Went for a stroll around The Shire this afternoon.

Ah, Shopify! Where would Breitbart be without you?

Now the CEO of Shopify demands that every developer there uses “AI” to enable swastika merchants to make even more moolah.

(Hi to my “friends” who work there!)

Welcome back, Jason!

adactio.com/links/21832

The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-in...

I’m sitting comfortably in my chair at home while my brother is running a 300 mile race through Arizona.

https://trackleaders.com/monster25i.php?name=Eoin_Keith

1. Basic functionality should work on any device that can access the web.
2. Extras and flourishes are treated as progressive enhancements for modern devices.
3. The UI can look different and even clunky on older devices and browsers, as long as it doesn’t break rule #1.

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If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.

adactio.com/links/21828

Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.

I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.

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Happy Caturday from Coco!

Thursday session

Wednesday session

Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.

Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the nofollow protocol.

adactio.com/links/21823

I really like the idea of unifying some layout values in CSS. If you’ve got any feedback, please chip in!

adactio.com/links/21822

Monday session

Went for a ramble in the countryside and felt Persephone’s return.

Same.

adactio.com/links/21819

After State Of The Browser, it’s time for State Of The Ballet at the Royal Opera House.

We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. ​​And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.

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As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.

adactio.com/links/21816

Thursday session

Wednesday session

AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.

adactio.com/links/21813

a:focus-visible {
  outline-offset: 0.25em;
  outline-width: 0.25em;
  outline-color: currentColor;
}

…makes any website better

My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel. Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfold...

After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.

George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:

It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

adactio.com/links/21810

More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.

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Make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle in with Julian Gough’s magnum opus:

How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields

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1. Support open source software
2. Support open web platform technology
3. Distribution on the web should never be throttled
4. External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized

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Thursday session

It’s the vernal equinox and Spring has sprung, right on time, giving us a beautiful sunny day.