Archive: March, 2023
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Thursday, March 30th, 2023
Wednesday, March 29th, 2023
Readability Guidelines
Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.
Replying to @jensimmons@front-end.social on mastodon.social
Any chance we might get support for the is
attribute?
https://caniuse.com/mdn-apicustomelementregistrybuiltinelementsupport
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/is
The search element | scottohara.me
Iâve already add the search
element to thesession.org, but while browser support is still rolling out, Iâm being extra verbose:
<search role="search">
...
</search>
Brought to you by the department of redunancy department.
Iâll remove the ARIA role once browsers are all on board. As Scott says:
Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.
Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting
A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.
Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. Thatâs good. We donât want a 927 situation.
My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetizationâI hope they donât attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.
The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.
Define âinnovationâ.
GB Renewables Map
A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:
Itâs a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
Replying to @adrian@holovaty.com on mastodon.social
I have the same issue on https://thesession.org
Hopefully the audioSession
API will fix this:
Design transformation on the Clearleft podcast
Boom! The Clearleft podcast is back!
The first episode of season four just dropped. Itâs all about design transformation.
Iâve got to be honest, this episode is a little inside baseball. Itâs a bit navel-gazey and soul-searching as I pick apart the messaging emblazoned on the Clearleft website:
The design transformation consultancy.
Whereas most of the previous episodes of the podcast would be of interest to our peersâfellow designersâthis one feels like it might of more interest to potential clients. But I hope itâs not too sales-y.
Youâll hear from Danish designer Maja Raunbak, and American in Amsterdam Nick Thiel as well as Clearleftâs own Chris Pearce. And Iâve sampled a talk from the Leading Design archives by Stuart Frisby.
The episode clocks in at a brisk eighteen and a half minutes. Have a listen.
While youâre at it, take this opportunity to subscribe to the Clearleft podcast on Overcast, Spotify, Apple, Google or by using a good olâ-fashioned RSS feed. That way the next episodes in the season will magically appear in your podcatching software of choice.
But Iâm not making any promises about when that will be. Previously, I released new episodes in a season on a weekly basis. This time Iâm going to release each episode whenever itâs ready. That might mean thereâll be a week or two between episodes. Or there might be a month or so between episodes.
I realise that this unpredictable release cycle is the exact opposite of what youâre supposed to do, but itâs actually the most sensible way for me to make sure the podcast actually gets out. I was getting a bit overwhelmed with the prospect of having six episodes ready to launch over a six week period. What with curating UX London and other activities, it wouldâve been too much for me to do.
So rather than delay this season any longer, Iâm going to drop each episode whenever itâs done. Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and cats living together!
Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)âzachleat.com
This isnât an opinion piece. This is documentation.
You canât JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.
Monday, March 27th, 2023
More speakers for UX London 2023
Iâd like to play it cool when I announce the latest speakers for UX London 2023, like I could be all nonchalant and say, âoh yeah, did I not mention these people are also speakingâŠ?â
But I wouldnât be able to keep up that façade for longer than a second. The truth is I am excited to the point of skittish gigglyness about this line-up.
Look, Iâll let you explore these speakers for yourself while I try to remain calm and simply enumerate the latest additionsâŠ
- Ignacia Orellana, Service design and research consultant,
- Stefanie Posavec, Designer, artist and author, and
- David Dylan Thomas, Author, speaker, filmmaker.
The line-up is almost complete now! Just one more speaker to announce.
I highly recommend you get your UX London ticket if you havenât already. You wonât want to miss this!
Sunday, March 26th, 2023
Reading Circe by Madeline Miller.
Saturday, March 25th, 2023
The machines wonât save your design system â Hey Jovo Design
Every day, a new marketing email, Medium post, or VC who will leave Twitter when theyâre cold in a body bag tells us that machine learning (ML, which they call AI because it sounds more expensive) is going to change the way we work. Doesnât really matter what your job is. ML is going to read, write, code, and paint for us.
Naturally, the excitement around ML has found its way into the design systems community. Thereâs an apparent natural synergy between ML and design systems. Design systems practitioners are tantalized by the promise of even greater efficiency and scale. We wish a machine would write our docs for us.
