
An interactive explaination of how QR codes work and techniques for rendering artistic QR codes
The truly No JavaScript web component.
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
This Spectrimage palette extractor started as a sidecar to image color analysis, but grew into its own feature.
A blog about software craft and quality
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy , to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In…
In early December 2023, I wrote a drawing program called WigglyPaint and published it on Itch.io.
We have been sold a lie that icons are the universal language of the modern interface.
(TL;DR: this is a blog post about the process of writing my guide to SDF fonts .)
