Way back in ~2008 I wrote the Newton Virus https://www.everita.com/how-the-newton-virus-was-made + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh75j6OHhRc (sorry for the broken images, need to update that site). Between that and using a hidden API to take screenshots of each individual element on your desktop (from icons, to taskbar, to windows) the effect was pretty believable. One of the most fun (and frustrating) projects I ever worked on.
We add trackers, observers, and RUM scripts to understand how customers use our applications. The irony is that those same scripts often make the experience worse, especially on mid-range and low-end devices.
This essay looks at how monitoring tools can distort the very thing they measure, why performance costs are often hidden until they hit production, and how to rebalance the trade-off.
An essay about how a thirty-year-old mixtape led me to think about technology, memory, and the strange persistence of things we’ve already declared obsolete.