After State Of The Browser, it’s time for State Of The Ballet at the Royal Opera House.

We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. ​​And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.

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As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.

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Thursday session

Wednesday session

AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.

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  outline-offset: 0.25em;
  outline-width: 0.25em;
  outline-color: currentColor;
}

…makes any website better

My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel. Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfold...

After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.

George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:

It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

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More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.

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Make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle in with Julian Gough’s magnum opus:

How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields

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1. Support open source software
2. Support open web platform technology
3. Distribution on the web should never be throttled
4. External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized

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Thursday session

It’s the vernal equinox and Spring has sprung, right on time, giving us a beautiful sunny day.

Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this articl...

I’ve been banging on for a while now about how much I’d like a declarative option for the Web Share API. I was thinking that the type attribute on the button element would be a good candidate for this (there’s prior art in the way we extended the type attribute on the input ...

Wednesday session

I wonder if a civilisation closer to the galactic centre might worship Sagittarius A* as a god.

AI can be incredibly useful when deployed skillfully in creative endeavors—as an ideation partner, as a scaffolding tool, by eliminating tedious tasks, etc.—but anyone making anything truly good with it is probably somebody who could already make something good first without it.

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I can’t recommend React to any project or customer anymore.

Using almost any other modern alternative, you will save time, money and nerves, even if you haven’t used them before.

Don’t stick to technology just because you know it.

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Books for all, and roses too!

https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/

American workers, this is the book you need.

There’s a new proposal for giving developers more control over styling form controls. I like it. It’s clearly based on the fantastic work being done by the Open UI group on the select element. The proposal suggests that authors can opt-in to the new styling possibilities by...

Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not.

— Matt Webb

Dan wrote an interesting post with a somewhat clickbaity title; This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design: I watched two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-...

So, let’s start with a simple premise: how can we make design less opaque and encourage teams to make small changes more efficiently? Not every product decision needs to be a big, complicated design process.

This checklist, in four parts, is meant to be a simple, lightweight way for the team to get the ‘gist’ of the issue and make a shared decision quickly. It’s a starting point, a way to get the critical information in once place so the entire team can understand and discuss. The four parts are:

• Gather: Bring the right info together into a single place
• Impact: List the size of the problem and possible risks
• Sketch: Create a preliminary sketch of a solution
• Team Huddle: Get the product team to discuss and agree on a solution.

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This is a really thoughtful piece by Rich, who’s got conflicted feelings about large language models in the design process. I suspect a lot of people can relate to this.

What I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.

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St. Patrick’s Day session

Tá mo chuid arán déanta…

Lá Fhéile Pádraig atá ann agus mar sin déanfaidh mé stobhach Gaelach inniu agus seinnfidh mé ceol traidisiúnta na hÉireann anocht!

Chilling with Coco. #NotMyCat