SitePoint Weekly #13
This Issue Certified Politics-Free

🍓 The freshest resources for web developers, designers, and makers.

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Pointed Advice
Just published on SitePoint

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This Issue Certified Politics-Free
Your weekly tech digest

Every week we try to pull together a combination of news, workflows, tools, and tutorials to help you spend less time keeping up and more time sharpening your edge.

With the U.S. election count still underway and every outlet on the internet pivoting to politics for the week, I bet you're fatigued with the topic. And even if you're not, there are numerous sources of political media out there — I hear there are literally dozens!

There are a couple of other reasons to constrain our focus. Our plan was to move SitePoint Weekly to Tuesdays after I returned from a week of leave. Once Tuesday actually arrived, though, my son had a mountain biking accident, falling from a couple of meters in the air in such a fashion as to scare the hell out of us and require maxillofacial surgery. Thanks go to Simon Mackie, SitePoint's master of books and Premium content, for the correct vocabulary — everyone in the hospital calls these surgeons "plastics" the way you or I might refer to everyone down in "accounts" except that nobody from accounts specializes in the intersection of knives and faces (as far as I know).

(Since I started putting this issue together, my other son has broken a bone, and I've placed my daughter within a protective cocoon of bubble wrap.)

Anyway, I don't want to milk it — my son is at home recovering now and looking remarkably better by the day — but my curated link file lacks the kind of Volume foretold of in history's greatest shampoo advertisements.

Because we know plenty of readers may need a break or escape from election coverage, we've precluded such coverage here. And because we'd rather focus limited resources on creative, fun, inspiring links, we've gone a step further to give anything that's strongly political, partisan, or involves yelling loudly a miss — even on antitrust, one of our usual subjects. There are a few important stories about right-to-repair legislation and police-Amazon cahoots. But I said we'd avoid politics, not anything that might've been politicized by the pugnacious, or this would be a slim read indeed.

In any case: you're tired. I'm tired. The muck is somewhere that way. Any direction will get you there. Cool links for hackers, makers, and designers below.

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The Rundown
Technology news, society, and internet culture

Every time a new feat of machine learning impresses us, as with GPT-3, a chorus shouts back: but it can't take our jobs yet! — albeit with diminished confident gusto every time. 

AI pioneer Geoff Hinton says “deep learning is going to be able to do everything.” Also interesting is the brief discussion around symbolic versus operational models of cognition and Hinton's views on these.

When deep learning can do everything and we do lose our jobs, it doesn't necessarily need to be a social and economic doomsday, of course (we just need to get an inconvenient global revolution out of the way first, since we can all agree that our current leaders lack the vision or ability to give a crap required to get us there). Perhaps in the future we'll even develop self-identities independent of our economic output. Crazy concept. Someone get the chorus a copy of The Player of Games!

• Find out how deep neural networks are helping decipher how brains work.
• Not a fan of drills near your skull? What a coincidence, me too! But that doesn't mean you'll be able to use it as your excuse for practicing mindful connectivity in the future, because we now know that our veins could be a viable way to plug the human brain into a computer.
• Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence. And I thought I struggled to keep up with my text messages.
• The Starlink beta has outperformed most internet in the US.
• Astronomers trace mysterious space radio waves to a source within our galaxy.
• Scientists say we should treat artificial light like other forms of pollution.

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It feels like barely a news cycle has passed since Apple announced the Intel exodus. Now, we're staring a November 10 Apple event right in the face.

All signs point to the first Apple Silicon device announcements. Apple has called the event One More Thing, which sounds to me like the lovechild of Jobsian foreshadowing and a John Farnham tour (Australian readers will understand).

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Neighborhood Watch is out. Letting police use your Amazon Ring camera as part of its Internet-of-Shit-fueled surveillance dragnet is in.

Can we take a moment to appreciate just how openly Amazon progresses the dystopian capabilities of law enforcement and landlords alike while a fraction of the sentiment actually sticks on the brand compared to, say, Facebook?

• The latest in the wave of activity trying to break Amazon's grip on books and monopoly on audiobooks: 'This is revolutionary’: new online bookshop unites indies to rival Amazon.
• Here's a big win for individuals and for technologists in particular: Massachusetts just passed the world’s most advanced Right to Repair law.
• GitHub warns devs they will face a ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while leaving a cheeky hint as to how penalties can be skirted.
• Questions are being raised over privacy promises made around Google's reCAPTCHA service — is this data as separate from the rest of your online identity as the company has made it appear?

