It turns out that Large Language Models are pretty decent planners. As Auto-GPT (GitHub) shows, you can give an LLM a goal, and have it auto-expand that goal into a sequence of steps. And that, given some basic plug-ins, start executing those steps with external tools.

But (having been one) 14 year old boys are idiots, and perfectly capable of typing “let’s do this idiot nation-destroying thing” and leaving the AI running overnight - and you can’t monitor them all. The main hurdle for 14 year old boys doing idiotic things is simply lack of opportunity and not knowing where to start. AI “fixes” that.

From The 14 year old boy alignment problem, future shock, and AI microscopes by Matt Webb

In general, if your design relies on having a client protect a secret from a local attacker, you’re doomed. As eloquently outlined in the story “Cookies” in 1971’s Frog and Toad Together, anything the client does to try to protect a secret can also be undone by the client:

“Trying” isn’t entirely madness — believing that every would-be attacker is “sufficiently motivated” is as big a mistake as believing that your protection scheme is truly invulnerable. If you can raise the difficulty level enough at a reasonable cost (complexity, performance, etc), it may be entirely rational to do so.

From (The Futility of) Keeping Secrets from Yourself by Eric Lawrence

Web performance is an unalloyed good. No one has ever complained that a website is too fast.

So the benefit is pretty obvious. Users like fast websites. But there are other benefits to web performance. And they don’t all get equal airtime.

With every file you add to a website’s dependencies, you’re adding one more barrier. Eventually the barrier is insurmountable for people with older devices or slower internet connections. If they can no longer access your website, your website is quite literally inaccessible

From The intersectionality of web performance by Jeremy Keith

Ah, but when it comes to front-end development, assumptions are like little hidden bombs just waiting to go off!

I’m very grateful that they brought the issue to my attention. If they hadn’t, that assumption would still be lying in wait, preparing to ambush someone else.

From Assumption by Jeremy Keith

No. Progressive enhancement means making sure your core functionality works without JavaScript.

Without JavaScript I should still be able to read my email in Gmail, even if you don’t let me compose, reply, or organise my messages.

Without JavaScript I should still be able to view a document in Google Docs, even if you don’t let me comment or edit the document.

Even with something as interactive as Figma or Photoshop, I think I should still be able to view a design file without JavaScript.

From Read-only web apps by Jeremy Keith

A person being able to modify an experience so it suits their specific needs is one of the web platform’s greatest strengths. You shouldn’t attempt to block, subvert, or otherwise undermine someone’s ability to do so.

Test actual support with different operating systems and modes other than the ones you use on a daily basis. Remember that the way you use technology is not the default, and that the majority experience is a contradiction in terms.

You don’t get to pick who visits your website or web app, what their circumstances are, or how they choose to interact with your content. Choosing not to mess with the browser’s scrollbar is a simple, yet powerful thing you can do to help ensure people can get what they need.

From Don’t use custom CSS scrollbars by Eric Bailey

I just don’t buy a lot of stuff. I’m not interested in lifestyle products and tastemaker brands. When I do buy something, it’s usually something I need - as in, not frivolous luxury spending (though I’m certainly not immune to this behavior). I typically won’t replace something unless it’s broken beyond repair.

I fear the day my TV gives up, because you can’t seem to buy one without the smart anymore.

There are so many touchscreens in my life now that I’m starting to get dull aches in my fingertips. Gone is the satisfying tactile response of mechanical buttons and knobs. My induction stovetop requires incessant thumb mashing just to raise the temperature a few notches. If a small amount of water falls on it, it starts beeping. This is in absolutely no way an improvement over my old mechanical one with ceramic hotplates.

In fact, for every improvement in speed, energy consumption, image resolution or audio fidelity, there seems to be a tradeoff in increased frustration: input lag, incessant bickering about connecting to WiFi, and ever more contrived software mechanisms designed to make me watch ads. I’m old enough to remember both software without built-in marketing schemes and TV:s that turned on instantly and switched channels in the blink of an eye. Streaming services may give better image quality than an old VHS player, but the VHS had zero boot time and never required you to enter a password using a flimsy remote.

Nobody wants it, because nobody buys it, because one day, all of a sudden, it just wasn’t for sale anymore.

Curiously, there’s still a booming market for these products, because several specialty online stores do sell them. The difference is that instead of just grabbing these items when also getting a carton of milk, I now have to keep track of my consumption rate, plan and place online orders on sites of dubious usability, and deal with the erratic behavior of delivery companies. Small inconveniences, sure, but ones that add up to quite a long list of similar small inconveniences.

From overly enthusiastic store clerks to contrived online tracking, marketing blatantly disrespects my privacy and pollutes my brain. It’s not just that it tries to make me buy things I don’t need, it’s that it makes my quality of life noticeably worse in the process. I like peace and quiet. I like thinking, eating, relaxing, reading, socializing - existing - without constant interruption

On the rare occasions I do catch a glimpse of a TV commercial, it’s by mistake. Usually it’s when someone not running an adblocker wants to show me something on their computer, or when I visit someone who watches broadcast TV. Every time it happens, I’m surprised by how many ads there are and how brazen, repetitive and disgusting they come off.

From A Life Less Ads by Carl Svensson

In a world awash with software whose shelf life approximates that of my grocery store milk, I love that there is no semver to worry about on the web — HTML5, CSS3, ES6, these are not major breaking changes.

