Related to Matt’s thoughts:

…working with agents feels much less like classic deep work, and much more like playing a game. Not to say the work is frivolous—it’s just because it feels like I’m in a game loop.

Flow, at least in the usual sense for me, feels smooth and continuous. The work and your attention starts to line up so cleanly that the experience becomes frictionless. You disappear into the work and meld with it. One notable aspect of flow has been I lose track of time. Working with agents on the other hand, is not like that at all. It’s highly engaging, but in a more jagged, reactive way. I’m focused, but not settled. I’m absorbed, but not merged with the task. I’m paying close attention the whole time, but the attention is dynamic and tactical rather than continuous. I don’t lose track of time at all.

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Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

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Second St. Patrick’s Day session

‘’Tis Saint Patrick himself!

Interlude with dancers

First St. Patrick’s Day session

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said: I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin. I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others. A Fisherman Of The Inland S...

It’s weird how there’s a subgenre of time-dilation folklore in Japan and Ireland…

Urashima Tarō: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urashima_Tar%C5%8D

Oisín in Tir na nÓg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ois%C3%ADn

On March 12th, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal. This would form the basis of what became the World Wide Web. On March 12th, 2026, Web Day Out happened in Brighton. Coincidence? Yes. Yes, it is a coincidence. But it’s a pretty nice coinci...

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh, a chairde!

Brian takes us back twenty years (which is when we first met):

To gather so many like-minded, energetic people in once place and not have it ruined by corporate greed felt unique.

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Matt has some smart reckons on the relationship between time and technology:

The factory bell, the railway timetable, the telegraph wire, the always-on smartphone — each imposed a new temporal discipline, each produced its own characteristic form of exhaustion, and each was eventually (partially, imperfectly) domesticated through a combination of regulation, design, and collective action.

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slop·py·pas·ta n. Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves.

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Just heard the sad news of Dolores Keane’s passing.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

Sunday evening session

Sunday afternoon session

Reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Tea and tunes

What a fantastic bunch of speakers! Thank you all for making #WebDayOut so great!

Lo-fi selfie with Manu

Generative AI vegetarianism, simply put, is avoiding generative AI tools as much as you can in your day-to-day life.

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The Session has been online in some form since the late 1990s. That’s long before web fonts existed. To begin with, Times New Roman was the only game in town if you wanted serif type on a website. When Microsoft introduced Georgia it was a godsend. A beautiful typeface desi...

This is about something that’s already happening, that doesn’t show up in employment figures: the quiet destruction of the feedback loop that turns inexperienced people into competent ones. The process by which you get something wrong, feel it, understand why, and become slightly less wrong next time. It’s unglamorous and it’s slow and it’s the only way it’s ever worked.

AI short-circuits that learning completely. Not maliciously. Just structurally. When you can generate something that looks right without doing the thinking, you will (most people, most people being me, will, most of the time, under pressure, with a deadline) and the muscle that thinking would have built never develops.

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Mutually assured Mechanical Turk.

This is genuinely much more interesting and wholesome than a chat interface powered by a large language model.

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Bobbie says:

Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into him at a party in a back yard in Brighton…

That was my party!

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The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.

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In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve used the web install API in production. Specifically, I’ve used it on The Session. In order to do that, I had to register for the origin trial. I’ve just signed up for another origin trial. This time it’s for the proposed focusgrou...

I have websites in my dock on my computer. I have websites on the home screen of my phone. When I open these websites from the dock or from the home screen, they behave just like native apps. It’s brilliant! But knowing that you can add a website to the dock or to the home ...

I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:

There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.

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You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.

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