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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Thursday session

I have little understanding for people using large language models to generate slop; words and images that nobody asked for. I have more understanding for people using large language models to generate code. Code isn’t the thing in the same way that words or images are; cod...

Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.

“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.

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AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

adactio.com/links/21884

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

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Happy anniversary to “the patent that never was”:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399/

Thanks, CERN!

Technically, AI is a field of computer science that uses advanced methods of computing.

Socially, AI is a set of extractive tools used to concentrate power and wealth.

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Thoughtful analysis from Ben (as always).

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