Alex Russell

Platforms are competitions, and the web is losing. We can do simple, straightforward things to combat that decline...but contemporary frontend isn't doing those things. Why not? A consolidated thread from last week: infrequently.org/2024/10/platform…

Fucking weasels.

They even had the Historical Documents to consult! imdb.com/title/tt0089886/

If you needed a win as badly as I have lately, mark this one down: CSS-Tricks is returning as an independent publication. Spread the word. wil.to/posts/taking...

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

it feels truly insane that it’s not

Amazing news, and if you can afford to, join me in becoming a member of the site. The web needs those of us who have benefited from it so much to give a little back:

The political media is visibly chafing at the current situation, where Republicans are glaringly awful, fucking everything up, running deviant candidates everyone hates, and Dems are just being normal & winning. The force is out of balance. They are viscerally eager to go after Dems about something.

What @jamellebouie.net said: youtu.be/NbGIpBRaVGI

It's insane that the campaign against El-Sayed is basically that he has some secret relationship with the people that the president's family has a secret relationship with.

Oh so a country *can* choose not to make the same mistake twice

My reporting on the student movement in Serbia last summer. They kept at it, amazingly, for two years. And they won. snyder.substack.com/p/youth-prot...

It's *super weird* how a good night for democracies anywhere in the world is always a bad night for Vlad and Donny, personally and specifically.

The core of everything is corruption. The cruelty, the fascism, the destruction of democracy and reality itself, it's all a means of self-enrichment and empowerment of a class of people that do not give two shits whether we live or die if it means stuffing their pockets. It starts there and expands

Congratulations Serbia 🇷🇸

I *may* have over-engineered this shadow designer just a touch but gawwwddamn, she pretty. #Lumen for #CSS → lumen.renderg.host

If you had told me at any point in Lula's 1st or 2nd term not only that I would be rooting for him in the future ... but also that I'd be rooting for his *4th* term, when he's *80*, after multiple corruption convictions... and that I would think it was of *urgent global importance* for him to win...

And it was actually a prisoner exchange in which we gave them an actual Russian criminal and we also gave them diplomatic cover in a war of aggression — not only morally shameful and personally humiliating but as a negotiation absolutely laughably unequal.

Me: "It cannot be stated often enough or vociferously enough: the Trump Administration is helping Russia to conquer Ukraine. The United States of America has taken the side of an aggressor against its innocent victim. We are helping our actual enemies" www.aei.org/foreign-and-...

Seems like the Trump White House agrees with everyone who says the Trump White House had committed countless crimes

This is a lawless and dangerous regime and precisely the reason that the Founders created the power of impeachment and removal.

Overall, we are seeing some very odd deal talks that are supposedly a part of ending the war in Ukraine. But in fact evidence shows these deals are structured (in the most recent case secretly until now) to financially benefit Russia or business partners of the Trump and Witkoff families.

Courts are weak. The only reason they have had the success they have in limiting government abuses is because we’ve had leaders who comply in the face of public pressure. Not so today.

Oh the games Cupertino plays. Being made to look fools on a loop ain't great for regulators, nevermind the market, and maybe the UK noticed? Fingers crossed: brucelawson.co.uk/2026/on-cmas-pro… /by @brucel.bsky.social

TRUMP: We gave nothing in exchange for Stephen. We never give anything in exchange for hostages. TRUMP LITERALLY MOMENTS LATER: If I implemented sanctions on Russia, Steven wouldn't be coming out right now.

Money in politics is never victimless: newrepublic.com/article/2163...

“When I look round the boardroom at the other board members Palantir has recently also recruited from the House of Lords – notably Lord Vader and Lord Voldemort – I don’t have any sense that these people are evil,” said Watson. From the new Private Eye, out now.

See also: dam.stanford.edu/memory-price...

"In 2022, security researcher Felix Krause showed that Instagram and Facebook’s in-app browsers injected JavaScript into the pages users visited". What if links to web pages simply opened in your default browser on a device that you own. The browser *you* chose and installed, because you trust it?

that's real weird because there were Maine Indivisible groups in your office every single day during the Kavanaugh confirmation repeatedly telling you he was going to do exactly that

emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com

He should not be allowed to have any government contracts--he is operating like a rogue state.

"A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales Americans told themselves like ghost stories... "But this alliance now exists." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

NEW: Ukrainian officials continue to report disruptions to US assistance to Ukraine. Read the full update: isw.pub/UkrWar101926 (1/5)

No surprise here.

I'm not sure how much more blatant it can get that these guys are looting the federal government and then pointing over there and saying "look what THOSE BLACK PEOPLE ARE GETTING AWAY WITH!!!" bsky.app/profile/atru...

Actually, you know what? Here's a gift link for that one.

4/ Trump cut a deal with Kazakhstan to make his sons rich off a mining deal. And then he approved $1.6 billion - BILLION - in taxpayer financing to further help his sons. Like wild, nuclear grade self enrichment. Missed that one, JD? Kazakhstan!!

Ted Cruz's former intern and organizer for the largest conservative youth summit in Texas has just confirmed he voted for James Talarico.

I have been trying to think of what Trump’s hideous “ballroom” project reminds me of — and I finally have it — it is Nicolai Ceausescu’s infamous and unfinished House of the People in communist Romania, which also brought awfulness to a lovely downtown.

Extremely sound mickryan.substack.com/p/what-has-u...

Anyway I think it's important to consider this kind of thing in light of the general expert consensus that it's not that young people are avoiding adult thinking, it's that young people are facing very difficult times. I think YA pretty closely tracks that in its trends. www.bbc.com/news/article...

The details are now public, as of two hours ago. bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi... The secret P-384 keys for these intermediate CAs are all zeros except the last 8 bits. All not-updated software can be MITM'ed now. IOT boxes that can't or don't update are now trivially MITM'able forever.

A bitter lesson of frontend's lost decade is that no individual can fix what an entire culture is dedicated to breaking. There is no singular, virtuous person in a large org that can wield evidence effectively in the face of a tradition that rejects the scientific method.

The Trump regime’s window to get Russia a victory in Ukraine without Congress exposing the corrupt personal payments Trump and Co. will get from Russia if they pull it off is down to three months. Hence the big push now.