However, as Chris points out, all of those features are a accretion to the language. “Don’t break the web” means we don’t have to worry about reading CSS release notes like, “🚨 Breaking changes: float has been replaced by flex. You must upgrade to newest version.”

But how long can we reasonably go without removing the old? How viable is this approach over time? 100 years from now, will people still be able to write float in their CSS?

I don’t know how the web will evolve over time to deal with what — I assume? — will inevitably become a problem of incomprehensible complexity resulting from decades of language accretion (like stalagmites in a cave).

From Gratitude For a Web That Tries Not to Break by Jim Nielsen

📝 Really enjoyed the ’local-first’ talk from @pvh and the perspective shift from the binary offline/online to a spectrum of latency: offline is just online but with extreme latency.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/offline-is-online-with-extreme-latency/

Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.

And while doing that, they aren’t:

• Telling authors their content is being used to train
• Telling users where the output came from
• Offering any meter of how reliable or confidently correct the output is

So, I’m critical. It’s irresponsible.

From “the secret list of websites” by Chris Coyier

In “Magic Mirror: The Novel as a Software Development Platform”, Mark Pesce eloquently argues that the developments we see in modern technology are predicted (if not determined) by science-fiction stories (Pesce, 1999). As a note of caution, Pesce’s chosen examples all display the traits of survivorship bias. That is, there are an infinite number of “inventions” in sci-fi which have not come to pass. Given the long history of the genre, it is not surprising that some of its predictions have become reality. Nevertheless, it is important to remember the “anchoring” effect that mass media has on users’ perceptions of what is possible with technology.

Technology companies frequently misappropriate terms from science fiction in order to make their products sound innovative and exciting (Newitz, 2021). The original Metaverse envisioned by Stephenson was a dystopian nightmare. It serves as an allegory for how the worst excesses of humanity can corrupt an environment. Similarly, the novel “Ready Player One” presents a world where VR has reduced the majority of humanity to serfdom (Rafif and Munjid, 2022). Given this, the author finds it inexplicable that Facebook chose to rebrand their company around the notion of the Metaverse. It is akin to a military power rebranding to be closer associated with The Empire from Star Wars, or a conglomerate explicitly citing the “Weyland-Yutani Corporation” from Alien as their inspiration.

Future-gazing sometimes means imagining the worst-case scenarios which may be exploited by future adversaries. There is an inherent tension in this line of research. If the futurist publishes their research, a malicious user may take inspiration from their research. But if the futurist does not publish, people may not be able to defend themselves against novel attacks.

From Rejected Sci-Fi Ramblings from my MSc by Terence Eden

I’ve been reading various entrepreneur books and blog posts. One thing they all emphasise is that success often comes from finding a problem that you yourself would pay money to solve.

And that’s a problem for me. I don’t tend to want to spend money solving problems.

I’m not claiming to be a hermit, but I find it weird just how little cash I’m willing to part with to improve my life. So I’m stuck trying to work out what services I would pay a small business for.

When it comes to software, I’d rather write my own or fiddle with open source. I’m aware this means I value my time poorly.

From How can I have a side hustle when I don’t want to pay for anything? by Terence Eden

In its README, it said that if I wanted to opt-out of having this particular tool scrape my images, I had to add some non-standard headers to my site. There was no way to opt-in to the bot.

It seems that every few years we have to have the same argument. Someone releases a tool on the Internet and claims that, if you don’t want to participate, you must explicitly opt-out.

It isn’t hard to see why that’s an obnoxious idea. Thousands of tools are released every day. Am I expected to play whack-a-mole and shut down every new one that appears? That is a perverse way to expect people to behave. These bots cost people time and money without offering any tangible benefit.

By analogy, I can’t suddenly declare that everyone online has to pay me £5 - oh, you don’t want to? Sorry, you should have opted-out last month. That’ll be a fiver, please.

Me asking for a tool to respect the consent of users is, apparently, an ethical crime against people who might benefit from whatever the tool could create in the future. That’s some “For The Greater Good” shit!

Different cultures have different ethics and one of the problems with the Internet is that we occasionally butt up against different norms of behaviour. But I think, in all cultures, you can’t just start grabbing a person’s stuff and then say “but you didn’t explicitly say that I couldn’t! Besides, it’s for your own good!!”

From Silence Isn’t Consent by Terence Eden

Again, I remember spending so much time trying to get a login form working with JSP. I don’t recall there being much error feedback either. It was like the thing worked or… blank page.

When I would add HTML and CSS to a page, I would get instant feedback. I would add the code, and things would appear on the page. They may not have looked exactly right, but they were there, giving me clues as to whether I was on the right track. I was hooked.

I’m sharing all this to say that if you want to learn how to code or be a developer of any kind, how important it is to find the technology and feedback loop that tickles your brain in just the right way. That allows you to create something that inspires you to keep learning and build your confidence.

I just needed to find the right context in which I could learn programming. My wish is that everyone else who is struggling can do the same.

From Find your feedback loop by Rach Smith

I was browsing Hacker News just now, and I came across an interesting question asked by user l2silver:

[What is the] most interesting tech you built for just yourself? - Hacker News

It’s an interesting question, and I’m sure a lot of tech people could some up with something interesting. But probably none as delightful as this answer from sriram_malhar:

My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.

She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60’s and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn’t like.

