Christmas with Sandy
Christmas with Sandy
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It’s getting towards the end of the year. That’s when I put together a post reviewing the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months.
I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I...
Sleepy Sandy
Sleepy Sandy
Arizona
Arizona
Waking up in an airport hotel room with a runway view.
Waking up in an airport hotel room with a runway view.
Going to Arizona. brb
Going to Arizona. brb
Thursday session
Thursday session
> Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
So much truth in one story:
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
So Many Websites
But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson
aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/dynamic-datalist-autocomplete-from-an-api/
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel
cydstumpel.nl/why-we-teach-our-students-progressive-enhancement/
Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.
Tunes and typefaces
In an Irish session, tunes are almost never played in isolation. They’re played in sets.
A set of tunes might be as few as two. More usually, it’s three or more.
It’s unusual to change from one tune type into another. You tend to get a set of jigs, or a set of reels, or a ...
NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS - Web Performance Calendar
calendar.perfplanet.com/2025/nolojs-reducing-js-workload-html-css/
You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.
While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.
Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.
Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost
See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.
Coming Soon · Gaeltacht Type
Spaceships, atoms, and cybernetics
Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.
The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the...
Reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
Reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
Pan-fried Irish salmon.
Pan-fried Irish salmon.
Dissent | blarg
I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.
There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.
AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You
Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.
Skip intro
There’s the old adage “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Or to put it more broadly, “everyone else is doing it.”
It’s dispiriting how often this explanation is given as justification for a dubious design decision, from home-page carousels to cookie banners.
Nic Chan has w...
Sultans!
Sultans!
Going to Cobh. brb
Going to Cobh. brb
Reading Rose/House by Arkady Martine.
Reading Rose/House by Arkady Martine.
Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
That’s it.
That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.
Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.
But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.
Monday session
Monday session
Sunday roast
Sunday roast
I’m speaking at Web Day Out 2026 - Manuel Matuzovic
The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.