Working on this project is great but ten minutes into it and I already miss the resilience of the web. I miss how you have to really fuck things up to make a browser yell at you or implode.

adactio.com/links/21720

If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.

Works for me!

You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.

Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you.

adactio.com/links/21719

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

— Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

This is one way of putting things into perspective.

adactio.com/links/21717

This is absolutely wonderful!

There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.

This is what the web is for!

adactio.com/links/21716

Saturday morning band practice.

I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory. What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it t...

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more! Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help. Large language models, especially those on...

A couple of days ago I linked to a post by Robin Sloan called Is it okay?, saying: Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models. That’s how it came across to me: fair and balanced. Robin’s central question is whether the current cr...

In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:

“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”

adactio.com/links/21711

Being “in tech” in 2025 is depressing, and if I’m going to stick around, I need to remember why I’m here.

This. A million times, this.

I urge you to read what Miriam has written here. She has articulated everything I’ve been feeling.

I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?

adactio.com/links/21710

Thursday session

The power of prototyping:

Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this.

I like the three questions that Chris asks himself:

1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?

adactio.com/links/21708

Strong Deb Chachra vibes in this ongoing series by Charles C. Mann:

he great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

adactio.com/links/21707

AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.

adactio.com/links/21706

Reading The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry.

Heydon’s latest video is particularly good:

All of my videos are black and white, but especially this one.

adactio.com/links/21704

We wonder often if what is created by AI has any value, and at what cost to artists and creators. These are important considerations. But we need to also wonder what AI is taking from what has already been created.

adactio.com/links/21703

Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models.

adactio.com/links/21702

Sand

Pacific coast

On the beach

Sunday morning session

Some really great advice here:

• Use native layout systems
• Start with semantic HTML
• Use fluid type with fluid space
• Always bet on progressive enhancement
• Trust the browser
• Ditch the “physical” CSS

adactio.com/links/21697

Backyard oranges

Every UI control you roll yourself is a liability. You have to design it, test it, ship it, document it, debug it, maintain it — the list goes on.

It makes you wonder why we insist on rolling (or styling) our own common UI controls so often. Perhaps we’d be better off asking: What are the fewest amount of components we have to build to deliver value to our users?

adactio.com/links/21695

Reading Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

Going to San Diego. brb

Wednesday session

Tuesday session