The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)

Now, that’s personal tech. My favourite part of it is that it still preserves the feeling and spontaneity of listening to radio. Perfect solution, and requires no extra learning at all!

This was originally posted in Personalised radio station by Chris Hannah but its a beautiful story to be shared again in its complete form.

OK, those who follow the teachings of the good book (HHGTTG) know that 42 is the answer “life, the universe and everything”. But here’s where it gets really geeky: the ASCII code of *, the placeholder character for everything is also… 42.

eeveelution cafe 🌷✨🌱

So, back to the Web. My blog is something I own, I can shape it however I want, I already have an audience for it, and I’m the admin. Everyone is already familiar with the concept of sharing web links, so there’s no learning required from anyone. You know what, the web is still awesome at letting you share long-form documents. That was it’s original purpose, so let’s do this!

From Back to the Web by André Staltz

Cool! I’d expect it to, and I’m sure it can even provide you some really good information. That is, if you know what to ask and know how to interpret what it returns to you. My 10 year old can also provide some very detailed information about what I do for work. About half of what she would say is true, and the rest is generally vauge and plausible enough that, sure, I have trained a shark to help blind people read the web. Why not. My 7 year old just thinks I drink coffee and write emails. Again, partially true. I’m going off topic…

My point is that this technology is still rather young, and what it regurgitates to you is going to be based on what it’s learned from humans, who are also unfortunately often incorrect. Some may acknowledge these gaps, but still assume ChatGPT could provide people with at least baseline information to start learning about aspects of web accessibility. Or at least, provide you accurate code guidance to help build accessible websites.

As with the authenticity of my kids’ answers, there is some truth to that, so long as you know that this can give you a start, but you should be mindful and question each answer it provides you

But, it is going to need some corrective training to help it unlearn all the junk it has picked up so far. I mean, it’s learning from what we’ve written on the Internet. We can’t get upset, and we should KNOW to expect such information gaps and lack of understanding, since its just recycling what we have collectively fed it. It’d be foolish to think it knows better than what it has learned from us.

From Setting expectations for asking ChatGPT web accessibility questions by Scott O’Hara

Rt to bless someone’s timeline

Let people do silly things that make no sense. The sillier the better. The nosenseier the better.

Not everything we do should be to increase the GDP. In fact, most of the things we do shouldn’t increase GDP.

Being alive should be a celebration of random silliness.

Yesterday I presented at the “Modern Frontend” Meetup in @MicrosoftBerlin about #AI, #LLMs and what #ChatGPT means for developers, showing off a lot of #Github #COPILOTx features. Here’s my edited recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou8S9ovMtVw Blog: https://christianheilmann.com/2023/03/31/modern-web-development-centering-divs-in-new-exciting-wrong-ways-with-ai/

We obsessively optimise when it comes to scripts, styles, and other resources; interestingly, that doesn’t always apply to HTML. In the case of single-page apps, it may feel like you stand to gain more in performance if you focus on JavaScript. In the case of server-rendered, non-interactive sites, some people doubt that the performance impact of a large DOM is noticeable.

We also lack the required tooling: according to Jens Meiert, not enough HTML minifiers prune optional HTML tags and default attributes. When it comes specifically to unneeded wrapper elements, tooling wouldn’t help us anyway (you would need a pretty sophisticated analysis of the associated styling to determine if an element can really be omitted).

Finally, working with deeply nested DOM trees just slows you down. […] Debugging becomes harder, tracking down nodes in the inspector becomes more tedious, and the joy of the craft is diminished.

From Fighting inter-component HTML bloat by Elise Hein

If we can use our design systems to speed up meaningful work, standardise things to a high quality, and scale the things we actually want to reproduce — then the reverse is also true. It means that we can also use our design systems to speed up problematic work, standardise things to a poor quality, and scale things we don’t want to reproduce.

From Building conscious design systems by Amy Hupe

The slowness in our tooling wasn’t caused by JavaScript the language, but by things just not being optimized at all.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - module resolution

Based on these numbers I’m fairly confident that we can get very close to rust’s performance with just JavaScript based on this little experiment.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - eslint

Engines are pretty good with loading big blobs of JavaScript. The main reason we care so much about file size on the web is the cost of having to deliver those bytes over the network.

From Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - npm scripts

All by Marvin Hagemeister from the same series. Amazing reads showing how javascript can be fast if you know what you do.

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Part 3 🚀

This time we’re taking a closer look at eslint and what is needed for a linter to do it’s jobs. There are a few surprises in there that would make it faster.

https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-3/

My favorite part of the documentary is Megan Smith beaming over her cabinet full of hardware prototypes. Her focus on making something people love, an intimate device, is infectious. Her eagerness to blend everyone’s wishes with the harsh reality of available and affordable hardware shows. Starting with off-the-shelf components and inventing if necessary. When describing the product, she’s not talking about megabytes, protocols, and pixels, but talking about the sound, the feeling, the touch of the product and software in people’s hands.

I feel more vindicated than ever that prototypes, put in people’s hands, are the biggest opportunity to capture lightning in a bottle. These people are imagining and building the iPhone 17 years before the iPhone launched. Megan Smith talks like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs doesn’t work at Apple or General Magic. We often herald the invention of the iPhone or Android and these magic devices as invented out of thin air or our collective science fiction, but both of those products used by billions of people rose from the ashes of General Magic’s failure. That’s a lot to dwell on. The composting of failures produces rich and fertile soil.