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• Take a look at 4 ways to run Kubernetes locally. We covered one method earlier in the year.
• The Sketch team took some time to explain why they're so committed to the native app. As much as I feel Sketch niched itself from a dominant start by refusing to go cross-platform, I appreciate the companies committed to building great native apps in a world of Electron. The Figma team came at this problem from an entirely different perspective when they rewrote Figma's TypeScript core in Rust a few years back. I use and enjoy both apps. 
• Speaking of, ox is an independent Rust text editor that runs in your terminal.
• Learn how to use Github Actions to deploy a Next.js website to AWS S3.
• Build a personal but multi-tenant web screenshotting service with Puppeteer and Vercel.
• Learn about the memory lifecycle, heap, stack and call stack in JavaScript.
• Understand your Python code with this open-source visualization tool.
• Chris Coyier talks about swapping GIFs for static images when prefers-reduced-motion is enabled.
• Learn how to bridge design and code with Figma's Variants.
• Stories is an extension that brings the Instagram Stories format to Visual Studio Code so you can easily explain your code to others.
• Build a native CSS masonry layout using CSS Grid with CSS Grid expert, former SitePoint editor, and current Smashing Magazine editor-in-chief Rachel Andrews.
• This tool helps you set up virtual environments for GitHub Actions.
• SuperAnnotate promises to be the fastest image annotation platform for training AI.
• Handshake wants to break the monopoly on major top level domains.
• Believe it or not, open-source iOS apps are a thing. Here's a collaborative list of them for those who'd like to get involved.

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Logic Flow
Computing, automation, productivity​, and tools for thought

The Linux ecosystem began to benefit from a renewed period of growth as the pandemic swung into force earlier this year. It's a legitimately great time to make the move over. Here are 5 reasons to use Linux in 2020.

SitePoint Head of Engineering Stuart Mitchell is a big fan of Pop!_OS, in particular for its auto-tiling window manager. And our sysadmin and master of the arcane Adam Bolte depends on the rock-solid stability of Debian. But if you're new to Linux, I imagine both would suggest starting your excursions with Pop! or something similar, like Ubuntu.

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Feeling guilty about your library of unread books? Have been for decades? That's one guilt you can put to bed, says Anne-Laure Le Cunff in Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books.

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Raspberry Pi's latest offering might remind you of some of the programmable computers of another era — it packs the whole computer into a keyboard.

• Here's a look at how the device, the Raspberry Pi 400, was designed.
• Ever need to turn a Roam page into PDF? Get a demo of the new RoamHacker extension feature that lets you do so on iPad and other operating systems.
• The latest update to popular Notion tool notion-enhancer, v0.10.0, adds tabs to the app experience — a long-requested addition.
• Spotify has added standalone streaming support to its Apple Watch app.
• New research shows that intermittent fasting's purported anticancer benefits are, in fact, quite real — fasting from dawn to sunset for four consecutive weeks induces anticancer serum proteome response and improves metabolic syndrome.
• Is this the end of the repairable iPhone? I'm always a little surprised that Apple has found something left to glue down in these things. Will it even be possible to tell where the iPhone 13 chassis ends and its other components begin?
• Control your Philips Hue lights on Ubuntu with this GNOME Extension.
• Finally, a script to remove the astonishingly large collection of Windows 10 bloatware.

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The Roadmap
Product, strategy, Future of Work, and the creator economy

• V.One reckons it's the no-code platform that'll make building logic-driven apps as easy as using Canva.
• Tara AI is a simple sprint management tool designed for modern teams. Tara's team says its core functionality will remain free without limitations because it wants teams to have an alternative to ossified turn-of-the-century tools like JIRA, with future monetization coming from genuinely optional premium features like automation. That's an appealing pitch, given how little products like JIRA have changed in response to years of developer dissatisfaction. Let us know if you take Tara for a spin, and whether it lives up to the hype.
• Have you been looking into the growing ecosystem of Google Analytics alternatives that offer users more privacy and operators more control? One developer talks about the process of replacing Google Analytics with a private, open-source, self-hosted alternative.

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The Shutdown
A little something for later

• Physicists 3D-printed this microscopic USS Voyager replica that can propel itself through liquid. A well-considered selection, given Voyager's canon adventures in aquatic space.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed again until December 10th — but it is still coming. Prepare yourself over the next month with all the gameplay videos, trailers, and other information available.
• Or if that's not your thing, you can always while away the final months of 2020 by engorging yourself on Age of Empires 4 information. I kind of pass out from the nostalgia every time I remember this is being built.
• You need a weather terminal, or you don't, but either way this could be your charitable opportunity to provide an unused, vintage Atari with its legacy.​

[i3/Polybar] Like in the Movies

Our favorite setup this week is this i3/Polybar rice named Like in the Movies. So many Linux desktop customizations go for the traditional hacker look, but so few pull it off in a way that isn't a little embarrassing. This smooth mover could be your daily driver, at least for a period of time. 

• [i3/Polybar] Like in the Movies
• Dotfiles and wallpaper

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Connect with the community

That's it for this week's issue. We'll see you in the next one — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities:

• the SitePoint forums
• our Discord server
• read new articles
• or via Twitter

Want to recommend SitePoint Weekly to a friend? Here's a link to our newsletter sign-up page, where they can sign up to receive new issues once a week.

Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor