Octavia Butlerian Jihad

Mark your calendars: Friday, 20th June — that’s when Salter Cane will be launching Deep Black Water at the The Hope And Ruin in Brighton

I can’t wait to get back on stage with the band! These songs sound great on the new album but I can guarantee that they’re going to absolutely rock when we play them live.

Support will be provided by our good friends Dreamytime Escorts, featuring former members of Caramel Jack. They’ve also got a new EP on the way.

Doors are at 8pm.

I’m really, really excited about this. It’s been far too long since Salter Cane were last bringing the noise live on stage. I hope to see you there!

It’s official. No matter how many annoying cookie consent banners you slap on a website, real-time bidding for behavioural adverts is illegal in Europe.

And before you go crying about advertising-supported businesses, this only applies to behavioural advertising, not contextual advertising …which works better anyway.

adactio.com/links/21915

Here’s some code to show the distance to the nearest airports on a map.

Here’s a modified version that shows the distance to the nearest Gregg’s. The hub-and-spoke visualisation overlaid on the map changes as you pan around, making it look like a spider bestriding the landscape.

Jonty’s version shows the distance to the nearest Pret a Manger.

I got nerdsniped by someone saying:

@adactio This would be cool for sessions 😉

He’s right, dammit! So here you go:

Session spider.

Now you can see how far you are from the nearest traditional Irish music sessions.

It’s using data from the weekly data dumps from thesession.org—I added a GeoJSON file in there.

Pure silliness, but it does make me wonder what kind of actually good data visualisations could be made with all this scrumptious data.

Proposal to rename language model benchmarks to Top Of The Slops.

Thursday session

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day: The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments. Awareness is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not su...

Here is the state of venture capital in early 2025:

• Venture capital is moribund except AI.
• AI is moribund except OpenAI.
• OpenAI is a weird scam that wants to burn money so fast it summons AI God.
• Nobody can cash out.

adactio.com/links/21909

When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.

adactio.com/links/21910

The editor in me is itching to insert the very necessary word “proposed” into the phrase “the HTML permission element” throughout this article:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/enhancements-to-permission-element

This is an interesting proposal for a declarative way of triggering permission dialogs, although it seems to overlap with the work being done on invokers (command and commandfor).

What really disgusts me is to see Google referring to this element as though it’s a done deal. It’s not. It’s a proposal …a proposal that Apple rejects and Mozilla rejects.

Words matter. Call your proposal a proposal, Google.

adactio.com/links/21908

The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.

— Adam Mastroianni

Meetings can be frustrating. But they don’t have to be. A lot of the frustration comes from unmet expectations. You go into the meeting expecting one outcome, and when it doesn’t materialise, you declare the meeting a waste of time. But had you gone into that same meeting w...

Monday session

Reading Folk by Zoe Gilbert.

Sunday session outside in the shadow of the cathedral

Saturday session in Belgium

Namur

Going to Namur. brb

I know I’m biased but I think the line-up for this year’s UX London is looking fantastic:

https://2025.uxlondon.com/speakers/

June 10th, 11th, and 12th—come for one day or come for all three!

It’s just over one month until UX London. You should grab a ticket if you haven’t already! The format of UX London is quite special. While the focus of each day is different—discovery, design, and delivery—each day unfolds like this… There are four talks in the morning. Yo...

I’ve been thinking about the kind of CSS I write by default when I start a new project. Some of it is habitual. I now use logical properties automatically. It took me a while to rewire my brain, but now seeing left or top in a style sheet looks wrong to me. When I mentione...

Wednesday session

Why is the new pope being elected at a Figma event?

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.

adactio.com/links/21893

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.

adactio.com/links/21891

An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.

adactio.com/links/21892

A good overview of how large language models work:

The words flow together because they’ve been seen together many times. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. It just means they’re coherent.

adactio.com/links/21890

Tuesday session

Reading The Voyage Home by Pat Barker.