Thursday session

The stage is set for #ResearchByTheSea

Getting ready to host Research By The Sea tomorrow:

• Clipboard ✅
• Loud shirt ✅

This is very nice HTML web component by Miriam, progressively enhancing an ordered list of audio elements.

adactio.com/links/21742

This describes how I like to work too.

adactio.com/links/21741

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

adactio.com/links/21740

If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.

adactio.com/links/21739

I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.

Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.

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Reading Matrix by Lauren Groff.

You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.

adactio.com/links/21736

You do not have to use generative AI.

AI itself cannot be held to account.

If you use AI, you are the one who is accountable for whatever you produce with it.

There are contexts in which it is immoral to use generative AI.

Correcting or fact checking generative AI may take longer than just doing a task yourself, or with conventional AI tools.

You do not have to use generative AI.

adactio.com/links/21735

Thursday session

My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too). No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffu...

Wednesday session

A fun new font from Jason:

Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.

adactio.com/links/21731

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)… Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s al...

Some good—if overlong—writing advice.

• Focus on what matters to readers
• Be welcoming to everyone
• Swap formal words for normal ones
• When we have to say sorry, say it sincerely
• Watch out for jargon
• Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice
• Use vivid words & delightful wordplay
• Make references most people would understand
• Avoid empty adjectives & marketing cliches
• Make people feel they’re in on the joke – don’t punch down
• Add a pinch of humour, not a dollop
• Smart asides, not cheap puns and cliches
• Be self-assured, but never arrogant

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Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too): Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too...

A handy one-pager for front-end web developers:

Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.

adactio.com/links/21727

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs: I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely n...

I Feel Like I’m Going Insane Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two s...

You can still have a home. A place to hang up your jacket, or park your shoes. A place where you can breathe out. A place where you can hear yourself think critically. A place you might share with loved ones who you can give to, and receive from.

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Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.

Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.

adactio.com/links/21723

From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022). I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together. It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mild...

Monday session

Working on this project is great but ten minutes into it and I already miss the resilience of the web. I miss how you have to really fuck things up to make a browser yell at you or implode.

adactio.com/links/21720

If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.

Works for me!

You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.

Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you.

adactio.com/links/21719

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

— Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

This is one way of putting things into perspective.

adactio.com/links/21717

This is absolutely wonderful!

There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.

This is what the web is for!

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