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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.

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You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown - Christopher Butler

chrbutler.com/you-can-be-a-great-designer-and-be-completely-unknown

Great design isn’t defined by who knows your name, but by how well your work serves human needs. It’s measured in the problems solved, the frustrations eased, the moments of delight created, and the dignity preserved through thoughtful solutions. These metrics operate independently of fame or recognition.

Our obsession with visibility also creates a troubling dynamic: design that prioritizes being noticed over being useful. This leads to visual pollution, cognitive overload, and solutions that serve the designer’s portfolio more than the user’s needs.

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Figure and ground • Buttondown

buttondown.com/cennydd/archive/figure-and-ground/

Man, this resonates:

At one end, you prioritise your own interests. Slap on the SPF and enjoy the cricket; ignore the emails; nip to Paris for the day. But egocentrism erodes social goods. It harms other people. So perhaps you reject it and skew the other way, anchoring your wellbeing to the trajectory of the world. But that undertow will easily drown you. The beneficence of caring only about others seems noble, but in truth few of us can endure that level of self-sacrifice. Total empathy harms you. And so most of us stumble in the fog between these extremes, recoiling from either end when the shame or the sadness becomes too much to bear. I plug away at my pleasant life with heartache for what’s happening to us. Perhaps you feel similarly, smiling but seconds from tears.

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Codewashing

I have little understanding for people using large language models to generate slop; words and images that nobody asked for. I have more understanding for people using large language models to generate code. Code isn’t the thing in the same way that words or images are; cod...

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An Entirely Other Day: The Triumph of Triumphalism

eod.com/blog/2025/04/the-triumph-of-triumphalism/

Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.

“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.

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“AI-first” is the new Return To Office - Anil Dash

anildash.com/2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

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UX London flash sale

In exactly six weeks time, UX London is happening!

I am ridiculously excited about this year’s line-up—I can’t wait to see the talks and get hands-on in the workshops.

If you haven’t yet got your ticket, now is the time. There’s a flash sale this week: use the discount code FLASH20 to get a whopping 20% of any ticket. Do it before the end of Friday!

Whether you’re coming for all three days or choosing one focused day, you’re in for a treat.

  • Day one on Tuesday, 10 June is discovery day.
  • Day two on Wednesday, 11 June is design day.
  • Day three on Thursday, 12 June is deliver day.

Head on over to the website to get all the details and then get your discounted ticket.

See you there!

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The Hidden Cost of AI Coding – Terrible Software

terriblesoftware.org/2025/04/23/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-coding/

Feels like an emerging trend:

Instead of that deep immersion where I’d craft each function, I’m now more like a curator? I describe what I want, evaluate what the AI gives me, tweak the prompts, and iterate. It’s efficient, yes. Revolutionary, even. But something essential feels missing — that state of flow where time vanishes and you’re completely absorbed in creation. If this becomes the dominant workflow across teams, do we risk an industry full of highly productive yet strangely detached developers?

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But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext

rakhim.exotext.com/but-what-if-i-really-want-a-faster-horse

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

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