One day last week, I updated Visual Studio Code. Anecdotally it feels like it asks for updates twice a week now. I’m sure that’s not true, but I feel overwhelmed by app update requests in this vibe-coded world we live in now. A couple of recent updates have really annoyed me.

I’ve been doing more front-end coding this year than I have in a while and every time I come back to write markup and CSS, it feels like there are new tricks. We’re closing in on the 30th anniversary of CSS (already a little past 30 years since Håkon Wium Lie proposed it) and it still feels like actual magic.

There have been various blog posts and social media posts in the last couple of years about people rejecting streaming services and going back to buying music, listening on handheld devices that - gasp - aren't phones. Vinyl's bigger than it's been for years. Multiple colleagues have shown me their CD collections - even cassettes have made a comeback, which makes me wish I still had the incredible glow-in-the-dark Sony Beans walkman I had as a child. I like that some people catalogue their music online, like Hidde and Andy, though I'm not sure I want to broadcast some of the garbage I listen to, or reveal quite how many times I've listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters Soundtrack (which is a reason I don't use Last.FM any more).

I am building a website, for work. It feels like a radical act these days. I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding. Learning new skills, refusing to hand them off to an unthinking machine.

'Alt-text' is short for alternative text, and is used to convey the substance of visual content as text. It is important for people with visual disabilities, though is beneficial for a wide range of people. It is useful for low-speed connections where an image might not load, for searching for an image, for SEO/AIO/GEO, for cases where a link to an image is broken, for understanding context, and for a variety of other gains.

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt. This data is in tandem bought, sold, and aggregated by brokers. It has been used to out individuals, track immigrants, and enable prosecution over reproductive healthcare.

I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about. As expected, “number chart go up” is always the desired outcome. Number chart go up is good because it makes other number charts go up, specifically stock ticker number.

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content. This is especially relevant now, at a time when a growing number of corporations want to own and control those things for you. The IndieWeb ethos seeks to eliminate external influence and control over both you and your stuff.

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.

LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next?

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.

At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills have always claimed.

If anyone can build it in a world of generative AI, what, then, are people paying for when they buy software? Why would people buy software?

Let’s review. Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and markets are becoming increasingly skittish over America’s big, all-encompassing bet on LLMs. And according to reports from NOTUS and Reuters, major “AI” providers are already having discussions with the United States government, in which they’re laying the groundwork for “too big to fail”-style bailouts.

AI is inher­ently polit­ical tech­nology. If AI works as intended, it will grad­u­ally corrode our liberal democ­racy, risking an irre­versible shift into another polit­ical and economic config­u­ra­tion. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consid­er­a­tion, because it requires no addi­tional condi­tions like malign actors or AI malfunc­tion. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, espe­cially around concen­tra­tion of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve mate­rial well-being.

Last week, the Safari team formally expressed their opposition to the WebMCP API. In Safari’s explanation of why they oppose WebMCP, they captured something I’ve been trying to articulate.

I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.

The current gold rush in civic tech is around HR1 work requirements implementation. Vendors are pitching states on systems to help them comply with the new federal mandates. The pitch sounds like operational efficiency, reducing burden on caseworkers, helping eligible people stay on benefits through the new verification gauntlet. What’s being built is administrative burden as a service.

There are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The function of a system is its output, and no matter what utility individuals find in the tech, the widespread adoption and deployment should be considered and regarded firstly as a threat to the labor force.

The determination to move away from the addictive doom-scrolling of social media has given me pause, given me space to look around at how I use the internet and figure out where I get most value and where I WANT to get it from.

It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.

This is a story about music, backups, nostalgia and, I guess, the iPod touch.

I encountered a proposition that original form and style are the aspects of writing that an LLM cannot mimic, thus human writers may start innovating on form as a way to compete in an oversaturated writing market (and demonstrate their humanity).

In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.

When I was living in the UK, one of the more common responses people had to me being Icelandic – beyond the strangely common “I hate Björk” refrain – was some comment about Vikings or Norse mythology.