Link archive: April, 2023

Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Maggie Appleton:

An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content.

*Punctuation Personified* (1824) – The Public Domain Review

Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”.

Stop The Tories .Vote

A great practical website to help you vote tactically in the upcoming local elections.

WPDS - Accessibility | Resources

I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.

“the secret list of websites” - Chris Coyier

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.

I concur with Chris’s assessment:

I just think it’s fuckin’ rude.

Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.

Typography Manual by Mike Mai

A short list of opinions on typography. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s all fairly sensible advice.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

ActivityPub is the next big thing in social networks - The Verge

After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.

A very simple rule

I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.

Rich Harris: Hot takes on the web 🌶️ - YouTube

I don’t agree with all of these takes-of-varying-spiciness, but Rich Harris is always worth paying attention to.

What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong - BBC Culture

I not only worry that “cli-fi” might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for.

A History Of The World According To Getty Images

A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:

The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.

Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.

Site Search in Arc Browser — For Your Own Site - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I can now have adactio.com on speed dial for search — a valid use case indeed.

😊

Funnily enough, I tend to use tags more often than my own site search. I type adactio.com/tags/… followed by whatever I think past me would’ve used. So my browser’s address bar is kind of a sitesearch interface already.

Grease

Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.

Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.

Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs

Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).

This is true of software, networks, and organisations.

When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

The Technium: Dreams are the Default for Intelligence

I feel like there’s a connection here between what Kevin Kelly is describing and what I wrote about guessing (though I think he might be conflating consciousness with intelligence).

This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” 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.

The Intelligence Illusion

Baldur has new book coming out:

The Intelligence Illusion is an exhaustively researched guide to the business risks of Generative AI.

“Craft at scale” is a white whale | Adam Stoddard

If you look at the available evidence, “craft at scale” is mutually exclusive with the kind of rapid and unending growth that’s the baseline expectation for traditional startups and public tech companies.

We’d say that’s obvious in other industries. Budweiser isn’t craft beer. IKEA isn’t heirloom-quality furniture. But we tend to treat software as immune to the typical relationship between quality and quantity.

LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content

I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.

This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.

CSS Text balancing with text-wrap:balance - Ahmad Shadeed

Ahmad runs through some of the scenarios where text-wrap: balance could be handy.

Even though it’s not well-supported yet in browsers, there’s no reason not to start adding it to sites now; it’s classic progressive enhancement.

Enhance

After admiring the loveliness of the homepage for Enhance, try reloading it with JavaScript switched off.

Spot the difference? Me neither.

Erin Kissane

Erin is back! Add this beautiful blog’s RSS feed to your reader now.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.

Stéphanie has gathered a goldmine of goodies:

Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins and books to design accessible products

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database

The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems.

Begging for Treats - blog.lmorchard.com

As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.

Bitcoin is Commoditized Waste - by Rusty Foster

It’s a popular myth that a Bitcoin’s value is based on nothing, just pulled out of thin air by math. But that’s not true—Bitcoin is a way to commoditize energy consumption without accidentally producing anything useful. Other energy-intensive industries tend to convert energy into useful materials like aluminum or cement. Bitcoin converts electricity into waste heat and records its destruction in the form of numbers, which can then be traded for other numbers but not used to make anything people need or converted back into energy.

A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived | Psyche Ideas

But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

This reminds me of that post by Winnie Lim I linked to a while back.

From ABC’s to 9999999 – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

See, about a year or so ago, I took inspiration from Kevin Smokler to set about listening through my entire music library alphabetically by song title.

I think I’m going to do this! I have a paltry 10,602 songs so it should take a mere 29 days of continuous listening.

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub

An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.

Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

This is enshittification.

We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

There’s a time for linguistics, and there’s a time for grabbing the general public by the shoulders and shouting “It lies! The computer lies to you! Don’t trust anything it says!”

Designing for colorblindness - The Verge

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?

Andy describes life online with deuteranopia and dispenses some practical advice for designers:

If there’s any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures to each meaningful color of your design will make it accessible to many more people, regardless of their ability to perceive color.

Down to Earth

Solarpunk and synthetic biology as a two-pronged approach to the future:

Neither synbio nor Solarpunk has all the right answers, but when they are joined in a symbiotic relationship, they become greater than the sum of their parts. If people could express what they needed, and if scientists could champion those desires — then Solarpunk becomes a will and synbio becomes a way.