Well, I'd appear to have a whole bunch of new readers after the last article: welcome, everyone! This is a blog/newsletter/place to publish long-form articles about the intersections of tech, politics and culture that I write: I try and publish about once a week, but there is sometimes slippage. This is entirely reader-supported: if you like what I'm doing and want to help me make more of it, there are avenues to do so, with links at the bottom of the article.

The release of the Sora slop-feed monstrosity has really done some shock and awe on the general public and on the press. People are wowed by the fidelity and the stability of the product, especially when compared to what previous iterations of Sora, and models like it, have been able to generate. This fidelity has also lead more people to ask questions than they were initially when it was mushy/sliding/morphing junk.

My recent post on removing classes from my personal site was unusual in a few ways; I got a surprising number of kind emails about it, and on the flip side, it broke containment and ended up on Hacker News. I know you shouldn’t look at the comments. No good can possibly come from looking at the comments. I looked at the comments.

Today’s world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments accordingly. Arriving at any conclusion is an exercise in threat modeling.

It’s not widely understood that it is technically possible for privately hosted data to be obtained by government, law enforcement, or even private parties without your knowledge.

One of my favorite stories from Chicago's recent history is the invisible flood that happened in 1992 that forced the shutdown of downtown Chicago for days. Repair work was happening on the Kinzie Street bridge, one of many that span the Chicago River. They were replacing nearly hundred-year-old pilings with updated ones that were driven deep into the ground beneath the river. Unbeknownst to anyone, one of the pilings was too close to an forgotten coal delivery tunnel that had been dug in 1906.

Trump’s National Design Studio has an executive order to “modernize the interfaces that serve everyday citizens”. That means rich/white people (but not the ‘disabled’ kind). The US government had digital service agencies that cared about a performant and accessible web until they got the DOGE treatment.

There was a time when I could ask, “Did you see the latest NPM attack?” And your answer would be either “Yes” or “No”.

Imagine listening to your favourite podcast. You rewind it to go over something you missed, but each time you replay it, it’s somehow different.

I want to take control of my music library and be responsible for organizing and tagging all of my music files. This probably sounds like making work for the sake of work, but it’s something that I’m passionate about. Like a well-curated and organized collection of records, clothes, make-up, or books, it feels good knowing everything is there for a reason and where it should be.

Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.

The rattle of a train moving in the quiet late night wouldn’t be the best sleep one could get but youth and excitement forgive. We had bunks to sleep in, which is far better than what most train infrastructure offered at the time. My travel mates, usually my cousin and friend, would get up periodically to walk, pee, or smoke. I don’t smoke, but I would accompany them as an excuse to chat in that small temporal space where the bathrooms and exits are in-between cars.

I think it’s long past time I start discussing “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) as a failed technology. Specifically, that large language models (LLMs) have repeatedly and consistently failed to demonstrate value to anyone other than their investors and shareholders. The technology is a failure, and I’d like to invite you to join me in treating it as such.

“Ivory tower design system”. That’s a more common four-word combination than people may think. A centralized design system is, by nature, detached from the people using it. It’s a downside that I’ll take every single time. But it’s a real issue.

Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store? I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods look legit at first glance. But then when you look closer, you realize something is off.

Internet enthusiasts of the previous century sometimes expressed the power of code by declaring the sovereignty of cyberspace, or that "code is law."

Setting the box-sizing model to border-box is one of the few remaining CSS ‘resets’ used across most projects. But there are two common approaches, and the more popular choice will cause more problems than it solves.

Composition may be the killer feature of the Shadow DOM. By “composition” we mean composing an element’s light DOM children within its encapsulated shadow tree using elements.

Even if you’ve been doing JavaScript for a while, you might be surprised to learn that setTimeout(0) is not really setTimeout(0). Instead, it could run 4 milliseconds later/

Nilay Patel sat down for a Decoder interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott to talk about NLWeb, an open source effort to allow an LLM-style indexing of small websites and provide local search. Instead of having large centralized search indexes like Google or Bing, the indexing shifts to sites having their own local indexes that large search platforms hook into via an MCP, an API endpoint for LLMs (basically). Lots to unpack there, but at first glance I like the idea of local ownership of search

So much of the web these days is ruined by the bloat that is modern JavaScript frameworks. React apps that take several seconds to load. NextJS sites that throw random hydration errors. The node_modules folder that takes up gigabytes on your hard drive.

Rollie Pemberton was barely a teenager when he started rapping. His hometown, Edmonton, didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene in the early aughts, so he honed his craft online. He plugged an old-school microphone into his mom’s desktop computer, recorded a few verses, later turned them into tracks, and sent them out into the burgeoning music blogosphere. Within a few years, he’d adopted the emcee name Cadence Weapon and earned a reputation as a shrewd critic and sharp lyricist.

Find inspiration for naming things – be that HTML classes, CSS properties or JavaScript functions – using these lists of useful words.

Last week, my country’s far-right administration announced they were establishing an “America by Design” initiative, along with a so-called National Design Studio to oversee it. That studio will, to quote its own homepage, “improve how Americans experience their government — online, in person, and the spaces in between.” After seeing the announcement, I read through the “America by Design” web page. And I have some thoughts.

The United States government has long had an interest in boosting its high technology sector, with manifold objectives: for soft power, espionage, and financial dominance, at least. It has accomplished this through tax incentives, funding some of the best universities in the world, lax antitrust and privacy enforcement, and — in some cases — direct involvement. The internet began as a Department of Defense project, and the government invests in businesses through firms like In-Q-Tel.

Twenty years ago, in August of 2005, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly wrote “We are the Web” for the magazine. He begins by looking backwards ten years to 1995, a few months before a Netscape IPO would spur the web’s growth. There were, of course, many early adopters who believed in the promise of the web. But far more were critical of the web, believing that without massive consolidation, there would never be enough content or enough commerce to make the web truly viable.

We can build UI components with accessibility in mind. We can also document accessibility specifics alongside them, or review them for obvious barriers during development. All helpful and recommended. What about claiming conformance? In this post, I'll talk about how WCAG technically doesn't allow for that, and why I believe WCAG is right.

Extremely silly mood and admission: I’m mildly annoyed when I see so many others online stressing about changing hosters, tools and more. Completely ridiculous feeling to have, because that doesn’t even affect me at all. It’s not my life, so why am I getting annoyed by others constantly switching up their tools and services and talking about it? It’s just another link to follow, a new look, a new navigation, or them using another software to organize. Whatever, no problem! Some of it is even interesting! So?

I'm going to be honest, when doing accessibility audits, the term "best practice" bothers me.

I got used to writing lengthy technical articles over the last few years that I’d been finding it increasingly harder to publish articles that are not lengthy and overly technical over the last few months. This had led me to abandon a lot of rough ideas and article drafts, eventually leading to my blog feeling abandoned for months in a row.