56 years ago today:

Talked to SRI Host to Host

— IMP log, 1969-10-29 22:30, Charles S. Kline, Boelter Hall, UCLA

The message:

LO

The ARPANET was born.

Beyond Tellerrand has a new website and it’s beautiful!

And look! Past speakers like me get our own page.

In fact there’s a great big archive of all the past talks—that very much deserves your support as a friend of Beyond Tellerrand.

adactio.com/links/22222

React exists as a profound perversion of the web platform. React has failed upwards to widespread adoption because it provides a “developer experience” that bypasses the hard parts. Like learning HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. Even learning React itself is discouraged; that’s for adults, you should use meta-frameworks. React devs are burdened with multi-megabyte monstrosities before they’ve written a single line of code. You cannot fix “too much JavaScript” with more JavaScript and yet React devs are trained to npm install until their problems become their users’ problems.

adactio.com/links/22220

A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:

Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.

And the real takeaway:

Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.

adactio.com/links/22221

On the last day of UX London this year, I was sitting and chatting with Rachel Coldicutt who was going to be giving the closing keynote. Inevitably the topic of converstation worked its way ’round to “AI”. I remember Rachel having a good laugh when I summarised my overall fe...

I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.

1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web
2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
3. You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you

It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design.

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A clear explanation of how image dithering works, illustrated along the way.

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A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.

I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.

adactio.com/links/22217

It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future.

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So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”

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I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own. Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the sli...

It’s wild what you can do with CSS these days!

adactio.com/links/22212

Coco in the sun.

Reading Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield.

Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract — laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity. In short, these are political choices masquerading as technical necessities, AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.

adactio.com/links/22211

Saturday morning tunes and tea

Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.

The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.

adactio.com/links/22207

Here’s a handy little tool for generating CSS with :has() selectors in order to do quantity queries.

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I’m very happy to announce that the one and only Jake Jaffa-The-Cake Archibald will be speaking at Web Day Out! Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing sp...

LLMs are useful when you need a compromise between fast and good. You will never get a good outcome fast.

I’m afraid we are settling into a status of good enough when using “AI,” which is especially hurtful for accessibility.

adactio.com/links/22203

The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.

adactio.com/links/22204

Having a coffee with Mango.

Confession: I can never remember the actual name of the coffee shop so in my mind it’s Mango’s.

Sunday session in Cork

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

adactio.com/links/22200

Reading A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

Going to Cork (for real this time, I hope). brb

There’s quite a crossover between resilence and longevity:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Keep scope small and fixed
3. Reduce dependencies
4. Produce static output
5. Increase Quality Assurance

adactio.com/links/22197

Thursday session

This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.

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When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.

adactio.com/links/22193