Pointers (February 2024)

Web highlights from the hardest-to-spell month:

• A remembrance of Tom Dowdy, an Apple engineer who left his mark both figuratively and literally.
• “Sooner or later, it becomes your turn to complicate the lives of others.” Part two of The Digital Anitquarian’s series on persistent online multiplayer games. Contains the inspired multiway pun “MUDders of invention.”
• “Wherever you get your podcasts” sounds a bit silly, as if it’s a statement of resignation in the face of the fact that, while you might be listening to podcasts through Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you could also be listening through Pocket Casts, Overcast, or, like, whatever, man. And while the myriad of podcast client options leads to some amusingly vague calls to action, Anil Dash argues it’s also evidence that podcasts are a rare and beautiful decentralized media success story.
• Jay Conrod’s post on V8 object representation shows how V8 stores user-defined data structures compactly in spite of JavaScript’s pervasive dynamism. Chase it with Michael Stanton’s “V8 and How It Listens to You.”
• As a user, I always felt a bit mystified by Bezier curves. Just what the hell am I doing when I’m dragging these control points around? Jason Davies demystifies it in four simple animations.
• “Okay, Color Spaces” nicely unjumbles the alphabet soup of color spaces.
• Not seeing the lines, but seeing the lines moving.