We are all, every single one of us, huge fucking nerds.
Friday, March 24th, 2023
Hello, internet | Sam OâNeill
I have been reminded time and time again of the utility of writing. How it is a way to turn messy thoughts into coherent ideas, and how â as we all know â practice makes perfect. So Iâm going to give it a go.
Welcome to the indie web, Sam!
Replying to @AmeliaBR@front-end.social on mastodon.social
Iâm talking about phrases, rather than names: single-page apps; large language models; client-side rendering; non-fungible tokens.
Just regular adjectives and nouns. No title case required, or deserved.
Thursday, March 23rd, 2023
Eight years ago today I published the first of 100 posts where Iâd write exactly 100 words every day:
https://adactio.com/journal/8577
It was fun!
https://adactio.com/journal/tags/100words
I should do it again sometime.
Techbros seem to love spelling their half-baked creations with capital letters to make them seem important.
Itâs a small act of resistance, but I write them as regular words. The added readability is a nice bonus.
Steam
Picture someone tediously going through a spreadsheet that someone else has filled in by hand and finding yet another error.
âI wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!â they cry.
The year was 1821 and technically the spreadsheet was a book of logarithmic tables. The frustrated cry came from Charles Babbage, who channeled his frustration into a scheme to create the worldâs first computer.
His difference engine didnât work out. Neither did his analytical engine. Heâd spend his later years taking his frustrations out on street musicians, whichâas a former busker myselfâearns him a hairy eyeball from me.
But weâve all been there, right? Some tedious task that feels soul-destroying in its monotony. Surely this is exactly what machines should be doing?
I have a hunch that this is where machine learning and large language models might turn out to be most useful. Not in creating breathtaking works of creativity, but in menial tasks that nobody enjoys.
Someone was telling me earlier today about how they took a bunch of haphazard notes in a client meeting. When the meeting was done, they needed to organise those notes into a coherent summary. Boring! But ChatGPT handled it just fine.
I donât think that use-case is going to appear on the cover of Wired magazine anytime soon but it might be a truer glimpse of the future than any of the breathless claims being eagerly bandied about in Silicon Valley.
You know the way we no longer remember phone numbers, because, well, why would we now that we have machines to remember them for us? Iâd be quite happy if machines did that for the annoying little repetitive tasks that nobody enjoys.
Iâll give you an example based on my own experience.
Regular expressions are my kryptonite. Iâm rubbish at them. Any time I have to figure one out, the knowledge seeps out of my brain before long. I think thatâs because I kind of resent having to internalise that knowledge. It doesnât feel like something a human should have to know. âI wish to God these regular expressions had been calculated by steam!â
Now I can get a chatbot with a large language model to write the regular expression for me. I still need to describe what I want, so I need to write the instructions clearly. But all the gobbledygook that Iâm writing for a machine now gets written by a machine. That seems fair.
Mind you, I wouldnât blindly trust the output. Iâd take that regular expression and run it through a chatbot, maybe a different chatbot running on a different large language model. âExplain what this regular expression does,â would be my prompt. If my input into the first chatbot matches the output of the second, Iâd have some confidence in using the regular expression.
A friend of mine told me about using a large language model to help write SQL statements. He described his database structure to the chatbot, and then described what he wanted to select.
Again, I wouldnât use that output without checking it first. But again, I might use another chatbot to do that checking. âExplain what this SQL statement does.â
Playing chatbots off against each other like this is kinda how machine learning works under the hood: generative adverserial networks.
Of course, the task of having to validate the output of a chatbot by checking it with another chatbot could get quite tedious. âI wish to God these large language model outputs had been validated by steam!â
Sounds like a job for machines.
Learn Privacy
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
Why ChatGPT Wonât Replace Coders Just Yet
Iâve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.
Thereâs a more subtle problem with ChatGPTâs code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPTâs general âbullshitâ problem.
Home | The Component Gallery
Hereâs an aggregator of components from multiple design systems.
