Wow, just noticed #ThingUmbrella reached 3700 stars on GitHub — I'm celebrating... 🤩🫠

Heartfelt thanks to all of you who've been helping along the way (in any shape & form) and been supporting this work for all these years and across different programming languages/camps! Merci beaucoup!!! Esp. big Thank You's to fellow fediverse people/supporters from various stages of this project: @avi, @made, @lurvey, @alesroubicek, @brandtryan, @latrokles, @rc101, @jeffpalmer, @jack, @Yura, @danielrothaug, @computersandblues, @shiffman... (apologies if I forgot you/others here!) 🙏😍

Not counting the earlier years spent on my related toxiclibs library collection for Java/Processing (developed between ~2006-2012), the larger thi.ng project is now 14+ years old, starting with various 2D/3D geometry and dataviz-related libraries for Clojure/ClojureScript in 2011.

Since 2018 the main focus has been https://thi.ng/umbrella, a monorepo collection of (so far) 210+ #TypeScript projects/libraries. It will be 8 years old in January and covers an extremely wide spectrum of topics, use cases, data structures and techniques (take a look at the tag cloud on the https://thi.ng website or the tag browser[1] to explore the scope and related projects).

These 200+ main libraries are NOT forming a monolithic framework and can largely be used individually. However, many of these libraries are complementing each other, or are structured to be composable, expose related functionality at different levels of abstraction and/or are heavily re-use functionality to ensure high code density and small bundle sizes when building large(r) projects. 99% of the packages have NO 3rd party runtime dependencies... The umbrella meta-project also includes 185 commented standalone example projects, hundreds of code snippets in documentation and readme files, illustrating other possible usage & composition patterns.

The total code size of this project is now around 3850 source files, 140k lines of code and 71k lines of comments/docstrings. The example projects add in total another ~35k lines of code & comments. The average package readme size is 11.8KB. 99.9% of this all has been created & maintained by yours truly...

There're still so many unreleased (and useful/interesting!) parts of functionality I've been working on and still need to figure out how to best refactor and package them up (bit by bit) before releasing... we're not done just yet!

There seemingly are quite a few active users (~1.8 million of combined installs per month) and it's so pleasing to see how these tools have matured, are stable/reliable[2] and it confirms to me these efforts were all somehow worth it. Especially this year, I've also spent a lot more time myself using these packages in production, mostly for client projects, but also my own (some of which will be open sourced too). Of course, we all have our own particular likes and preferences for our own tools, but for my kind of work/workflows, #ThingUmbrella provides some of the most varied, productive, _composable_ and malleable tools I've ever used...

Happy coding! 🙌

[1] https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/thing-browser/

[2] ...even many of those packages which still manage to have a v0.x.y version number, often for years already! My release tool only creates new major versions when there're breaking changes, so if the API is already stable, the version stays at 0.x — I just need to manually bump some of them to a v1.0... 😅

#ThingUmbrella #OpenSource #TypeScript #JavaScript #Community #Github

A working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrian. Inspired @divbyzero and @andrewt.

#Art #PietMondrian #QRCode

This article in The Register [1] reported that Meta's apps (specifically Facebook and Instagram) on Android devices were secretly opening network ports on users' phones as part of a "localhost tracking" technique to covertly link web browsing activity to user identities, bypassing standard privacy protections like incognito mode, VPNs, and cookie clearing. This practice was uncovered by security researchers in early June 2025 and had been ongoing since at least September 2024.

Whatever needed to enhance data collection for advertising purposes will be done. Privacy violations of users may not get a priority when it comes to profit driven digital surveillance. I don't think it has impacted the user base of Meta products. In India switching costs are high since WhatsApp is essential for daily life [2].

Till researchers find another violation again, it will be business as usual.

1. https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/
2. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/8/24/23320183/india-whatsapp-meta-land-of-the-giants-mark-zuckerberg

#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #DigitalSurveillance #Privacy #MastodonIndians #MastIndia #India

Weekend list of critical reading links about the state[1] of Tech, AI[2] hype/finance/politics, mostly long form:

Ed Zitron's The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

How to use computing power faster: on the weird economics of semiconductors and GenAI (by @gauthier)
https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster

Predictive Capital: Roads to Terminal Alienation: Soil to Server Farm, Reason to Vibe (by @atomless)
https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/

Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy
https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/

Decomputing as Resistance (by @danmcquillan)
https://danmcquillan.org/decomputing_as_resistance.html

How big tech is force-feeding us AI
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-big-tech-is-force-feeding-us

Also, in addition to the above, a little more #FollowFriday if you're interested in these topics, their implications and peripheries (in A-Z order):

@asrg
@festal
@gerrymcgovern
@Kurtis_Clark
@tante
@w0bb1t

Academia:

@bildoperationen
@databasecultures
@emilymbender
@Iris
@timnitGebru

[1] As in: "Just look at the state of this..."
[2] As in "generative AI"

#LongRead #CriticalAI

Just finished manually updating in total ~780 code blocks & snippets in over 400 files (readme's & source code), adding import statements of all used functions & updating comments over the past week (in addition to the 1st round last weekend[1])... Would be super great to hear if people find this useful/helpful (other than the two who were proposing it in the survey feedback)... 😉

Over the next months I will do another pass over the readmes to make it easier to auto-extract various code examples[2], to try them out and/or test them... Also going forward, new code examples added to readme's will aim to support this feature, but there's a huge backlog of existing ones too.

[1] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/111997356595048440
[2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/111959275083112668

#ThingUmbrella #OpenSource #Documentation #TypeScript #JavaScript