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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Saturday morning band practice.

I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory. What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it t...

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more! Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help. Large language models, especially those on...

A couple of days ago I linked to a post by Robin Sloan called Is it okay?, saying: Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models. That’s how it came across to me: fair and balanced. Robin’s central question is whether the current cr...

In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:

“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”

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Being “in tech” in 2025 is depressing, and if I’m going to stick around, I need to remember why I’m here.

This. A million times, this.

I urge you to read what Miriam has written here. She has articulated everything I’ve been feeling.

I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?

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Thursday session

The power of prototyping:

Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this.

I like the three questions that Chris asks himself:

1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?

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Strong Deb Chachra vibes in this ongoing series by Charles C. Mann:

he great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

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AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.

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