Smoke screen | A Working Library
The story that âartificial intelligenceâ tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isnât replenished.
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023
In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt
Temporal standards bodies.
Disclosure
You know how when youâre on hold to any customer service line you hear a message that thanks you for calling and claims your call is important to them. The message always includes a disclaimer about calls possibly being recorded âfor training purposes.â
Nobody expects that any training is ever actually going to happenâsurely we would see some improvement if that kind of iterative feedback loop were actually in place. But we most certainly want to know that a call might be recorded. Recording a call without disclosure would be unethical and illegal.
Consider chatbots.
If youâre having a text-based (or maybe even voice-based) interaction with a customer service representative that doesnât disclose its output is the result of large language models, that too would be unethical. But, at the present moment in time, it would be perfectly legal.
That needs to change.
I suspect the necessary legislation will pass in Europe first. Weâll see if the USA follows.
In a way, this goes back to my obsession with seamful design. With something as inherently varied as the output of large language models, itâs vital that people have some way of evaluating what theyâre told. I believe we should be able to see as much of the plumbing as possible.
The bare minimum amount of transparency is revealing that a machine is in the loop.
This shouldnât be a controversial take. But I guarantee weâll see resistance from tech companies trying to sell their âAIâ tools as seamless, indistinguishable drop-in replacements for human workers.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2023
Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestringâs Blog
How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).
The perfect link - The A11Y Collective
How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Letâs dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pigâs breakfast of it.
Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Ameliaâs proposed syntax.
Monday, March 20th, 2023
Adoption. â Ethan Marcotte
Ethan highlights a classic case of the McNamara Fallacyâmeasuring adoption of design system components.
The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.
Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2023 Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Keith
Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.
Sunday, March 19th, 2023
50 Years Later, Weâre Still Living in the Xerox Altoâs World - IEEE Spectrum
A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.
Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign
So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Artificial Guessing
Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.
Robin picks up on my framing.
Instead of brainstorming, discussing, iterating, closely inspecting a product to understand it and figure out what to show on a page, well, we can just let the machines figure it out for us! This big guessing machine can do our homework and we can all pack up and go to the beach.
ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem
It doesnât bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.
Yes! Like I said:
Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.
Saturday, March 18th, 2023
Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I canât even. Iâm out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier
Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.
Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:
How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?
Friday, March 17th, 2023
Replying to @SimonJohnGreen on mastodon.social
But no sessions.
(Which is a shameâitâs right âround the corner from me)
Hereâs how the St. Patrickâs Day sessions are shaping up in Brighton:
- 2:30-4:30 The Fiddlerâs Elbow
- 4-6 The Bugle
- 5-7 The Lord Nelson
- 6-8 The Dover Castle
- 8-10 The Jolly Brewer
- 10-? ???
Lå Fhéile Pådraig sona daoibh go léir!
Iâm off to play a rake of tunesâŠ
I presume that âChatGPTâ isnât supposed to be said as one wordââchatgipitââbut rather the capital letters should be spelled out.
So itâs pronounced âSee Hat Jee Pee Tee.â
Thursday, March 16th, 2023
Dumb Password Rules
A hall of shame for ludicrously convoluted password rules that actually reduce security.
Modern Font Stacks
This is handyâa collection of font stacks using system fonts. You can see which ones are currently installed on your machine too.
The most performant web font is no web font.
Reading The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling.
The stupidity of AI | The Guardian
A great piece by James, adapted from the new edition of his book New Dark Age.
The lesson of the current wave of âartificialâ âintelligenceâ, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And donât be intimidated by them either â theyâre really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: âTechnology is what we can learn to do.â
Wednesday, March 15th, 2023
Another three speakers for UX London 2023
I know Iâm being tease, doling out these UX London speaker announcements in batches rather than one big reveal. Indulge me in my suspense-ratcheting behaviour.
Today Iâd like to unveil three speakers whose surnames start with the letter HâŠ
- Stephen Hay, Creative Director at Rabobank,
- Asia Hoe, Senior Product Designer, and
- Amy Hupe, Design Systems consultant at Frankly Design.
