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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.

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Keeping up appearances | deadSimpleTech

deadsimpletech.com/blog/keeping_up_appearances

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

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Tools

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...

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The landing zone

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 ...

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Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

unplannedobsolescence.com/blog/hard-page-load/

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

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Salter Cane album launch gig on Friday, 20th June

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!

A poster featuring all four band members advertising Salter Cane and Dreamytime Escorts on Friday, 20th June at 8pm at The Hope And Ruin.

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EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

iccl.ie/digital-data/eu-ruling-tracking-based-advertising-by-google-microsoft-amazon-x-across-europe-has-no-legal-basis/

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

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Session spider

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.

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Awareness

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...

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Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking ‹ Literary Hub

lithub.com/craig-mod-on-the-creative-power-of-walking

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

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Page Embedded Permission Control (` permission ` element)

github.com/WICG/PEPC/blob/main/explainer.md

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

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A tiny taxonomy of meetings

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...