Alex Russell

I'm seeing the active de-skilling happen in corners that were somewhat insulated from previous episodes of "yolo, what is an engineering?" (e.g., widescale adoption of React), but it's much more intense in the communities that already decided that evidence isn't an epistemic requirement.

@glyph@mastodon.social

It's 2026, so we've all been awash in even more cursed headlines for a decade, but this is a doozy. Sandberg *and* Nick Clegg ? Their deep expertise in [ checks notes ] ad sales and soporific untruths will surely come in handy to a [ double checks ] data centre firm:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-09/nscale-raises-2-billion-and-adds-sandberg-clegg-to-board

Sure would be a bad time for the US to have dropped the ball on renewables and electric vehicles.

https://www.investing.com/commodities/crude-oil-streaming-chart

Back when I was misspending my youth trying to make DHTML do unnatural things, I would have *killed* for the sorts of tools and documentation we have now; including, but not limited to, the source code comments of the hottest browser paths:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:third_party/blink/renderer/core/css/invalidation/pending_invalidations.h

Just got word from @patrickbrosset@mas.to that the Edge Top Developer Needs dashboard has been updated for 2026:

https://microsoftedge.github.io/TopDeveloperNeeds/

This follows from the launch of Interop '26, and plugs gaps the selection process leaves due to silent, unaccountable vetoes.

It goes without saying that this shouldn't be necessary. No web developer should have to guess who is on their side, and who demands secrecy while holding the web back. @owa@mastodon.social's 2024 piece remains sadly relevant:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/interop-2025-must-drop-secret-vetos/

UK friends! Today (yes, today, Monday March 2nd) is the last day to submit comment to the CMA regarding their plan to capitulate to Apple & Google (booo!), prolonging harm to UK businesses and consumers, despite new powers that would let the CMA rein it in. @owa@mastodon.social has details and how to file comment:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-interoperability-commitments-to-the-uk-cma-promise-nothing/

For background on why all of this matters, see OWA Director Alex Moore's recent appearance on the @redmonk@mastodon.social podcast:

https://youtu.be/EOT0w7EwkVI?si=7Q44LWe16aUijodQ

/cc @pluralistic@mamot.fr

me for the last decade: "I sure hope rich techies take the plight of folks who have fewer system resources more seriously"

2026: [ monkey paw curls ]

If you're a technologist in the US, I think it's worth sitting with the reality that the government's current abuses against the population are playing out almost every single *"if we allow databases of X, bad thing Y will be possible"* warning. Performative privacy protections were never enough; we have to make them structural (in law), actionable (right-of-action for individuals), and national. Nothing else will do.

Regulators can take many lessons from the Grok/Twitter undressing scandal, but one of the most important is that Apple and Google are gaslighting when they claim store monopolies are necessary to protect us. Nothing could be further from the truth: https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

How broken is today's frontend culture? @fugueish@wandering.shop points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the P75 page is larger than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM: https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight

I meet web developers who cannot accept that most smartphones in the world, and even in the US, are not iPhones. And that keeps them from understanding that the "i" in "iPhone" stands for "inequality":