Firefox users: are you able to reproduce this doozy of a bug I’ve found in the latest version?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924798

Wondering if this is the responsible way to enable view transitions on websites:

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference) {
  @view-transition {
    navigation: auto;
  }
}

People posting screenshots of their chats with large language model tools, like it’s cute, like each one of those queries didn’t use exorbitant amounts of carbon, like those tools aren’t all built on masses of unpaid labour.

The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.

adactio.com/links/21493

Monday session

Trys describes exactly the situation where you really do need to use the Shadow DOM in a web component—as opposed to just sticking to HTML web components—, and that’s when the component is going to be distributed and you have no idea where:

This component needed to be incredibly portable, looking great on any third-party website, in any position, at any viewport, with any amount of content. It had to be a “hyper-responsive” component.

adactio.com/links/21491

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

adactio.com/links/21490

When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy. I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, ...

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

adactio.com/links/21488

Sunday session

Spent the day making pumpkin ravioli from scratch. Turned out pretty good!

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

adactio.com/links/21485

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

adactio.com/links/21484

Coco is having a snoozy #caturday on my lap. #notmycat

Pondering pace layers.

adactio.com/links/21482

One of the perks of speaking at conferences is that I get to travel to new and interesting places. I’d say that most of my travel over the past couple of decades was thanks to conferences. Recently though, I’ve been going places for non-work related reasons. A couple of wee...

This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:

I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.

👏

adactio.com/links/21480

They say they’re building the thing that will build the thing that will solve all of our problems, while they destroy the planet and run on data theft and labor exploitation, and they get Nobel prizes.

— Timnit Gebru

Reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

This seems to be the attitude of many of my fellow nerds—designers and developers—when presented with tools based on large language models that produce dubious outputs based on the unethical harvesting of other people’s work and requiring staggering amounts of energy to run:

This is the future! I need to start using these tools now, even if they’re flawed, because otherwise I’ll be left behind. They’ll only get better. It’s inevitable.

Whereas this seems to be the attitude of those same designers and developers when faced with stable browser features that can be safely used today without frameworks or libraries:

I’m sceptical.

Wednesday session

React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.

adactio.com/links/21475

A solid detailed in-depth report.

The sheer amount of resources needed to support the current and forecast demand from AI is colossal and unprecedented.

adactio.com/links/21474

Tuesday session

If you gaze for long into an infinite canvas, the infinite canvas gazes also into you.

Sunday session

Today I am the man in seat 61 on the Eurostar from Paris to London.

Circles

Checked in at La Corde à Linge. Spätzle

Checked in at Royal 26. Pairing a good book with a glass of Pinot Gris