Tags: us

The Gist: AI, a talking dog for the 21st Century.

My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too).

No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog.

Also, trust:

They’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?

Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too):

Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there.

This is all true. But this post from John Gruber is equally true: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps:

I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.

As John points out, the problems aren’t technical:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

He’s right. It makes no sense, but this is the reality.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the gap between the web and native apps on mobile was entirely technical. There were certain things that you just couldn’t do in web browsers. That’s no longer the case now. The web caught up quite a while back.

But the experience of using websites on a mobile device is awful. Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen.

This is not a technical problem. This doesn’t get solved by web standards. This is a cultural problem.

First of all, there’s the business culture. If your business model depends on tracking people or pushing newsletter sign-ups, then it’s inevitable that your website will be shite on mobile.

Mind you, if your business model depends on tracking people, you’re more likely to try push people to download your native app. Like Cory Doctorow says:

50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony (Jay Freeman calls this ‘felony contempt of business-model’).

Matt May brings up the same point in his guide, How to grey-rock Meta:

Remove Meta apps from your devices and use only the mobile web versions. Mobile apps have greater access to your personal data, provided the app requests those privileges, and Facebook and Instagram in particular (more so than WhatsApp, another Meta property) request the vast majority of those privileges. This includes precise GPS data on where you are, whether or not you are using the app.

Ironically, it’s the strength of the web—and web browsers—that has led to such shitty mobile web experiences. The pretty decent security model on the web means that sites have to pester you.

Part of the reason why you don’t see the same egregious over-use of pop-ups and overlays in native apps is that they aren’t needed. If you’ve installed the app, you’re already being tracked.

But when I describe the dreadful UX of most websites on mobile as a cultural problem, I don’t just mean business culture.

Us, the people who make websites, designers and developers, we’re responsible for this too.

For all our talk of mobile-first design for the last fifteen years, we never really meant it, did we? Sure, we use media queries and other responsive techniques, but all we’ve really done is make sure that a terrible experience fits on the screen.

As developers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why it’s perfectly justified to make users on mobile networks download React, Tailwind, and megabytes more of third-party code.

As designers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why intrusive pop-ups and overlays are the responsibility of some other department (as though users make any sort of distinction).

Worst of all, we’ve spent the last fifteen years teaching users that if they want a good experience on their mobile device, they should look in an app store, not on the web.

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

We fucked up. Badly. And I don’t see any signs that things are going to change anytime soon.

But hey, websites on desktop are just great!

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

The Generative AI Con

I Feel Like I’m Going Insane

Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t.

Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble.

We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours — where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings.

Their narrative is built on a mixture of hysteria, hype, and deeply cynical hope in the hearts of men that dream of automating away jobs that they would never, ever do themselves.

Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it’s fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we’re all fucking morons.

How Indie Devs and Small Teams Can Win in a Tech Downturn - The New Stack

In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:

“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”

AI wants to rule the World, but it can’t handle dairy.

AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.

Back in July 2023 I went into the studio along with the rest of Salter Cane.

We had been practicing a whole lot of new songs for over a year beforehand. Now we were ready to record them.

We went in with a shared approach. We were going to record everything live. We were going to prioritise the feeling of a particular take over technical accuracy. And we weren’t going to listen back to every take—that can really eat into the available time and energy.

This approach served us really well. We had an incredibly productive couple of days in the studio collaborating with Jake Rousham, who we had worked with on our previous album. We ended up recording eleven songs.

After that burst of activity, we took our time with the next steps. Chris recorded additional vocals for any songs that needed them. Then the process of mixing everything could start.

After that came the mastering. We hired Jon Sevink—fiddler with the Levellers. He did a fantastic job—the difference was quite remarkable!

We decided to keep two songs in reserve to have a nine-song album that feels just the right length.

The album is called Deep Black Water. It’s available now from all the usual digital outlets:

• Bandcamp
• Spotify
• Apple Music UK
• Apple Music US
• Amazon UK
• Amazon US

We decided not to make any CDs. We might make a vinyl version if enough people want it.

I really, really like how the album turned out. These are strong songs and I think we did them justice.

I hope you’ll like it too.

6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2025 · 19 January 2025

• Springy easing with linear()
• Typed custom properties
• View transitions for page navigation
• Transition animation for dialog and popover
• Transition animation for details
• Animated adaptive gradient text

Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.

una.im | Updates to the customizable select API

It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!

Daring Fireball: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps

I have to agree with John here:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) - Rogue Engine

Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.

This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.

(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)

There goes 2024.

It was a year dominated by Ukraine and Gaza. Utterly horrific and unnecessary death courtesy of Putin and Netanyahu.

For me personally, 2024 was just fine. I was relatively healthy all year. The people I love were relatively healthy too. I don’t take that for granted.

Looking back on what I did and didn’t do during the year, here’s something interesting: I didn’t give a single conference talk. I spoke at a few events but as the host: Patterns Day, CSS Day, and UX London. That’s something I really enjoy and I think I’m pretty darn good at it too.

I was wondering why it was that I didn’t give a talk in 2024. Then Rachel said something:

I really miss An Event Apart.

That’s when I realised that An Event Apart would usually be the impetus behind preparing a conference talk. I’d lock myself away and spend ages crafting a presentation to match the calibre of that event. Then, once I had the talk prepared, I could give modified versions of it at other conferences.

With An Event Apart gone, I guess I just let the talk prep slide. Maybe that’ll continue into 2025 …although I’m kind of itching to give a talk on HTML web components.

