Wednesday session

At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

adactio.com/links/21408

This is a masterpiece.

adactio.com/links/21407

Tuesday session

I’ve noticed a really strange justification from people when I ask them about their use of generative tools that use large language models (colloquially and inaccurately labelled as artificial intelligence). I’ll point out that the training data requires the wholesale harve...

Why, oh, why can’t I use logical properties in media queries?

Seeing min-width in a stylesheet just looks like a weird bug when you’re using min-inline-size everywhere else.

This is grim:

If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.

adactio.com/links/21403

The goal isn’t to write less code.

It’s to ship less code to users. Better code. Faster code. More resilient code.

THIS!

Sooooo many front-end developers don’t grasp this fundamental principle: it’s not about you!

adactio.com/links/21402

Matt has made a new website for tracking our collective progress levelling up the Kardashev scale:

Maximising energy generation, distribution and usage at street level, for as many people as possible, everyday.

adactio.com/links/21401

This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:

What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.

adactio.com/links/21400

Reading Dogs Of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Sunday session

I’ve been going buildless—or as Brad crudely puts it, raw-dogging websites on a few projects recently. Not just obviously simple things like Clearleft’s Browser Support page, but sites like: The Clearleft podcast Patterns Day UX London They also have 0 dependencies. Lik...

Thursday session

• People only understand things relative to things they already understand
• People only understand things in context
• People rely on patterns and consistency
• People seek to minimize cognitive load
• People have varying levels of expertise and familiarity
• People are goal-oriented
• People often don’t know what they’re looking for
• Information is more useful when it’s actionable

adactio.com/links/21395

Wednesday session

Idle CSS thought …should the flex-direction values “row” and “column” have the aliases “inline” and “block”?

flex-direction: inline;

flex-direction: block;

Like @michelle@front-end.social says:

It feels a little like we’re going backwards.

https://css-irl.info/the-problem-with-surveys/

Here’s the sausage fest I pulled out of:

https://frontmania.com/

They responded to my concerns:

We did receive a lot of talks, but almost no women because there are almost no women in this kind of jobs.

😳

“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.

And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.

adactio.com/links/21390

Oh, this looks like an excellent event (in London and online):

Adventures in Episodic Type Design

With David Jonathan Ross

Thursday 17th October 2024

adactio.com/links/21389

Pulling out of a conference I was supposed to speak at because, now that the schedule is live, I see that 90% of the line-up is white dudes like me.

(They also don’t pay their speakers. These two things are not unrelated.)

Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.

adactio.com/links/21387

I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks. At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot. My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alterna...

So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.

You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?

Do it.

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

adactio.com/links/21385

Here’s a picture from Belfast Trad Fest of me in my happy place (playing in a fantastic session led by piper Mick O’Brien and fiddler Sean Smyth).

Our ethical struggle with generative models derives in part from the fact that we…sort of can’t have them ethically, right now, to be honest. We have known how to build models like this for a long time, but we did not have the necessary volume of parseable data available ...

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way. Another great piece by Ted Chiang! The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativit...

If you have a pet parrot, it’s fun to get it to say “Help, I’m trapped in the body of a parrot!”

If you have a photocopier, it’s fun to copy a piece of paper that says “I am a sentient photocopier!”

#LargeLanguageModels

In our current digital landscape, where a corporate algorithm tells us what to read, watch, drink, eat, wear, smell like, and sound like, human curation of the web is an act of revolution. A simple list of hyperlinks published under a personal domain name is subversive.

adactio.com/links/21380