Simon Willison’s Weblog

File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans (via) This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work. The new generation has a completely different mental model of how applications work, where everything is found using search and data mostly lives inside the application that you use to manipulate it. # 10:49 pm

Introducing Partytown 🎉: Run Third-Party Scripts From a Web Worker (via) This is just spectacularly clever. Partytown is a 6KB JavaScript library that helps you move gnarly poorly performing third-party scripts out of your main page and into a web worker, so they won’t destroy your page performance. The really clever bit is in how it provides sandboxed access to the page DOM: it uses a devious trick where a proxy object provides getters and setters which then make blocking API calls to a separate service worker, using the mostly-forgotten xhr.open(..., false) parameter that turns off the async default for an XMLHttpRequest call. # 6:29 pm