New pattern in “optimistic/polite UI” - when an editor reach out to meet your cursor halfway 🤝

Here it is, the longest piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written, CENTURY-SCALE STORAGE. The kind folks at lil (library innovation lab) let me investigate the present and future of digital storage, how we might store and remember our most treasured cultural objects over the long-term (LINK BELOW)

I'm looking forward to learning about history, networks, and open-source development at our first 2025 #dataviz / #d3js meetup with Ben Garvey at Datadog, Inc. this month!

thanks to Cameron Yick, DocWrangler now renders Vega-lite specs! I wrote an operation to generate a Vega-lite spec to "visualize something interesting" for every presidential debate transcript & it looks very cool. (who knows if any of the charts are correct though... 😜)

Sometimes you need more than the default charts to visualize your data. Whether it’s a categorical heatmap, layered histogram, or 3D geomap, the Wildcard widget lets you build custom Vega-Lite visualizations directly in Datadog: dtdg.co/wildcard

Check out this hot HCI paper about autonomous agents! It’s from… wait a sec… 1997? “Researchers and software companies have set high hopes on so-called software agents, which "know" users' interests and can act autonomously on their behalf. Instead of exercising complete

I usually avoid special-case logic in my code—but this one’s worth it. When closedLoop is enabled and there are only two anchors, Poline now draws a second line that isn’t identical to the first. Looks way nicer.

My essay on what I learned by spending a day with a personal hero and wonderful man Kevin Kelly.

Aaron Francis aaronfrancis.com/2024/what-if-y… What if you tried hard? - Aaron Francis