From Megan Smith explaining the General Magic prototyping process by Dave Rupert

🔗 Good link: https://www.zachleat.com/web/single-page-applications/

Before getting into the details of Signals, I’d like to start with a bit of a history that celebrates the incredible work done across the ecosystem over the past 10 years.

“The Evolution of Signals in JavaScript” by @RyanCarniato #DEVCommunity #webdev https://dev.to/this-is-learning/the-evolution-of-signals-in-javascript-8ob

Perl had now been replaced with PHP and flat files with MySQL, and the job was truly what you’d call full stack development. All of us did everything, from compiling Apache, PHP and MySQL on freshly installed Slackware boxes, to designing databases, coding PHP and churning out HTML. Deployment was simply a matter of uploading the files from your local machine to the production server.

Testing? Maybe banging the keyboard a bit to see if your forms validated reasonably, but not much more than that. Truth be told, I couldn’t program to save my life. I - well, we - committed many grave and terrible sins. SQL injection mitigation? Please, this was the time of the honest web. Who would even try something so sinister?

The daily work was mostly routine churn: HTML forms submitted to a PHP backend, saved in a MySQL database. These were simpler sites for simpler times: a single person could easily write, understand and manage the code, database and daily running of what was at this time considered a state of the art web shop. JavaScript was maybe used for mouseover effects or scattered lines of glue logic - after all, the biggest competitor to Netscape 4 was, at this point, Netscape 3.

Much like how Commodore 64 programmers could keep a map of the entire computer in their head, a moderately competent developer could churn out an acceptable web site in a matter of weeks, understand every single aspect of it and get paid in the process. If I, a quarter century ago, had possessed the experience and knowledge I do now, the simplicity of those early web pages would’ve felt surreal. And yet, we apparently provided a service that was of some value to some people. A digital commodity, nothing more, nothing less. Actually useful software.

For quite some time, this complexity has served us well. It has made life copiously more endurable and rewarded us with great material wealth. Small wonder, then, that we want to squeeze every last drop from it. Sure, your electric toothbrush really shouldn’t require firmware upgrades, but there’s a buck to be made in all kinds of planned obsolescence. Web sites don’t need tens of megabytes of ads and tracking scripts to function, but someone is still paying for those sweet, sweet data points at which to target ads. It’s most certainly a strange idea to run a text editor inside a bundled web browser - but that way it’s easier to build for more platforms and you can even hire simpletons like me to write much of the code for it. And since more software is produced than ever, more bad software is also produced than ever before.

From A Quarter Century of Web Coding by Carl Svensson

Sensacional apanhado de utils de Amiga 500, com belíssima galeria de menus de disco e GUIs.

https://datagubbe.se/utildisks/

every year I’m reminded of the massive cultural loss we suffered with the death of flash

it was so ahead of its time, there’s still no replacement for the creative space it once occupied for artists, animators, and game devs

There’s truth to that! I too have a great dissatisfaction with the recommender systems available to me. But I suspect that many who dismiss algorithms outright are throwing the baby out with the bath water. Chronological feeds are dominated by those who post frequently, and building an audience from scratch can take years. Recommender systems can help to solve problems like these.

In reality, I don’t think people actually want “full control” over what they read, because that’s too much work. What people are more likely to do is over-subscribe themselves, feel overwhelmed and stagnated in their content diet, and move onto a new platform if the old one doesn’t solve their problem for them. I don’t think most people are interested in painstakingly curating their feeds.

Recommendation doesn’t have to be just a tool that big tech companies use to make a number on a spreadsheet go up. How can we develop algorithms that serve the interests of individuals?

From In defense of recommendation by Jacob O’Bryant

This is something that i’ve been looking for a while. I dont think algorithmic timelines are bad as long as they only recommend things from the feeds you are subscribed and using your own thumbs-(up/down) to train that recommendation. Sometimes i have a lot of unread articles, and i dont have the energy to skim through titles, i just want a kind of “top 5 suggested based on your previous votes”.

[…] But even if we restrict our focus to those who want to be founders, the reality is that it can take years for a nascent idea or desire to mature into a real business. YC may be focused on early-stage companies, but sometimes even an early-stage company takes a long time to build.

This has been workable in my case, but it points to a lack of institutional support. Not everyone has the resources (or stakeholder buy-in) to take a 4-year sabbatical. We have institutional support for research—what if there was something like “going to grad school,” but for open-source developers? Could it be scaled up enough so that people can actually get in without applying 8+ times?

From Funding software innovation by Jacob O’Bryant

What this centralization means in practice and whether, for example, the US government could realistically exert control over the root operators and companies discussed here, is a different story altogether. But no matter how you look at it, the internet seems less distributed or decentralized than one might wish, as many businesses and organizations appear to concentrate in a handful of registries and cloud service providers. We don’t have a single point of failure just yet, but I do see multiple points of calamity with increasing blast radius…

From Who controls the internet? by Jan Schaumann

So all in all, the answer to the question of who can read your email pretty much boils down to – yep – “Google and Microsoft”. Even if your domain doesn’t use one of their mail servers, chances are that whoever you are sending mail to does. To be fair: these companies are going to be doing a much better job at running and securing your email than you are, and outsourcing this critical functionality often makes good sense. And yet, this is another example of the continuously increasing centralization of the internet. Our businesses, just like our personal online lives, are concentrated in the hands of just a few companies.

