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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
Frankly, I’d rather quit my career than live in the future they’re selling. It’s the sheer dystopian drabness of it. Mediocrity as a service.
I tried the tab-completion slot machines; not my cup of tea. I tried image generation and was overcome with literal depression. I don’t want a future as a “prompt artist”.
I’m mostly linking this for what it says, but oh boy, do I love the way it says it with this wonderful HTML web compenent.
Thursday session
goodinternetmagazine.com/close-to-the-metal-web-design-and-the-browser/
It seems like the misguided perception of needing to use complex tools and frameworks to build a website comes from a thinking that web browsers are inherently limited. When, in fact, browsers have evolved to a tremendous degree
I heard you like divs…
AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It’s a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don’t care, it’s miraculous.
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
When evaluating any technology I understand why it’s important to ask “how might this benefit me” but it’s more important to first ask “how might this harm others”.
Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.
Looking at LLM usage and promotion as a cultural phenomenon, it has all of the markings of a status game. The material gains from the LLM (which are usually quite marginal) really aren’t why people are doing it: they’re doing it because in many spaces, using ChatGPT and being very optimistic about AI being the “future” raises their social status. It’s important not only to be using it, but to be seen using it and be seen supporting it and telling people who don’t use it that they’re stupid luddites who’ll inevitably be left behind by technology.
Monday session
If I’m understanding Greg correctly here, he’s saying it’s okay for people to use large language models …because they’re being forced to?
Reading Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor.
When someone breezily tells me how they’re using a large language model, I can feel myself channeling Luthen Rael.
“How nice for you” I say, the words seething with contempt.
Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.
Wednesday session
Remember intranets?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
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.
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:
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
pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/03/in-2025-venture-capital-cant-pretend-everything-is-fine-any-more/
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.
