Sunday afternoon session in Belfast

Going to Belfast. brb

People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.

This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

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Find freedom not in infinite choice, but in working a single seam until you strike gold: conducting dozens, even hundreds, of iterations within a tight parameter space—not in search of more, but in search of better.

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CSI London, York, and Oxford:

Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.

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Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:

The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.

I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.

And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!

adactio.com/links/22041

A fantastic explanation of the building blocks of SVG, illustrated—as always—with Josh’s interactive examples.

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Following on from my earlier link about AI etiquette, what Trys experienced here is utterly deflating:

I spent a couple of hours working through my notes and writing up a review before sending it to my manager, awaiting their equivalent review for me.

However, the review I received back was, quite simply, quintessential AI slop.

When slopagandists talk about “AI” boosting productivity, this is the kind of shite they’re talking about.

adactio.com/links/22039

If you’re a front-end developer and you don’t read Chris Ferdinandi’s blog, you should change that right now. Add that RSS feed to your feed reader of choice! Lately he’s been posting about some of the thinking behind his Kelp UI library. That includes some great nuggets of...

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. … Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war. You engaged and replied – you’re as good as dead. The dead internet is not just dead it’s poisoned.

I think that realistically, our main weapon in this war is AI etiquette.

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This page collects my blog posts on the topic of fighting off spam bots, search engine spiders and other non-humans wasting the precious resources we have on Earth.

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Monday session

Hi Chris. You mentioned you were off to Portugal soon to explore Lisbon and Porto and I promised I’d send along some food tips from my previous visits. I’ll skip over the obvious. No doubt you’ll seek out pasteis de nata in Lisbon. And I’m sure someone will convince you to ...

Thit Corcaigh ina gcodladh sa dara leath! 😴

Bhuaigh an fhoireann níos fearr. 😭

After spending a week immersed in the language and the landscape of Glencolmcille, Jessica and I were headed to Miltown Malbay for the annual Willie Clancy music week. I could only get us accommodation from the Monday onwards so we had a weekend in between Donegal and Clare...

Watching the all-Ireland hurling final on BBC2, but listening to the commentary on Raidió na Gaeltachta.

Corcaigh abú!

Saturday session

A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.

This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.

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I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share. And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past: At no point did the constraints make the ...

The short version of what I want to say is: vibe coding seems to live very squarely in the land of prototypes and toys. Promoting software that’s been built entirely using this method would be akin to sending a hacked weekend prototype to production and expecting it to be stable.

Remy is taking a very sensible approach here:

I’ve used it myself to solve really bespoke problems where the user count is one.

Would I put this out to production: absolutely not.

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I had never been to Donegal before my trip to Glencolmcille to spend a week there learning Irish. I had heard it’s beautiful there. But pictures don’t really do it justice. When our bus was winding its way down into the valley, it looked breathtaking, laid out before us lik...

This is a really thougtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.

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Reading Haven by Emma Donoghue.

Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!

While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.

Bravo!

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Thursday session

Wednesday session

I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!

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Brian’s excellent comparison of network latency and the nervous system of animals:

If an earthquake occurs in California USA, halfway around the globe someone can find out faster than a blue whale detects something has touched its tail.

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Monday session

Má bhfuil a fhios agat, tá a fhios agat.