FeedCity

Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:

I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.

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Live oaks reach branchesSunlight graces every leafWith gentle wisdom Inspired by the not-haiku on my ITO EN tea. (BTW the Automattic home page is all haiku since 2009.)

56 years ago today:

Talked to SRI Host to Host

— IMP log, 1969-10-29 22:30, Charles S. Kline, Boelter Hall, UCLA

The message:

LO

The ARPANET was born.

Beyond Tellerrand has a new website and it’s beautiful!

And look! Past speakers like me get our own page.

In fact there’s a great big archive of all the past talks—that very much deserves your support as a friend of Beyond Tellerrand.

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Apparently last night's email didn't go out, so I re-sent them. Hopefully people didn't receive two emails.

Before it’s too late there should be a rule that AI chatbots should not be allowed in any way to impersonate humans. We will come to see that as our biggest mistake, not stopping this before it got out of control.

React exists as a profound perversion of the web platform. React has failed upwards to widespread adoption because it provides a “developer experience” that bypasses the hard parts. Like learning HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. Even learning React itself is discouraged; that’s for adults, you should use meta-frameworks. React devs are burdened with multi-megabyte monstrosities before they’ve written a single line of code. You cannot fix “too much JavaScript” with more JavaScript and yet React devs are trained to npm install until their problems become their users’ problems.

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A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:

Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.

And the real takeaway:

Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.

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Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and spea...

My new WordPress News page is faster and looks better on phones. Also, lots of new sources thanks to suggestions from readers.

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its … Continue reading Grokipedia →

Crossing over the Lamar bridge.

It’s really an over-asked question: What do you use your typewriter for?. (tl;dr: writing). To make things more interesting and entertaining in the middle of the week, let’s turn it on its ear and ask only for the wrong answers today. Whether it’s use in food preparation: Throw a slab of steak into the segment … Continue reading How do you use your typewriter? [Wrong Answers Only Edition]

I checked out Elon Musk's answer to Wikipedia by going to the pages on his site that Wikipedia mangles the most. It looks like they basically copied Wikipedia, so it's no better or worse. They'll probably be able to improve it, because ChatGPT tells a much closer to actual-events story. Getting the story right, is more important imho than keeping democracy open to trolls.

On the last day of UX London this year, I was sitting and chatting with Rachel Coldicutt who was going to be giving the closing keynote. Inevitably the topic of converstation worked its way ’round to “AI”. I remember Rachel having a good laugh when I summarised my overall fe...

I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.

1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web
2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
3. You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you

It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design.

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Last weekend, my mom passed away. I had blogged once or twice that in recent months I found myself at the hospital often, as she declined in health and was in and out of the hospital and rehab. It was what inspired me to make Micro.blog free for nurses and teachers. My mom w...

A clear explanation of how image dithering works, illustrated along the way.

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A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.

I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.

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I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try. Reading Kai Brach’s excellent newslett...