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.

In this episode, I have a lively chat with Cory Dransfeldt about getting started as a web developer making band websites and his recent work on design systems, his passion for supporting creators and the preservation of craft, the ai.robots.txt open source project, what the GitHub CEO said (note: we recorded this episode before he announced he was stepping down), releasing a music app for Navidrome, machines coming for our tattoos (!), and a whole lot more.

Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home.

Nowadays I’m used to signing up for services and discovering that the username blakewatson is already taken—yes I’m one of those people who uses their real name everywhere. But that’s okay because I have something the other Blake Watsons don’t. Back in 2005 when I was learning HTML and obsessed with the incredible knowledge that you could just upload a file to the internet and everyone could see it, I made the decision to purchase the domain, blakewatson.com. To this day, that decision stands as one of my best. It was cool and nerdy to have your own personal homepage. And okay, maybe it’s still a little nerdy now. But in an age where corporate social media is the default, a personal homepage is a breath of fresh air.

AI is everywhere. The conversations are ubiquitous and the technology is rapidly transforming. It dominates the conferences I attend and the strategy blogs I read across journalism and tech. This week, even Mark Zuckerberg, seeing the writing on the wall, published an essay about Meta building "a personal superintelligence that serves everyone".

Contrary to what many people seem to be doing, especially in the digital world, I don’t often change the tools and services I use. When I find something that works, I’m happy to stick around for the long run. Well, at least unless something major happens that forces me to reconsider my choices.

I linked to this post from CloudFlare yesterday where they showed, based on the data they have, that Perplexity is using all sorts of shitty tactics to get around robots.txt[1] and other blocks based on user agent.

Last week, both The Verge and Wired announced major newsletter strategies. Wired writes of a “traffic apocalypse”, where “platforms on which outlets like Wired used to connect with readers, listeners, and viewers are failing in real time”. The Verge describes “Google Zero”: the moment when the dwindling supply of visitors from Google Search completely dries up.

Most workday afternoons, I leave my desk, set my Slack status to “away,” and take a meandering forty-minute walk around my neighborhood. This open secret between me and my coworkers—a habit I stumbled into a few years ago—has proven immensely beneficial to both my psychological and physical well-being. After a walk I think better, I feel better, and I have more energy. So I treat the brief time I dedicate to walking as sacred, blocking out the time on my calendar and ignoring or disabling notifications on my phone.

A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers. Thankfully, I still have access to my library because I saw this video by Jared Henderson warning of the change and downloaded all ~400 of my books immediately.

The first benefit that came to my mind when I started thinking about this, was replicating commands. If I use a GUI, to replicate some complex action, I need to do a lot of clicking around, whereas using command line, I can run the command with one copy-paste command (or using history feature) as many times as I want without having to do any more work.

I feel like I’m going crazy. I keep hearing people talk about how they still trust Firefox more than any of the alternative browsers. Most recently, it was in this article in the Register, Firefox is fine. The people running it are not. But Firefox is not fine. Firefox is turning into a tool for surveillance capitalism.