From Who reads your email? by Jan Schaumann

On the weekend of July 4, 2014, Brian Mayer launched a website which listed reservations for sale to popular restaurants in San Francisco. The price of each reservation was a sliding scale, based on how in-demand the restaurant was. But Brian Mayer didn’t own or run any of these restaurants. He didn’t work for or with them. He had simply called the restaurants up weeks in advance, booked a whole lot of reservations under assumed names, and then put them up for sale without the restaurant’s permission. He called it ReservationHop.

[…] He cited other examples of websites that circumvent or otherwise ignore the norms, ethics, and laws tied to those interactions, sites like MoneyParking, which let users auction off parking spots they had no legal right to, and Enq, which ties up IRS phone lines so they can sell that spot to the highest bigger, Doctrow claims that the end goal is “Markets in everything!”

From Web Products Everywhere by The History Of The Web

Can we stop pushing the narrative of “this topic has already been taught in courses before, we don’t need another course/blog/etc. on this topic.”

So what?

That’s like telling an author “there are already thousands of murder-mystery novels, your book is worthless.”

Time Sense is a wearable sensory headband which allows the wearer to feel the passing of the 24-hour clock around the circumference of the head. As the day progresses, a tiny heat sensation passes the length of the headband.

Also

[…] it allows him to feel and hear colours as audible vibrations inside his head, including colours invisible to the human eye such as infrareds and ultraviolets.

The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording.

From Filtered for clocks by Matt Webb

All of this is to say that open source has absolutely nothing to do with being cloned. Open source licenses will not save you, copyright won’t save you, patents will not save you: if you have a successful product it will get cloned. This is inevitable and trying to prevent it is a waste of your resources. Not even the almighty Apple can prevent the mass cloning of the AirPods.

From A reply to Josef Průša by Stargirl Flowers

The simple power of a URL is that anyone can click it and instantly access it. All you need is a browser. There is no need to install an application or worry about what operating system you are running on.

A quote from Thomas Nattestad in Photoshop’s journey to the web

Web applications are inherently universal. They run on whatever operating system is capable of running a Web browser and they do not need to be compiled for each operating system separately. The same code base powers the application on all platforms. This does not mean that there are no compatibility issues—there are plenty actually—but there is a solid, shared, increasing baseline that all applications can build upon.

Investing in a memorable domain name can sometimes actually be better for discoverability. Even for app stores, people still rely most on recommendations from friends and family members to discover new apps according to research done by Google.

The tooling and framework situation in the Web development world is infamous for being confusing and hard to keep up with. In practice, though, companies would use one technology and tooling stack and stay true to it for many years. The world of tech Twitter is one thing, the reality in businesses, where the decades-old jQuery is still (and by a large amount) the most popular framework, is the other.

Web applications have seen impressive performance improvements thanks to advanced technologies such as WebAssembly (including SIMD), WebGPU, and general JavaScript engine progress in recent years. Nonetheless, a carefully developed, platform-specific app will typically outperform a Web-based application (albeit the situations where this actually matters may be limited). With even high-performance audio-editing tools like Soundtrap (thanks to the Web Audio API and AudioWorklet), interactive development environments like Jupyter Notebook, and graphics-editing tools like Figma (thanks to WebAssembly), and of course graphics-intensive games like Quake (thanks to WebGL and WebGPU in the future), the boundaries are being pushed at a rapid rate.

From Not everyone’s currently building for the Web, but probably more people should by Thomas Steiner

So, has Open Source won? Mostly, I’d say. At the very least there are good Open Source alternatives to nearly every programming language and paradigm. There are some niches - science, finance, gaming - which rely on proprietary languages. And Cloud services run custom software on their custom OS running on custom processors. The new paradigm of LLM AI might eventually be fully open, but rely on processing power so out of reach of mortals that it might as well be closed.

From Are there any modern closed-source programming languages? by Terence Eden

Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you with all the typical pleasantries and talking-points? While AI doing these things for you is likely to happen, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Even when these tools exist, they are not a replacement for writing. Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.

From AI: Do we really “get it”? by Anton Sten but is quoted from Why Write?

Experiments like Arc feel like they could have more in common with tools-for-thought software like Obsidian and Roam Research. Those tools build knowledge graphs of connected nodes. A kind of hypertext of ideas. But we’ve already got hypertext tools we use every day: web browsers. It’s just that they don’t do much with the accumulated knowledge of our web browsing. Our browsing history is a boring reverse chronological list instead of a cool-looking knowledge graph or timeline.

From Browser history by Jeremy Keith

Couldn’t have said it better.

Make a website. Publish your content there. Syndicate elsewhere if you like. But own your content. https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1646993047853633536

You don’t have to prove everything. Sometimes you gotta follow what’s interesting, follow your gut, even if you can’t immediately measure it and extrapolate it to a theory. If it proves to work, that’s its own metric, however opaque the mechanics.

From AI & The Science of Creativity by Jim Nielsen

And this idea of AI making you “more collaborative in Teams”? Collaboration is about relational exchanges, cooperation, and connection. Writing a product strategy update for your team takes into consideration the individual circumstances, unspoken doubts, and historical context of the individuals on your team — not just the emails and messages the computer parsed (AI can’t synthesize what hasn’t been captured).

The most rewarding work I’ve done always originated outside of my tools. My satisfaction of feeling collaborative, or creative, or expressive, or ____ came about first outside any given tool.

