Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.

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Reading A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.

Soon…

Thursday session

This Saturday, April 12th, is Record Store Day. To mark the occasion, Salter Cane will be playing a stripped-down set at Union Music Store in Lewes. That’s the place that Jamie used to run, so it has a special place in our hearts.

Liza Lo will be playing at midday.

Salter Cane are on at 1pm.

If you’re in the neighbourbood, please swing by! We’re really looking forward to playing a mix of some old songs and some brand new songs from our brand new album.

<a href="https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water" target="_blank" rel="external noopener">Deep Black Water by Salter Cane</a>

Tuesday session

Grim reading from the games industry, especially if you work at Shopify where the CEbrO has just mandated that you have to use this shite.

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Oh man, this tune by Adrian is so good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsJihAhX5P4

Happy 25th anniversy to A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp:

https://alistapart.com/article/dao/

Still relevant after all these years!

Went for a stroll around The Shire this afternoon.

Ah, Shopify! Where would Breitbart be without you?

Now the CEO of Shopify demands that every developer there uses “AI” to enable swastika merchants to make even more moolah.

(Hi to my “friends” who work there!)

Welcome back, Jason!

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The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-in...

I’m sitting comfortably in my chair at home while my brother is running a 300 mile race through Arizona.

https://trackleaders.com/monster25i.php?name=Eoin_Keith

1. Basic functionality should work on any device that can access the web.
2. Extras and flourishes are treated as progressive enhancements for modern devices.
3. The UI can look different and even clunky on older devices and browsers, as long as it doesn’t break rule #1.

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If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.

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Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.

I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.

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Happy Caturday from Coco!

Thursday session

Wednesday session

Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.

Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the nofollow protocol.

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I really like the idea of unifying some layout values in CSS. If you’ve got any feedback, please chip in!

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Monday session

Went for a ramble in the countryside and felt Persephone’s return.

Same.

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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