Going to Amsterdam. brb

Monday session

I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct. (I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s lit...

Brighton is blessed with plenty of traditional Irish music sessions. You need some kind of almanac to keep track of when they’re on. Some are on once a month. Some are twice a month. Some are every two weeks (which isn’t the same as twice a month, depending on the month). Sometimes when the stars align just right, you get a whole week of sessions in a row. That’s what happened last week with sessions on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I enjoyed playing my mandolin in each of them. There was even a private party on Saturday night where a bunch of us played tunes for an hour and a half. There’s nothing quite like playing music with other people. It’s good for the soul.

Checked in at Fox On the Downs. Sunday roast — with Jessica

I look the look of this proposal that would allow authors to have more control over network priorities for third-party iframes—I’ve already documented how I had to use a third-party library to fix this problem on the Salter Cane site.

adactio.com/links/21769

A fascinating look at the modern equivalent of the Longitude problem.

adactio.com/links/21768

I really like Brad’s new project, Cold Album Drumming: Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong? I got a kick out of watching him play alon...

Thursday session

New Kabin Crew belter in the gaff, like—great gas altogether, like!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWzL7wo0VJE

This was a day of big conversations, but also one of connection, curiosity, and optimism.

Seeing it all laid out like this really drives home just how much was packed into Research By The Sea.

Throughout the day, speakers shared personal reflections, bold ideas, and practical insights, touching on themes of community, resilience, ethics, and the evolving role of technology.

Some talks brought hard truths about the impact of AI, the complexity of organisational change, and the ethical dilemmas researchers face. Others offered hope and direction, reminding us of the power of community, the importance of accessibility, and the need to listen to nature, to each other, and to the wider world.

adactio.com/links/21764

Check it out—here’s the line-up for UX London 2025! This is going to be so good! Grab a ticket if you haven’t got one yet. UX London take...

This looks like a really interesting proposal for allowing developers more control over styling inputs. Based on the work being done the customisable select element, it starts with a declaration of appearance: base.

adactio.com/links/21762

Wednesday session

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

adactio.com/links/21760

Tuesday session

This is a great new musical project from Brad:

Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?

I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.

adactio.com/links/21758

Research By The Sea was last Thursday. I’m still digesting it all. In short, it was excellent. The venue, how smoothly every thing was organised, the talks …oh boy, the talks! Benjamin did a truly superb job curating this line-up. Everyone really brought their A-game. As ...

Monday session

Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.

adactio.com/links/21755

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

adactio.com/links/21754

The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error. You can fix that yourself or you can feed the error back into the LLM and watch it correct itself.

Compare this to hallucinations in regular prose, where you need a critical eye, strong intuitions and well developed fact checking skills to avoid sharing information that’s incorrect and directly harmful to your reputation.

With code you get a powerful form of fact checking for free. Run the code, see if it works.

adactio.com/links/21753

Слава Україні!

The tech bros advocating for generative AI to take over art are at the same level of cultural refinement as the characters in Severance. They’re creating apps to summarize books to people, tweeting from accounts with Greek statue profile pictures.

GenAI would automate Lumon’s cultural mission, allowing humans to sever themselves from the production of art and culture.

adactio.com/links/21751

Good news for the fediverse, the indie web, and community sites like The Session:

People are abandoning massive platforms in favor of tight-knit groups where trust and shared values flourish and content is at the core. The future of community building is in going back to the basics.

adactio.com/links/21750

Research by the Sea was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected. None of the ‘utopian bullshit’ you usually get at a product or digital conference, to quote one of the speakers!

adactio.com/links/21749

I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being sold today has almost nothing to do with improving lives, but instead stuffing the pockets of those who already need for nothing. It’s not making us smarter. It’s not helping heal a damaged planet. It’s not making us happier or more generous towards each other. And it’s entrenched in everything — meaning a momentous challenge to re-wire or meticulously disconnect. I’m slowly finding my own ways of breaking free to regain a sense of self and purpose.

adactio.com/links/21748

This is a great little helper in understanding anchor positioning in CSS.

Chrome-only for now.

adactio.com/links/21747

Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.

Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.

adactio.com/links/21746

Thursday session