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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
A shame that this must-read book won’t be out in time for Christmas—’twould make a great stocking filler for a lot of people I know.
A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.
Feature suggestion: an end-of-year Spotify Unwrapped thingy but for Wikipedia contributions (maybe it would encourage me to contribute more).
Tuesday session
Monday session
Reading Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson.
Thursday session
Wednesday session
I’m suscribing to this RSS feed.
I’m quitting while I’m ahead: https://adactio.com/journal/21585
Tabloid is a turing-complete programming language for writing programs in the style of clickbait news headlines.
This tracks (ahem) with my experience of coding on trains.
Hidde lists the potentially flaky connectivity as a downside, but for many kinds of deep work I’d say it’s very much a feature, not a bug.
Sunday session
Spent the morning rocking out with Salter Cane.
chromamine.com/2024/10/you-can-use-web-components-without-the-shadow-dom/
So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?
- Obvious Markup
- Instantiation is More Consistent
- They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
Wednesday session
I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.
And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.
Reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
Monday session
Sunday session
A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).
Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:
I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
React is a non-transferable skill.
React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI.
autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features likedialogor popovers requiresuseEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.
Wednesday session
Looking up the translation for the word “cute” in another language, it’s listed in a dictionary as “cute, a.F” where “a.F” stands for “adjective, Familiar” …but that is not how I read it at first!