In most years, speaking at conferences is what allows me to travel to interesting places. But even without being on the conference circuit I still travelled to lovely places in 2024. Turin, Belfast, Amsterdam, Freiburg, west Cork, Boston, Pittsburgh, Saint Augustine, Seville, Cáceres, Strasbourg, and Galway.

A lot of the travel was motivated by long-standing friendships. Exploring west Cork with Dan and Sue. Celebrating in Freiburg with Schorsch and Birgit. Visting Ethan and Liz in Boston. And playing music in Pittsburgh with Brad.

Frostapolooza was a high note:

I felt frickin’ great after being part of an incredible event filled with joy and love and some of the best music I’ve ever heard.

Being on sabattical for all of August was nice. It also meant that I had lots of annual leave to use up by the end of the year, so I ended up taking all of December off too. I enjoyed that.

I played a lot of music in 2024. I played in a couple of sessions for pretty much every week of the year. That’s got to be good for my mandolin playing. I even started bringing the tenor banjo out on occasion.

I ate lots of good food in 2024. Some of it was even food I made. I’ve been doing more and more cooking. I’ve still got a fairly limited range of dishes, but I’m enjoying the process of expanding my culinary repertoire a bit.

I read good books in 2024.

All in all, that’s a pretty nice way to spend a year: some travel, seeing some old friends, playing lots of music, reading books, and eating good food.

I hope for more of the same in 2025.

Of Books and Conferences Past - Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

I miss A Book Apart, and I really miss An Event Apart—I made so many friends and memories through that conference. I admire Jeffrey’s honest account of how much it sucks when something so good comes to an end.

You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.

To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.

Like, when I went out to my usual Wednesday evening traditional Irish music session I was prepared the inevitable discussion of Trump’s election. I was ready to quite clearly let people know that I didn’t want to talk about it. But I didn’t have to. Maybe because everyone else was feeling much the same, we just played and played. It was good.

The session on Thursday was good too. When we chatted, it was about music.

Still, I was ready for the weekend and I wasn’t really feeling psyched up for FFConf on Friday. But once I got there, I was immediately uplifted.

It was so nice to see so many people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I had the chance to reconnect with people that I had only been hearing from through my RSS reader:

“Terence, I’m really enjoying your sci-fi short stories!”

“Kirsty, I was on tenterhooks when you were getting Mabel!”

(Mabel is an adorable kitty-cat. In hindsight I probably should’ve also congratulated her on getting married. To a human.)

The talks were really good this year. They covered a wide variety of topics.

There was only one talk about “AI” (unlike most conferences these days, where it dominates the agenda). Léonie gave a superb run-down of the different kinds of machine learning and how they can help or hinder accessibility.

Crucially, Léonie began her talk by directly referencing the exploitation and energy consumption inherent in today’s large language models. It took all of two minutes, but it was two minutes more than the whole day of talks at UX Brighton. Thank you, Léonie!

Some of the other talks covered big topics. Life. Death. Meaning. Purpose.

I enjoyed them all, though I often find something missing from discussions about meaning and purpose. Just about everyone agrees that having a life enfused with purpose is what provides meaning. So there’s an understandable quest to seek out what it is that gives you purpose.

But we’re also constantly reminded that every life has intrinsic meaning. “You are enough”, not “you are enough, as long as there’s some purpose to your life.”

I found myself thinking about Winne Lim’s great post on leading a purposeless life. I think about it a lot. It gives me comfort. Instead of assuming that your purpose is out there somewhere and you’ve got to find it, you can entertain the possibility that your life might not have a purpose …and that’s okay.

I know this all sounds like very heavy stuff, but it felt good to be in a room full of good people grappling with these kind of topics. I needed it.

Dare I say it, perhaps my optimism is returning.

I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.

When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregman, Rebecca Solnit, and Hans Rosling, pointing to all the evidence that people are, by and large, decent. I should really just read the room and shut up.

I opened my talk Of Time And The Web with a whole spiel about how we seem to be hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news than good (perhaps for valid evolutionary reasons).

I like to think that my optimism is rational, backed up by data. But if I’m going to be rational, then I also can’t become too attached to any particualar position (like, say, optimism). I should be willing to change my mind when I’m confronted with new evidence.

A truckload of new evidence got dumped on my psyche this week. The United States of America elected Donald Trump as president. Again.

Even here I found a small glimmer of a bright side: at least the result was clear cut. I was dreading weeks or even months of drawn-out ballot counting, lawsuits and uncertainty. At least the band-aid was decisively ripped away.

Back in 2016, I could tell myself all sorts of reasons why this might have happened. Why people might have been naïve or misled into voting a dangerous idiot into power. But the naïveté was all mine. The majority of America really is that sexist.

This feels very different to 2016. And hey, remember when we woke up to that election result and one of the first things we did was take out subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post to “support real journalism”? Yeah, that worked out just great, didn’t it?

My faith in human nature is taking quite a hit. An electoral experiment has been run three times now—having this mysogistic racist narcissistic idiot run for the highest office in the land—and the same result came up twice.

I naïvely thought that the more people saw of his true nature, the less chance he would have. When he kept going off-script at his rallies, spouting the vilest of threats, I thought there was an upside. At least now people would see for themselves what he’s really like.

But in the end it didn’t matter one whit. Like I said in a different context:

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

I never liked talking about “faith” in human nature. To me, it wasn’t faith. It was just a rational assessment. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I need some faith after all.

I wonder if my optimism will return. It probably will (see? I’m such an optimist). But if it does, perhaps it will have to be an optimism that exists despite the data, not because of it.

In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide

This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!

Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.

2004 was the first year of the future

I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…

Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!

My solar-powered and self-hosted website | Dries Buytaert

This is a neat project form Dries:

This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.

At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.