Friday session

Afternoon tea and tunes

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!

adactio.com/links/22541

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google: The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken. He’s absolute...

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

adactio.com/links/22539

This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?

adactio.com/links/22538

Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.

adactio.com/links/22537

Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.

adactio.com/links/22536

Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:

At its core, form-saver is a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values in localStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.

adactio.com/links/22535

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird. Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’...

Sunday session

After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn. When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings: The b...

Reading Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

Thursday session

People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to: Compression. Transformation. Expansion. Compressi...

Wednesday session

A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.

adactio.com/links/22527

A stack is also technical debt, non-transferable knowledge, accelerated obsolescence, and vendor lock-in. That means fragility and overall unnecessary complication. Popular stacks inevitably turn into cargo cults that build in spite of the web, not for it.

The web platform does not require build toolchains. Always default to, and regress to, the fundamentals of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Those core standards are the web stack.

adactio.com/links/22526

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.

No logins, no registration, no data collection.

adactio.com/links/22525

Just heard the sad news about Moya Brennan passing. Some of the first records I ever bought were by Clannad—Macalla, Magical Ring, Legend.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

Monday session

The bots are swarming hard today, laying waste to the meadows of the open web. This is what powers vibe-coding.

The slop must flow.

I know a young student in Germany who needs to learn about relevance of the Entscheidungsproblem and Alan Turing to today’s work in computation—who should I put them in touch with?

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy.

adactio.com/links/22520

Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience. One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting ...

The conference circuit is in a slump these days. That won’t change as long as people don’t buy tickets. And a good conference circuit is typically something that you start to miss only when it’s too late.

adactio.com/links/22518

Tuesday session

Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time. For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequio...

Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience: B...

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Salter Cane gig on Saturday night—that was fun!