Cool Links Vol. 9: March, 2025

Hey there! Autumn is here in Brazil and the leaves have started to go yellow, which means it's my favorite season of the year! Mainly because it's neither too hot nor too cold, but also because it's very pretty.

I've prepped a selection of links to read through while you drink your coffee, tea, or whatever's your choice of beverage. The last one is a quite long video, but I highly recommend watching it!

Fun

It is as if you were on your phone

pretend to be on your phone so that you pass as human, but actually do essentially nothing instead

Do you feel pressured to be on your phone all the time, so you can pass as a human? This neat web app allows you to do just that, but while doing absolutely nothing instead.

(honestly, it's a better use of your phone than scrolling through social media...)

Dev

The select element can now be customized with CSS 🎉

Customizing <select> elements is something every web developer has had to do, probably. And the thing about that is that... you really can't customize it. Or couldn't, until now.

Having to implement a custom look on this field was always, to me, the perfect definition of "reinventing the wheel". You gotta pick up this element that works reliably, is accessible, natively supported by all browsers, and users have been using for 30+ years, and then... build it from scratch, with JavaScript (which already kills the accessibility for some people).

Now, as of Chromium 135, you can finally customize them as you always expected you could! This will probably take a while to get to Safari and Firefox, but here's the cool thing: if those browsers don't support this new thing, the <select> will just look like a normal field and work just as well. A perfect example of progressive enhancement!

CSS Relative Colors, by Ahmad Shadeed

Ahmad’s blog has been featured here a few times already, and here’s another gem! A fully interactive, well-written and just a plain joy to read article explaining different strategies to handle colors in CSS, focusing on all those little color variations we need to handle when building something.

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox, by Nikita Prokopov

In times where software “needs” to stand out rather than be familiar, we lose our heroes. Rest in peace, square checkboxes!

patch-package on npm

Sooo many times I’ve had to debug something in a npm package dependency of a project I’m working on, only to realize I need to change some of the code to make it work.

That’s usually a pain though, since you either have to open a pull request with a fix and wait for it to be merged, or setup your own fork of the package and host it somewhere.

This package aims to avoid that. It applies patches to other packages in your project, so you don’t have to go through the process of setting up a fork.

Tech

The iPad’s “Sweet” Solution, by Federico Viticci

Really nice article that pretty much sums up the iPad situation: it is interesting hardware but that has pretty much no software that showcases what it does best.

The best iPad apps are... web apps. And the iPad's only available browser being Safari doesn't make things better.

Deep Reads (or watch, in this case)

Algorithms are breaking how we think, by Technology Connections

This is an incredibly well-articulated rant about how recommendation algorithms are changing how our brains work. Automation is good for us and it’s everywhere, but what about when thinking, the very thing that makes us human, starts being automated?

Letting recommendation algorithms (that, as we all know, prioritize revenue) decide the information we get, the tone of that information, and the context of every social interaction is pretty much giving up on our autonomy.

The entire video is worth watching, but this part about context collapse was one of the most interesting bits. It makes perfect sense, but I had never thought of it this way:

Algorithmic feeds on social media are unfortunately quite good at fostering something known as context collapse. To understand this, imagine you’re dining in a restaurant and you’re close enough to a table of people to hear snippets of their conversation. You don’t know who any of the people at that table are, but if you manage to overhear them talk about something you’re really interested in, you might feel tempted to join their conversation. But in the context of a restaurant setting, that’s considered very rude, so it rarely ever happens.

On social media, though, the same kinds of quasi-private conversations between parties who know each other are happening all the time, but since the platform is just one big space and it might decide to put that conversation in front of random people, that social boundary of etiquette which is normally respected is just not there. And lots of conflicts happen as a result.

A really common one you might accidentally step into on social media happens when you stumble across a conversation among friends making sarcastic jokes with each other, but since you don’t know who those people are, you don’t have the context you need to recognize they’re joking. And so, if you reply with a serious critique, well, that’s a social misfire which some will react poorly to.

And that’s a pretty mild form of context collapse. It can be much, much worse when people want to discuss things like politics. And unless we realize recommendation algorithms are what’s fostering these reactionary conflicts, they’re going to continue so long as we use platforms in the ways that we do. It's for all these reasons that I believe algorithmic complacency is creating a crisis of both curiosity and human connection.

Wrapping up

Thanks for tuning in another month, and I hope to see (write to? Be read by?) you again next month!