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.

Yesterday, my husband and I treated ourselves to an evening at the spa. It was a nice spa, clean and spacious, not too busy. But what was supposed to be a relaxing and rejuvenating experience soon turned into an incredibly stressful and surreal one, because most of the other spa attendees spent the majority of their time with their phones in their hands: filming.

These past couple of days have each felt like a week. This week like a month. This month like a year. This year like a lifetime.

Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.

It’s a warm summer night in NYC and I’m walking through central park with a friend, the fireflies blink around us like an external reflection of the neurons firing in our brains as the conversation sparks.

We often talk about design systems as singular entities. “The design system saves time and increases quality.” “Oh, the design system provides that.” “Update to the latest version of the design system.” The reality is that a design system is a multi-faceted layer cake, and also operates as part of other layered systems within an organization.

At Apple's annual marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here's the list, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromium.

All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to center a

Like many other self-styled thinky programmer guys, I like to imagine myself as a sort of Holmesian genius, making trenchant observations, collecting them, and then synergizing them into brilliant deductions with the keen application of my powerful mind.

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter anyway.” I've come to expect these words in my social media replies to my own work, and elsewhere in response to other journalists doing critical reporting on the abuses of the Trump regime.

Thomas Ptacek published this article in the Fly.io company blog. You might ask why such a one-sided and belittling rant with plenty of toxic vitriol could be published in a business blog, but let's put that aside.

I don’t recommend publishing your first draft of a long blog post. It’s not a question of typos or grammatical errors or the like. Those always slip through somehow and, for the most part, don’t impact the meaning or argument of the post.

One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager.

I wanted to collect the thoughts that have been swirling in my brain about AI. Not to add another think piece to the pile, but to record them so I can understand where my head was at on the topic. Kind of a future letter to myself.

The parts of the web/tech industry we lit on fire and probably aren't going to get back.

Engineers often feel a lot of ownership over the code they write. That’s understandable: it’s partially their creation, and it’s also their workspace, so they have a direct interest in it being a nice place to work in.

The VC model of technology cannot allow for the joyful technology artist. Joyful artistic technology is humane, useful, interesting, accomplished and occasionally it may be profitable and world-changing. It is not something that will ever be produced by AI, nor can it be produced by the apparent inhumane factory conditions that big tech firms desire to turn their programming operations into.

"Artificial intelligence" is not a technology. A chef’s knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot meaningfully talk about a technology that encompasses both Sherman and santoku; the affordances, practices, and intentions are far too different to be brought into useful conversation.

Careless People is a tell-all book that walks through Facebook’s rampant (and criminally?) inept responses to it’s growing role in global policy, from it’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to the election of Donald J. Trump. The book, written by Facebook’s former director of foreign policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, explains that Zuckerberg initially denied the notion that Facebook could ever impact an election but over time starts to see Facebook and social media as a powerful “Digital Fifth Estate”.