When evaluating any technology I understand why it’s important to ask “how might this benefit me” but it’s more important to first ask “how might this harm others”.

I don’t use large language models. My objection is to using them is ethical. I know how the sausage is made. I wanted to clarify that. I’m not rejecting large language models because they’re useless. They can absolutely be useful. I just don’t think the usefulness outweighs...

Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.

adactio.com/links/21931

Must be something in the air.

adactio.com/links/21932

Looking at LLM usage and promotion as a cultural phenomenon, it has all of the markings of a status game. The material gains from the LLM (which are usually quite marginal) really aren’t why people are doing it: they’re doing it because in many spaces, using ChatGPT and being very optimistic about AI being the “future” raises their social status. It’s important not only to be using it, but to be seen using it and be seen supporting it and telling people who don’t use it that they’re stupid luddites who’ll inevitably be left behind by technology.

adactio.com/links/21930

Monday session

If I’m understanding Greg correctly here, he’s saying it’s okay for people to use large language models …because they’re being forced to?

adactio.com/links/21928

Reading Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor.

One persistent piece of slopaganda you’ll here is this: “It’s just a tool. What matters is how you use it.” This isn’t a new tack. The same justification has been applied to many technologies. Leaving aside Kranzberg’s first law, large language models are the very antithe...

When someone breezily tells me how they’re using a large language model, I can feel myself channeling Luthen Rael.

“How nice for you” I say, the words seething with contempt.

Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!

https://ti.to/clearleft/ux-london-2025

Also sprach Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. Or in English, thus spoke Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Language and thinking are intertwined. I’m not saying there’s anything to the strong ...

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

adactio.com/links/21922

Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.

adactio.com/links/21921

Wednesday session

Remember intranets?

Pepperidge Farm remembers

A great talk by Matthias on what you can do with web standards today!

adactio.com/links/21918

Octavia Butlerian Jihad

Mark your calendars: Friday, 20th June — that’s when Salter Cane will be launching Deep Black Water at the The Hope And Ruin in Brighton

I can’t wait to get back on stage with the band! These songs sound great on the new album but I can guarantee that they’re going to absolutely rock when we play them live.

Support will be provided by our good friends Dreamytime Escorts, featuring former members of Caramel Jack. They’ve also got a new EP on the way.

Doors are at 8pm.

I’m really, really excited about this. It’s been far too long since Salter Cane were last bringing the noise live on stage. I hope to see you there!

It’s official. No matter how many annoying cookie consent banners you slap on a website, real-time bidding for behavioural adverts is illegal in Europe.

And before you go crying about advertising-supported businesses, this only applies to behavioural advertising, not contextual advertising …which works better anyway.

adactio.com/links/21915

Here’s some code to show the distance to the nearest airports on a map.

Here’s a modified version that shows the distance to the nearest Gregg’s. The hub-and-spoke visualisation overlaid on the map changes as you pan around, making it look like a spider bestriding the landscape.

Jonty’s version shows the distance to the nearest Pret a Manger.

I got nerdsniped by someone saying:

@adactio This would be cool for sessions 😉

He’s right, dammit! So here you go:

Session spider.

Now you can see how far you are from the nearest traditional Irish music sessions.

It’s using data from the weekly data dumps from thesession.org—I added a GeoJSON file in there.

Pure silliness, but it does make me wonder what kind of actually good data visualisations could be made with all this scrumptious data.

Proposal to rename language model benchmarks to Top Of The Slops.

Thursday session

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day: The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments. Awareness is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not su...

Here is the state of venture capital in early 2025:

• Venture capital is moribund except AI.
• AI is moribund except OpenAI.
• OpenAI is a weird scam that wants to burn money so fast it summons AI God.
• Nobody can cash out.

adactio.com/links/21909

When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.

adactio.com/links/21910

The editor in me is itching to insert the very necessary word “proposed” into the phrase “the HTML permission element” throughout this article:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/enhancements-to-permission-element

This is an interesting proposal for a declarative way of triggering permission dialogs, although it seems to overlap with the work being done on invokers (command and commandfor).

What really disgusts me is to see Google referring to this element as though it’s a done deal. It’s not. It’s a proposal …a proposal that Apple rejects and Mozilla rejects.

Words matter. Call your proposal a proposal, Google.

adactio.com/links/21908

The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.

— Adam Mastroianni

Meetings can be frustrating. But they don’t have to be. A lot of the frustration comes from unmet expectations. You go into the meeting expecting one outcome, and when it doesn’t materialise, you declare the meeting a waste of time. But had you gone into that same meeting w...