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”.

I recently wrote about AI and productivity, and how data from the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report shows that widespread AI adoption in the software industry is contributing to a real and meaningful decline in software delivery performance. Approximately 76% of developers use AI tools in daily tasks such as coding, debugging, and documentation.

It’s rare that a national news story surfaces right at my sweet spot of journalism, book publishing, and Chicago, but yesterday, May 20, was one such special day. On that day, it was discovered by a reader on BlueSky that the May 18 Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the city’s two daily papers, had published a 64-page summer-themed insert titled “Heat Index” that appeared to have been largely generated by AI hallucination. A section on “summer reading” recommending fake books by real authors like Isabel Allende and Rebecca Makkai was what tipped astute readers off.

Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.

Click “I agree” to continue. You didn’t click it, though. Or maybe you did? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.

In my day to day life, I often forget how much advertising most of the people face every day: ads are delivered to home via mail unless forbidden; linear TV has so many ads constantly interrupting the shows; web is near unusable without an ad blocker; newspapers and magazines are full of ads too.

If you read about the current crop of “artificial intelligence” tools, you’ll eventually come across the word “hallucinate.” It’s used as a shorthand for any instance where the software just, like, makes stuff up: An error, a mistake, a factual misstep — a lie.

It depends on who you ask. But the current wave of generative AI has unpleasant side effects that are hard to ignore: large-scale copyright infringements, environmental impact and bias.

…Unless you want to fail all the WCAGs, create litigation risk, close off opportunities in Europe, engage in reputational harm, and oh yeah, throw up barriers to your customers and users.

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If you aren’t using this technology, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. There is no future where this technology is not dominant and relevant. If you are not using this, you will be unemployable. This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.