From More Everything With AI by Jim Nielsen

A single ant eats about 2mg per day according to a random website, so you could support a colony of a million ants with 2kg of food per day. Supposing they accepted pay in sugar, or something similarly expensive, 2kg costs around $3. Perhaps you would need to pay them more than subsistence to attract them away from foraging freely, since apparently food-gathering ants usually collect more than they eat, to support others in their colony. So let’s guess $5. My guess is that a million ants could do well over $5 of the above labors in a day.

How do you hold an ant accountable if they fail to deliver on a contract? Do individual ants even have agency? Can we require an ant colony to purchase public indemnity insurance?

So while we, in the 21st century, are tying ourselves in knots trying to figure out the appropriate remedy when civil unrest caused by a social media app leads to deaths, maybe in Athens how ever many millennia ago they simply would have sunk a few of the servers in the Aegean.

From Filtered for ants and laws by Matt Webb

There used to be a salmon smokery in north London. Aside from the juniper and beech wood, Ole Hansen (proprietor) would, once a day, sit down and play piano to the hanging fish – live jazz and occasional singing.

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler’s cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels.

Let’s take hip-hop ovens to CES 2024 by Matt Webb

YET – I find myself labelling this task as a failure of the industrial design. Oh, the charging port gets fluff in it! Get rid of the port! Invent a whole thing for wireless charging! Which is a shame. Because in other worlds it is a marketing benefit to use oil in your car that makes it run better over time. It is a pleasure - and a performance benefit - to oil a cricket bat, or wax a violin bow, or season an iron pan. A vocation to prune a bonsai.

“if you don’t fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it is very likely to finish failing just when it is the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with, such as in the midst of a storm.”

From Don’t bother me now I’m waxing my phone by Matt Webb

So my theory is that AI finger mistakes are actually representative of the pre-tetrapod transition 7-fingered body map buried deep in the collective unconscious, now unearthed by LLM gestalts.

And it points out that kisses now needn’t be synchronous. Async kisses could, I suppose, be recorded, replayed, traded, added to the permanent collection of the museum of kisses of famous smoochers (perhaps), pirated!, kept for lending in a nationwide state-run kissing library, etc. Deepfake kisses would enable kissing inaccessible celebrities (ick) or people from long ago or fictional people. Or what if the AI boffins at DeepMind got their hands on this. AlphaGo, AlphaProteinFolding, AlphaSnogs. The Kasparov/Deep Blue moment. 2024 will be the final year that humans are better than computers at kissing, what then.

Filtered for causes and kissing by Matt Webb

For anyone who missed the lofi girl’s countdown and the boy’s intro

Instead - I think most people would be better served by subscribing to small b blogging. What you want is something with YOUR personality. Writing and ideas that are addressable (i.e. you can find and link to them easily in the future) and archived (i.e. you have a list of things you’ve written all in one place rather than spread across publications and URLs) and memorable (i.e. has your own design, logo or style). Writing that can live and breathe in small networks. Scale be damned. When you write for someone else’s publication your writing becomes disparate and UN-networked. By chasing scale and pageviews you lose identity and the ability to create meaningful, memorable connections within the network.

Forget about “visibility” for your post. The unit of blogging isn’t pageviews, it’s conversations.

From Writing, Riffs & Relationships by Tom Critchlow

✨ Introducing: “An Interactive Guide to Flexbox” ✨

It’s a brand new interactive blog post with 20+ demos that help you build an intuition for how Flexbox works. 🔥

I’ve never been more excited about a blog post 😄

→ Check it out: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox/

When it comes to day-to-day production code, here’s the barometer I like to use: will a junior developer, someone at the very start of their career, struggle to understand this code? In the context of a shared codebase, good code is simple code. Code that doesn’t do anything fancy. Code that makes minimal use of abstractions. Code that you’d use to explain fundamental concepts to novices.

If the goal is to reduce complexity, and abstractions add complexity, should we abolish abstractions altogether? Well, no. Abstractions are everywhere. Loops are abstractions. Functions are abstractions. Programming languages themselves are abstractions over machine code, which itself is an abstraction over transistors flickering off and on really fast. It’s abstractions all the way down. The key is to weigh the cost of an abstraction against its benefit.

From Clever Code Considered Harmful by Josh Comeau

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.

Sorry I didn’t quote tweet anything in order to say that.

For example: imagine for a moment the value of google.com. What would that domain cost? People’s entire personal and professional lives — email, photos, calendar, documents, etc. — built up over years and years, solely accessible at that domain.

Now imagine someone who invested years of their life creating value for others and amassing a following on Twitter. They now face a dilemma: all that value lives at a URL they can’t control twitter.com/{username}. Even the word-of-mouth username is something they have zero control over.

However, if own your domain, create value there, and drive people to it, you’re paying ~$10 a year to build unbounded value over the years — value you control.

That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

This is the what I love about rel=me: it reinforces the value of owning a domain that people respect and trust because, through the years, it becomes a source of quality information. In an internet connected world, domains are a currency of value. Do you want to own your value, or let someone else own it?

From The Best Time to Own a Domain Was 20 Years Ago; The Second Best Time Is Today by Jim Nielsen

Early cartridge and disk-based games have been fairly easy to preserve. If you have an NES and a game cartridge, you can play the game. But this is not possible for iPhone apps. To run an old iPhone app, you’ll need an older device and the related cloud services to be running as they were at the time.