Just look at how that line-up is coming together! Thereâll be just one more announcement and then the roster will be complete.
But donât wait for that. Grab your ticket now and Iâll see you in London on June 22nd and 23rd!
Stochastic Parrots Day Tickets, Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite
This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.
Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?đŠ two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.
Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.
www91.pdf
This is the flyer that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau distributed at the Hypertext 91 Conferenceâthe one where their submission was infamously rejected.
The WWW project merges the techniques of information rerieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. lt aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions - BBC News
Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?
Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.
print-color-adjust - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN
I love print stylesheets but I was today years old when I found out that print-color-adjust
exists.
Tuesday, March 14th, 2023
My brother is competing in the Barkley Marathons. Again.
https://runningmagazine.ca/trail-running/whos-who-at-the-barkley-marathons-2023/
Last time he broke his collarbone on the second loop. #bm100
Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[âŠ] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of âscientific managementâ are the same as those of design systemsâincreasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the âoutputâ is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce âfreeâ iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
The climate cost of the AI revolution âą Wim Vanderbauwhede
As a society we need to treat AI resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal AI.
Why arenât logical properties taking over everything? - Chris Coyier
Good question.
I think itâs mostly inertia.
Tech-last
Iâve spent a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about evaluating technology and what Robin describes here is definitely a bad âcode smellâ that should ring alarm bells:
Whatâs really concerning is when everyone is consumed with the technology-first and the problem-last.
Unless youâre working in an RânâD lab, start with user needs.
Iâm certain now that if you want to build something great you have to see through the tech. And thatâs really hard to do when this cool new thing is all that anyone is talking about. But thatâs why this one specific thing is the hallmark of a great organization; they arenât distracted by short-lived trends and instead focus on the problem-first. Relentlessly, through the noise.
Guessing
The last talk at the last dConstruct was by local clever clogs Anil Seth. It was called Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality. Itâs well worth a listen.
Anil covers a lot of the same ground in his excellent book, Being You. He describes a model of consciousness that inverts our intuitive understanding.
We tend to think of our day-to-day reality in a fairly mechanical cybernetic manner; we receive inputs through our senses and then make decisions about reality informed by those inputs.
As another former dConstruct speaker, Adam Buxton, puts it in his interview with Anil, it feels like that old Beano cartoon, the Numskulls, with little decision-making homonculi inside our head.
But Anil posits that it works the other way around. We make a best guess of what the current state of reality is, and then we receive inputs from our senses, and then we adjust our model accordingly. Thereâs still a feedback loop, but cause and effect are flipped. First we predict or guess whatâs happening, then we receive information. Rinse and repeat.
The book goes further and applies this to our very sense of self. We make a best guess of our sense of self and then adjust that model constantly based on our experiences.
Thereâs a natural tendency for us to balk at this proposition because it doesnât seem rational. The rational model would be to make informed calculations based on available data âŠlike computers do.
Maybe thatâs what sets us apart from computers. Computers can make decisions based on data. But we can make guesses.
Enter machine learning and large language models. Now, for the first time, it appears that computers can make guesses.
The guess-making is not at all like what our brains doâlarge language models require enormous amounts of inputs before they can make a single guessâbut still, this should be the breakthrough to be shouted from the rooftops: weâve taught machines how to guess!
And yet. Almost every breathless press release touting some revitalised service that uses AI talks instead about accuracy. It would be far more honest to tout the really exceptional new feature: imagination.
Using AI, we will guess who should get a mortgage.
Using AI, we will guess who should get hired.
Using AI, we will guess who should get a strict prison sentence.
Reframed like that, itâs easy to see why technologists want to bury the lede.
Alas, this means that large language models are being put to use for exactly the wrong kind of scenarios.
(This, by the way, is also true of immersive âvirtual realityâ environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.)
Take search engines. Theyâre based entirely on trust and accuracy. Introducing a chatbot that confidentally conflates truth and fiction doesnât bode well for the long-term reputation of that service.
But what if this is an interface problem?
Currently facts and guesses are presented with equal confidence, hence the accurate descriptions of the outputs as bullshit or mansplaining as a service.
