See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

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👀

Tá sceitimíní orm!

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Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar. The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the...

Reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

Pan-fried Irish salmon.

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.

There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.

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Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.

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There’s the old adage “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Or to put it more broadly, “everyone else is doing it.” It’s dispiriting how often this explanation is given as justification for a dubious design decision, from home-page carousels to cookie banners. Nic Chan has w...

Sultans!

Going to Cobh. brb

Reading Rose/House by Arkady Martine.

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That’s it.

That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.

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Monday session

Sunday roast

The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.

Can’t wait!

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Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.

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AI has the Jeopardy Phenomenon too. If you use it to generate code that is outside your expertise, you are likely to think it’s all well and good, especially if it seems to work at first pop. But if you’re intimately familiar with the technology or the code around t...

Thursday session

Wednesday session

My mind boggles at the thought of using a generative tool based on a large language model to do any kind of qualatitive user research, so every single thing that Gregg says here makes complete sense to me.

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Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins

I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.

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Tuesday session

Fiddlers three

Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.

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Here’s a little snippet of CSS that solves a problem I’ve never considered:

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

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Safari, Chrome, and Edge all allow you to install websites as though they’re apps. On mobile Safari, this is done with the “Add to home screen” option that’s buried deep in the “share” menu, making it all but useless. On the desktop, this is “Add to dock” in Safari, or “In...

This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:

CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.

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A short piece of speculative fiction.

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Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!

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Belfast TradFest back in July.