Modern software is in a strange place where it’s more at risk of being erased from history than software created in the pre-internet era. Everything we work on is so incredibly ephemeral.

From Celebrating App Icon Design by Michael Flarup

This struck me as intriguing. To run an old game, you need the hardware (console) and the software (game cartridge). But with the interconnected, interdependent nature of so much software today, you not only need the hardware and the software, but also all the cloud services the software depends on.

From Digital Preservation and “The App Icon Book” by Jim Nielsen

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.

From this tweet by Miriam Suzanne

I still find it fully miraculous that webpage source code is freely viewable, and browsers allow for trivial editing of the source live and inline. Can just imagine the pushback against if someone tried to launch a platform like this today

From this toot by Craig Mod

It’s quite incredible that the money and power birthed through the advent of the web haven’t yet been able to completely overtake this “mashup art experiment” medium which “gives consumers all the power”.

All quotes from The Anti-Capitalist Web by Jim Nielsen

The Life Script – a play for algorithms https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-life-script-a-play-for-algorithms/

Some thoughts on a web+follow protocol (for the likes of Mastodon federated follow)

https://paul.kinlan.me/thoughts-on-web-follow/

The informal, untracked, messily human space that the bots and algorithms haven’t infiltrated yet.

From The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web by Maggie Appleton

All computing is to some degree artificially intelligent. At one point a TI-83 calculator was artificial intelligence. When Google search first came out it was artificial intelligence. Frankly, a modern refrigerator counts as artificial intelligence: it’s programmed to achieve an objective by taking action and uses environmental feedback to adjust its behaviour. These things are now so banal and pervasive we are unimpressed by their “intelligence.”

From Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI by Maggie Appleton

The web is lots of things. Very good things. Versatile, Decentralized, Resilient, Responsive, Adaptable, Accessible, Inexpensive, Diverse, Standardized, and Open. Makes ya proud to work on it sometimes, doesn’t it?

What the Web Still Is by @ericwbailey https://css-tricks.com/what-the-web-still-is/

I wrote about the presence of censorship in automatic captions and voice control software. With thanks to @codingchaos for help swearing/being sworn at. https://ericwbailey.website/published/swearing-and-automatic-captions/

I think that’s one quality of a good old blog; reader agency. I remember late nights roaming through my favorite blogs and I’d find something, a small trinket of the tiniest little poem, from way back in 2002. And because there were no likes or comments or anything attached to the post, I decided it was important.

From Notes On Hypertext by Robin Rendle

It’s neat to ponder over how for however many people you know about from their internet presence, there is a sort of “dark matter” of other super smart people you never hear about. For one example I think of the very talented Antoine, author of gnarly comments like these and seniormost person on ChromeOS, who appears to be otherwise mostly invisible on the internet.

I mention this because when we learned we got the award, and each person was told how much they would get, one of the most senior people on the team announced soon after that he was leaving the company. I remember being surprised by it and asking him about it. His response has stayed with me, something along the lines of: “Once I knew the highest upside I would get for staying, I could better evaluate it against my other options.” I think there’s a lesson there about how rewards can have the opposite effect you intend.

At one point the question came up: how many redirects should a browser follow? Say you try to load A, but it redirects you to B, which redirects to C, and so on; at some point you should give up and say something is broken. Someone picked some reasonable-seeming threshold, like 10 or so, after which Chrome would give up. Then Darin, who had previously worked on Firefox, said “no, it has to be 30, or it breaks the New York Times — I know this from experience”. (Today Darin is working on another browser, hopefully getting a third use out of that hard-won lesson.)

At the time I’d joke that “Chrome 12 [an old version] was the best Chrome”, but since I’ve come to see underneath that for me what I wanted was a fast tight browser, and once I had that, pretty much by definition most subsequent work was just gonna make it worse. Sure, there’s work like fixing rendering crashes or improving scroll performance, but most work involves adding features that make it bigger or slower.

Longer term, what I have come to appreciate about this is that I put a lot of myself into the product and I am proud of what I made at the time, but that product is a living thing that I do not control and it has gone on in directions I wouldn’t have taken it.

It’s also funny to reflect on how much time we spent agonizing over making the most minimal thing — Chrome initially had no “Home” button and I remember there being long arguments about whether adding it even as an option was contrary to the goal of the thing — vs today’s browser which is covered with buttons and settings, just like the browsers it was intending to revolt against.

All from Chrome, 10 years later by Evan Martin

The tools we choose have a major impact on our access to core web platform features. Are we choosing tools that help us move forward, or do some of these tools hold us back?

My latest post @OddBird https://www.oddbird.net/2022/11/11/platform-tools/

My algo -> following.tweets.sort_by(date, desc)

I just want to smoosh my face into that neck floof.

#princessmononoke #ghibli #wolf

First official preview of how PicTacToe works! Watch my 12 yrold niece in purple against my sister in red and yellow! #PicTacToe #LockPick

a tea break from the AI firehose

maybe all the years spent on designing and shipping touch controllers, should have worked on kitchen appliances ⏲️

Gilliams Great Escape, a game where you are golf-ing a fish with a toaster @Official_GDC 💜

We use this quote in the first lecture of our usability course to make the point that most successful startups (and even the Web itself!) were primarily usability innovations.