What if the more fanciful guesses were marked as such?
As it is, thereâs a âtemperatureâ control that can be adjusted when generating these outputs; the more the dial is cranked, the further the outputs will stray from the safest predictions. What if that could be reflected in the output?
I donât know what that would look like. It could be typographicâsome markers to indicate which bits should be taken with pinches of salt. Or it could be through content designâphrases like âPerhapsâŠâ, âMaybeâŠâ or âItâs possible but unlikely thatâŠâ
Iâm sure youâve seen the outputs when people request that ChatGPT write their biography. Perfectly accurate statements are generated side-by-side with complete fabrications. This reinforces our scepticism of these tools. But imagine how differently the fabrications would read if they were preceded by some simple caveats.
A little bit of programmed humility could go a long way.
Right now, these chatbots are attempting to appear seamless. If 80% or 90% of their output is accurate, then blustering through the other 10% or 20% should be fine, right? But I think the experience for the end user would be immensely more empowering if these chatbots were designed seamfully. Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.
Mind you, that only works if there is some way to distinguish between fact and fabrication. If thereâs no way to tell how much guessing is happening, then thatâs a major problem. If you canât tell me whether something is 50% true or 75% true or 25% true, then the only rational response is to treat the entire output as suspect.
I think thereâs a fundamental misunderstanding behind the design of these chatbots that goes all the way back to the Turing test. Thereâs this idea that the way to make a chatbot believable and trustworthy is to make it appear human, attempting to hide the gears of the machine. But the real way to gain trust is through honesty.
I want a machine to tell me when itâs guessing. That wonât make me trust it less. Quite the opposite.
After all, to guess is human.
When JavaScript Fails
So, if progressive enhancement is no more expensive to create, future-proof, provides us with technical credit, and ensures that our users always receive the best possible experience under any conditions, why has it fallen by the wayside?
Because before, when you clicked on a link, the browser would go white for a moment.
JavaScript frameworks broke the browser to avoid that momentary loss of control. They then had to recreate everything that the browser had provided for free: routing, history, the back button, accessibility features, the ability for search engines to read the page, et cetera iterum ad infinitum.
Sunday, March 12th, 2023
Happy birthday to Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee
Saturday, March 11th, 2023
Friday, March 10th, 2023
Going to A Coruña. brb
Thursday, March 9th, 2023
Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio
This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.
Social networks like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter that present a so-called algorithmic feed are really providing little more than continuous partial shadowbanning.
Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
Cole Peters â An Introduction to Constraint Based Design Systems
Design systems as codified constraints.
An end to typographic widows on the web | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Rich explains what text-wrap:balance
does âŠand what it doesnât.
Monday, March 6th, 2023
The past is a foreign country
I tried watching a classic Western this weekend, How The West Was Won. I did not make it far. Letâs just say that in the first few minutes, the Spencer Tracy voiceover that accompanies the sweeping vistas sets out an attitude toward the indigenous population that would not fly today.
Itâs one thing to be repulsed by a film from another era, but itâs even more uncomfortable to revisit the films from your own teenage years.
Tim Carmody has written about the real hero of Top Gun:
Icemanâs concern for Maverick and the safety of his fighter unit is totally understandable. He tries, however awkwardly, to discuss Gooseâs death with Maverick. Thereâs no discussion of blame. And when theyâre assigned to fly into combat together, Iceman briefly and discreetly raises the issue of Maverickâs fitness to fly with his superior officer and withdraws his concern once a decision is made.
I know someone who didnât watch Ferris Buellerâs Day Off until they were well into adulthood. Their sympathies lay squarely with Dean Rooney.
And I think we can all agree in hindsight that Walter Peck was completely correct in his assessment of the dangers in Ghostbusters.
Oh, and The Karate Kid was the real bully.
This week, George wrote Iâve fallen out of love with Indiana Jones. Indyâs attitude of âit belongs in a museumâ is the same worldview that got the Parthenon Marbles into the British Museum (instead of, yâknow, the Parthenon where they belong).
