Lo-fi selfie with Manu

Generative AI vegetarianism, simply put, is avoiding generative AI tools as much as you can in your day-to-day life.

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The Session has been online in some form since the late 1990s. That’s long before web fonts existed. To begin with, Times New Roman was the only game in town if you wanted serif type on a website. When Microsoft introduced Georgia it was a godsend. A beautiful typeface desi...

This is about something that’s already happening, that doesn’t show up in employment figures: the quiet destruction of the feedback loop that turns inexperienced people into competent ones. The process by which you get something wrong, feel it, understand why, and become slightly less wrong next time. It’s unglamorous and it’s slow and it’s the only way it’s ever worked.

AI short-circuits that learning completely. Not maliciously. Just structurally. When you can generate something that looks right without doing the thinking, you will (most people, most people being me, will, most of the time, under pressure, with a deadline) and the muscle that thinking would have built never develops.

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Mutually assured Mechanical Turk.

This is genuinely much more interesting and wholesome than a chat interface powered by a large language model.

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Bobbie says:

Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into him at a party in a back yard in Brighton…

That was my party!

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The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.

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In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve used the web install API in production. Specifically, I’ve used it on The Session. In order to do that, I had to register for the origin trial. I’ve just signed up for another origin trial. This time it’s for the proposed focusgrou...

I have websites in my dock on my computer. I have websites on the home screen of my phone. When I open these websites from the dock or from the home screen, they behave just like native apps. It’s brilliant! But knowing that you can add a website to the dock or to the home ...

I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:

There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.

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You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.

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Brilliant!

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Sunday morning kitchen session in B

Thursday session

If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.

But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.

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Wednesday session

If you wanted to make a really crude approximation of project management, you could say there are two main styles: waterfall and agile. It’s not as simple as that by any means. And the two aren’t really separate things; agile came about as a response to the failures of wate...

An open source project that has already produced a great app for learning Irish—programmed in a language called Draíocht (sin “magic” as Béarla)!

I’m supporting this on Open Collective.

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Tuesday session

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This knocked me for six when I read it back in 2022: It’s like a slow-building sucker punch. Like my other favourite book of that year—A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—it’s hard to classify. I think it’s autoficti...

Monday session

I went to State Of The Browser in London on the weekend. It was great! I mean, it’s always great but this year the standard felt really high. All the talks were top quality. I’ve been at events with ticket prices a literal order of magnitude greater but with quality nowhere...

Reading A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Large language models help you build the thing faster, which is the primary end goal for your company but only sometimes for you. My primary goal might be to build the thing faster, but it also might be to learn something durably, to enjoy the work, to look forward to Monday.

I don’t like the mental fragility of not fully understanding how my own code works, where AI-generated code is “mine” in that it’s attributed to me in the git blame and I’m its maintainer going forward.

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Curse you, Betteridge’s Law!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c1d6q1l5r6do

But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.

— Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You

Birthday session

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come. It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery. Mozi...

There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.

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The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.

Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.

The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.

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