You could do all these things before, but in a clunky way requiring high technical expertise. https://twitter.com/bradneuberg/status/1638590177672323073

https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2023-03-23-devices-for-internet/

✍️ New post: Transient Frameworks

Happy #bluebeanieday, everyone! 💙

https://matthiasott.com/notes/transient-frameworks

I wrote about how a framework choice can harm people in a moment of crisis. https://ericwbailey.website/published/modern-health-frameworks-performance-and-harm/

“In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.” https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies

Or, as I always say: UX > DX. https://twitter.com/scottohara/status/1638135841187823620

I talked about app stores are a massive step back in software distribution that favours the publisher over the user. The argument is that the web is unsafe and curated stores are protecting users. Except when they pay enough. https://christianheilmann.com/2023/02/20/so-you-want-to-safely-authenticate-with-2fa-app-stores-are-still-not-the-solution-why-the-web-is-dead-revisited/

How sad should I be about ChatGPT? Machines are encroaching on things I care about and now everyone needs to pay attention.

https://robertheaton.com/chatgpt

It kind of reminds me of this blog post that Rach Smith wrote, about how learning in public is challenging when you’re very deep in layers of niche engineering. It’s hard for me to lay out, for example, a specific type of strategy I learned in the game go, because so few people I know actually play it. It’s hard for me to explain the details around keycap designs I’ve worked out, because so few people understand how much effort that takes or why it’s exciting. It’s hard for me to describe some of the little (and big) problems I’ve solved, because y’all simply don’t have the context I have to understand why it’s thrilling that it’s finally done.

From The small, private wins - Cassidy Williams

Take one of my work days recently. I was struggling with something and thought writing a note about it might help. The problem was that the “something” was generating TypeScript types from GraphQL files using GraphQL Code Generator in a Next.js project using a custom webpack config, that lives in a monorepo powered by Lerna. There were …seven tools or technologies in that sentence. My potential note is niched down so hard, it feels like there is maybe one other person in the world who can relate. His name is Geoff and chances are he’s not reading this site.

From Learning in public isn’t so easy when you’re buried by layers of engineering - Rach Smith

I feel like with AI right now there is something there there, sure, but folks are just trying to slam it into everything regardless of whether or not that makes the product better. They don’t start with the idea first and then explore multiple options that leads to this one technology— machine learning or whatever—which just happens to be the right thing to solve it.

Tech-last

An AI should be doing my taxes while I paint cool stuff. I shouldn’t be doing taxes while an AI badly paints women with too many fingers and teeth and tits the size of a fucking Toyota Prius

okay @elonmusk why can’t we see the reason a tweet is on your timeline anymore?

there used to be notes like “because X liked this tweet” or “because X follows them”, but now we’re getting completely unsourced tweets from accounts we don’t follow - what happened to transparency? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1613995936585519104

Just like we should always ask “Could this meeting have been an email?”

…we should always ask “Could this PDF have been web page?”

@OneRadAlienDude https://pudymody.netlify.app/blog/2020-11-26-origen-messi/

@OneRadAlienDude

Folks, make sure your webapp has a fallback for when your JavaScript fails to load or your fetch request back to the server fails.

Three times this morning, THREE TIMES, I’ve been stuck on a blank page on three different apps because something failed to load.

THIS IS WHY 3D PRINTERS EXIST OK DO YOU GET IT NOW 🥹 https://twitter.com/Brieyonce/status/1630051041524760576

I coded playable Tetris for the FlipDot display! #processing code and build instructions on Github: https://github.com/owenmcateer/FlipDots #kineticart #flipdot

Yeah you can add as many characters as you want, but I’m probably not going to be reading posts this long. Twitter may become a place for long-form posting, but it is not and will not be the place for long-form reading. At least not for me.

RSS Foreva! https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1623411536243965954

@fechu @f0go El gran compumap? En the internet archive creo hay una version demo subida.

Proposed solution to twitter’s ridiculous API pricing https://www.reddit.com/r/programmerhumor/comments/10rxlve

let me get this straight: Twitter shows me cute animals once an hour, and the rantings of idiots every second of the day, and they’re banning the animals

Swamping us with unnecessary features (no refrigerator should be connected to the internet); squeezing us for money, time, and personal data; collapsing through buggy software or spam/troll/hacker/DDoS susceptibility or mass layoffs/cost cutting leading to subpar service.

me acaban de pasar esto y me parece absolutamente fantástico y ocurrente saben quien/es? son los autores? gracias gente de frontend por ser consistentemente geniales, aguante Vuejas Locas, la radio esta re buena

Es 2002 tenes 7 pesos para administrar en tu almuerzo y sin saberlo tomas la mejor decisión posible:entras al cyber Hay dos personas jugando un juego raro miras asombrado y te haces una cuenta.Elegis tu raza y de repente ahí estás siendo feliz en Lorencia No salgas es una estafa

I don’t get it. Why not focus on getting AI to perform more mundane tasks that don’t require creativity and nuance? Use it to free up time for actual human beings to focus more on the things they love? Pushing for it to write novels, make music, and create art is weird as hell.

I made this thing called LOL Verifier: a device that only lets you type lol if you’ve actually laughed out loud

New SNES game, everyone! Sadly, there was no SNESDEV Game Jam this year, so @bennysnesdev, @sfc_moogle and me had a little #snesdevparty instead and created Supercooked! for the best 16Bit system out there. Enjoy! https://goldlocke.itch.io/supercooked