Adrian Hon invites us to imagine what it would be like if the tables were turned. He wrote a short piece of speculative fiction called The Taking of Stonehenge:
We selected these archaeological sites based on their importance to our collective understanding of human and galactic history, and their immediate risk of irreparable harm from pollution, climate change, neglect, and looting. We are sympathetic to claims that preserving these sites in their âoriginalâ context is important, but our duty of care outweighs such emotional considerations.
I doubled-down on RSS â Eric Bailey
In which Eric says:
Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.
Iâll take it.
Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.
Like
We use metaphors all the time. To quote George Lakoff, we live by them.
We use analogies some of the time. Theyâre particularly useful when weâre wrapping our heads around something new. By comparing something novel to something familiar, we can make a shortcut to comprehension, or at least, categorisation.
But we need a certain amount of vigilance when it comes to analogies. Just because something is like something else doesnât mean itâs the same.
With that in mind, here are some ways that people are describing generative machine learning tools. Large language models are likeâŠ
The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden
I agree with the reasoning hereâa new display
value would be ideal.
Sunday, March 5th, 2023
Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube
This video was in my âWatch Laterâ queue for ages but I finally got âround to watching it this weekend. Itâs ace! Great content, great narrative, great deliveryâwouldâve made a good dConstruct talk.
Saturday, March 4th, 2023
Those meddling kids! The Reverse Scooby-Doo theory of tech innovation comes with the excuses baked in | Nieman Journalism Lab
Manufactured inevitability a.k.a bullshit:
Thereâs a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:
- Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.
- The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we wonât be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.
We can think of this rhetorical move as a Reverse Scooby-Doo. Itâs as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby-Doo villain â but decided in this case that heâs actually the hero. (âWe wouldâve gotten away with it, too, if it wasnât for those meddling regulators!â)
The critical point is that their faith in the promise of the technology is balanced against a revulsion towards existing institutions. (The future is bright! Unless they make it dim.) If the future doesnât turn out as predicted, those meddlers are to blame. It builds a safety valve into their model of the future, rendering all predictions unfalsifiable.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2023
Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much
- Donât wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
- Every tool will eventually fade.
- Flexibility is a valuable skill
- Changing tools does not mean starting over.
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
Redefining Developer Experience â Begin Blog
Perhaps most problematic of all is the effect that contemporary developer experience has on educational programs (be they traditional classes, bootcamps, workshops, or anything in between). Such a rapidly expanding and ever changing technological ecosystem necessarily means that curricula struggle to keep up, and that the fundamentals of web development (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP, browser APIsâŠ) are often glossed over in favor of getting students into the technologies more likely to land them jobs (like React and its many pals). This leads to an outpouring of early career developers who may speak confidently about things like React hooks or Redux state reducers, but who also lack any concept about the nature of HTML semantics or the most basic accessibility considerations. To be clear, Iâm not throwing shade at those developers â they have been failed by an industry obsessed with the new and shiny at the expense of foundational practices and end user experiences.
And so, I ask: what exactly are we buying when we are sold âdeveloper experienceâ today? Who is benefiting from it? And if it is indeed something many of us arenât too excited about (to put it kindly), how can we change it for the better?
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era | The Spicy Web
We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.
That was a lie.
We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.
That also was a lie.
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
Jeremy Keith â Declarative Design â SOTR - YouTube
Hereâs the video of the talk I gave at Mondayâs meet-up here in Brightonâitâs a very condensed version of my longer conference talk on declarative design.
Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
Out with the Clearleft crew in a pub having a retro games nightâŠ
Them: âWant to play Tekken? Or is it Tekken 2?â
Me: âAs long it stars Liam Neeson, thatâs all that matters!â
On Container Queries, Responsive Images, and JPEG-XL â Cloud Four
Container queries canât be used in the sizes
attribute for responsive images. Here, Jason breaks down why that is (spoiler: itâs the lookahead pre-parser) and segues into a truly long term solution: a âmagicalâ image format.
If youâve ever thought it felt weird to put media conditions inside the HTML for responsive images, this will resonate.