Links, April 3, 2026

§on the scorption and frog

on tumblr, of all places, several iterations of the scorpion and the frog parable, which go to some unexpected places:

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

§Shigeru Miyamoto x Shigesato Itoi (1989)

A wonderful interview from 37 years ago with two legends, on video games, realism, wonder, and the nature of childhood versus adulthood, and the value of following one’s creative compass rather than pandering to study groups:

Miyamoto: Right now, all else being equal in terms of fun, the games that sell are usually the grand, large-scale RPGs with sprawling stories and worlds… games that take a long time to play through. But personally, I prefer games you can finish quickly. I think they have a much better chance of reaching a wider audience. Everyone is so focused on “long-play” games because they think that’s what sells, but then something like Tetris comes along and just blows everyone away.

§Scrappy

An experimental local-first webapp creation environment:

We ended up creating a research prototype that we call Scrappy — a tool for making scrappy apps for just you and your friends. First and foremost, we aim to contribute a vision of what home-made software could be like. We want to make this vision as concrete as we can, by sharing a working tool and examples of apps made in it

§On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse

A great essay that illustrates nicely why I tend to be skeptical of Cory Doctorow:

 I first encountered this weird argument on a Mastodon thread years ago, and it never sat right with me. It would be a defensible claim if that was the argument Audre Lorde was making in the first place. Something strange happens in that paragraph, something worth sitting with: a writer invoking a Black lesbian feminist theorist in order to dismiss an argument about tech platforms, which she never made. The phrase has been borrowed, stripped of its roots, and sent out to do labour it was never meant to do. And in the act of rebutting a meme, Doctorow becomes part of the meme’s problem.

§Mouthwords

Again, if Mandy Brown wrote it, you should read it:

We need to see the advent of workslop in the context of the technological aims of the last several decades, one of which has been to obfuscate the human labor involved in everything from driving to cooking to gathering

§The Shape of Friction

On why making things “easy” is sometimes counterproductive:

When someone on your team pushes back, that resistance carries weight precisely because they have context you don’t have. They’ve built things that broke. They’ve watched users struggle with the last version. They remember the architectural decision from six months ago that makes your clever idea a nightmare to implement. That friction isn’t making the work worse. That friction is the point.

§how to make programming terrible for everyone

On programming languages, mental models, and usability:

The lack of a clear mental model leads to the so-called ELIZA effect: a user’s tendency to project all kinds of intellectual capabilities onto a computer system, in the same way my cats might think that I have magical powers when I turn the lights on and off or summon meat from the refrigerator.

§I Decompiled the White House’s New App

Among other things,

An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.