The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering me or someone exploring unconventional ideas before bringing it to a broader audience. Both of those situations seem considerate. A tool for thought, as it were.

On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago.

As someone who prefers using services via their websites, I’ve gotten terribly jaded lately. Almost everyone wants me, and by extension, you, to use their darn apps to consume content and off their web versions.

TL;DR: Armed with new powers to rein in the worst excesses of mobile's duopolists, antitrust bodies around the world are struggling to find their footing, and an incurious tech press is letting it pass with nary a nod. Browsers are app stores, but that perspective is almost entirely absent from the antitrust conversation.

I just read Anil Dash’s recent piece, Endgame for the Open Web, and I think it is important. He is right to point out that the open web is under pressure from powerful companies which have grown rich by extracting value from open systems and are now increasingly hostile to the norms that made those systems possible in the first place.

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that.

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat. It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.

human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Scroll fade is that oh so wonderful web design experience where elements fade in as they scroll into view. Often with a bit of transform on the Y-axis.

So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career.

It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I'd tell you why I do this and what it looks like.

In 2023, Bluesky's CTO Paul Frazee was asked what would happen if Bluesky ever turned against its users.

All industries and disciplines, over time, direct people into greater and greater specialization. Those who have been working on the web since the beginning have been able to see this trend first hand, as the practices and systems grew ever more complicated and it became impossible for one person to hold it all in their head. We sometimes talk of this level of increasing complexity and specialization as inevitable or natural, when it’s neither. Moreover, like many things involving work, speciali

A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid for not knowing them already. He’s one of those folks who still has faith in the Web.

Many ads in Apple News served by Taboola are clearly scams.

I cancelled Disney Plus in September (though my annual sub runs until March). A year ago, I downloaded my entire Kindle library and stopped buying from their store. Netflix was cancelled in December. Audible went bye-bye sometime last summer. None of this was planned, exactly - more like a series of small decisions that eventually accumulated into something larger.

Over the past months, I realised it was about time I moved away from music streaming, to keeping a personal music collection that I control.

Mozilla published a new State of Mozilla. It’s absolute slopaganda. A mess of trippy visuals and corpo-speak that’s been through the slop wringer too many times. I read it so you don’t have to.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated with slow delivery and high costs. Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of software work.

In the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything—when we washed our mail, when everything seemed dangerous, when nothing was available—I made masks. Hundreds of them, a sewing machine permanent on the only table in our small house. I'd bag them and take them to friends and neighbors, tossing them onto their porches and stoops. Eventually, when I felt OK going into the post office, I'd mail them to groups that needed them. The Navajo Nation got packs from me, an org in Chicago for homeless L

“The Open Web” means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web’s Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.

I recently added a rule to my reset style sheet UA+ that I wanted to share with you. When you add a popover to a page and open it, it looks similar to a dialog in terms of its styling. It's positioned at the center of the viewport.

Over the past year, I’ve made a change to how I consume content. Everything is at 1x now: podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks. All of it.

Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention.

The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.