Left Align (formerly Notletter): First Issue!
On the subject of Yale students and horny techbros
Why did I get this?
If this is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed to my newsletter Notletter. I’m changing the name to Left Align, because I tried to write this post without hating on tech CEOs and it didn’t work. If you don’t like this content, there’s an unsubscribe button at the bottom somewhere. You won’t hurt my feelings. It’s okay.
Why a newsletter?
I’d like a place where I can create content that’s a bit more personal and direct than Twitter, and also as a backup for when I eventually get banned for bullying tech CEOs. So here’s Left Align. I’ll use this space to post my best tweets in case you missed them, interesting tech content that I’ve scavenged for, and whatever else I feel like sharing. I’m aiming to do this fortnightly, or maybe even weekly if I can find enough content.
I’m hosting this on Substack since Mailchimp was too bloated. I’m not actually planning on putting any of this behind a paywall. I’ll definitely try to solicit donations though.
Anyway, the tweets
I haven't made any good tech tweets lately because I've been too busy posting about anarchism. Sorry everyone. I did find this exceptionally terrible Workplace StackExchange post though.
The Yale School of Art lets students change the HTML
This one's pretty self-explanatory. You can check out the current website here. I found this mentioned in Garbage Day, which is another good newsletter about why the internet was a mistake.
For anyone who's been around on the internet long enough, the idea of a university website allowing any student to freely edit it is mortifying. I've clicked enough links on 4chan /b/ to know the full extent of college student depravity. But the website actually seems to be extremely tame.
The only thing interesting is just how bad these art students are at HTML. Or how amazing they are, depending on how you look at it. The entire site is just tiling gifs and weird gradients. I suppose in the modern world of hero images and painstakingly designed grids, the Yale School of Art truly is a form of avant-garde.
I decided to check out the HTML code itself, because why not, and it seems like the entire thing is just div hell and malformed tags. Bless.
Are the techbros okay?
Every now and then, I look at r/programmerhumor. I don't do this because I want to. I'm compelled by some other force, like how characters in horror movies put their face in the hole even though it obviously has demons in it. This is one of those demons:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ii7y5l/my_favorite_js_framework_penisjs/
Penis.js lets you write comparisons so that they look like if(B===D). That's all it does. Someone wrote this, and a lot of other someones think it's funny.
Should we burn down every Javascript library and start over? Probably, but then we’d lose Elevator.js.
Someone's brother wrote a JS app from jail
Here's the post. Please read it. You can check out the app on codepen here.
This bit stands out to me:
We the family send him javascript and html books - He studies them and writes programs in pen and paper - He calls me so I input what he wrote on my computer and we debug it live via a phone call, he has to imagine the program in his head.
Wow. Well, I'm certainly going to feel much worse about myself next time I have to Google the syntax for if statements in Python.
If you're interested, Angela Davis has written an incredible book on the subject of prison abolition which you can check out for free.
Gay Linux Penguins
Gay Linux penguins.
I really don’t like the Elon Musk brain chip
I’m going to be honest here. I’m not a fan of the Elon Musk brain chip. I’m not a fan of most brain chips in general. While I wouldn’t mind having Peaky Blinders beamed directly into my neurons, I don’t think that a for-profit or government entity could ever create an ethical brain chip. Worker-owned cooperative brain chips are still pretty far into the future, so as far as “fitbits in your skull” go it’s going to have to be a no from me.
I thought that everyone else felt the same, but apparently 30% of the internet is fine with having the dude who owns child labor mines put an IED in their brain. Cool.
Anyway, here’s a good video on Elon Musk.
Let’s talk about HTML in emails
Before I gave up and just opted for Substack instead, I tried to set up the newsletter more manually. This is how I learned that HTML in emails hasn’t progressed since the 1990s. You have to nest tables within tables within tables to get it looking alright. There’s frameworks that help with this, but all they really do is give you an editor to write normal code which then gets converted into - you guessed it - tables.
There’s no good reason why it should be this way, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. But trying to write tables reminded me of how much more exciting and rewarding coding felt back in the day. Even something as simple as making a welcome page with some centered images felt like a huge achievement. Nowadays, I copy and paste some boilerplate and then I have a website. It doesn’t feel the same. I think maybe modern websites just need more Neopets.
Some good tweets
What I'm up to
I'm writing a tech comedy book. Initially it was meant to be half informative and half funny, but partway through I realized that I'm actually very terrible at writing educational content. So I'm going to go back and replace all the informative bits with jokes instead. Essentially, this will be a 100 page shitpost.
I don't know when it'll be done, because it turns out that writing a book is actually really hard. I'm still in the rough draft phase so none of it is fit for human consumption yet, but I'll post updates and snippets here eventually.
That's all for now. Bye, and thanks for subscribing!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti
Tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/katmaddox
Any typos in the above post are caused by bit flips and are not my fault.