

Journal 2972 Links 9907 Articles 82 Notes 6987
Saturday, May 27th, 2023
404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner
Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.
Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
Thursday, May 25th, 2023

Checked in at The Lord Nelson Inn. Last Thursday of the month — with Jessica
Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session — with Jessica
Generative AI: What You Need To Know
Generative AI: What You Need To Know is a free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.
You can read all the cards on one page, print them out, or print to PDF.

I’ll be part of the Pooka Cèilidh Band providing music for the Candlelight Cèilidh this Sunday.
There’ll be all sorts of witchy shit.
https://www.brightonfringe.org/events/the-candlelight-ceilidh/
Add view transitions to your website
I must admit, when Jake told me he was leaving Google, I got very worried about the future of the View Transitions API.
To recap: Chrome shipped support for the API, but only for single page apps. That had me worried:
If the View Transitions API works across page navigations, it could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years.
If the View Transitions API only works for single page apps, it could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.
Well, the multi-page version still hasn’t yet shipped in Chrome stable, but it is available in Chrome Canary behind a flag, so it looks like it’s almost here!
Robin took the words out of my mouth:
Anyway, even this cynical jerk is excited about this thing.
Are you the kind of person who flips feature flags on in nightly builds to test new APIs?
Me neither.
But I made an exception for the View Transitions API. So did Dave:
I think the most telling predictor for the success of the multi-page View Transitions API – compared to all other proposals and solutions that have come before it – is that I actually implemented this one. Despite animations being my bread and butter for many years, I couldn’t be arsed to even try any of the previous generation of tools.
Dave’s post is an excellent step-by-step introduction to using view transitions on your website. To recap:
Enable these two flags in Chrome Canary:
chrome://flags#view-transition
chrome://flags#view-transition-on-navigation
Then add this meta
element to the head
of your website:
<meta name="view-transition" content="same-origin">
You could stop there. If you navigate around your site, you’ll see that the navigations now fade in and out nicely from one page to another.
But the real power comes with transitioning page elements. Basically, you want to say “this element on this page should morph into that element on that page.” And when I say morph, I mean morph. As Dave puts it:
Behind the scenes the browser is rasterizing (read: making an image of) the before and after states of the DOM elements you’re transitioning. The browser figures out the differences between those two snapshots and tweens between them similar to Apple Keynote’s “Magic Morph” feature, the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or the 1980s cartoon series Turbo Teen.
If those references are lost on you, how about the popular kids book series Animorphs?
Some classic examples would be:
- A thumbnail of a video on one page morphs into the full-size video on the next page.
- A headline and snippet of an article on one page morphs into the full article on the next page.
I’ve added view transitions to The Session. Where I’ve got index pages with lists of titles, each title morphs into the heading on the next page.
Again, Dave’s post was really useful here. Each transition needs a unique name, so I used Dave’s trick of naming each transition with the ID of the individual item being linked to.
In the recordings section, for example, there might be a link like this on the index page:
<a href="/recordings/7812" style="view-transition-name: recording-7812">The Banks Of The Moy</a>
Which, if you click on it, takes you to the page with this heading:
<h1><span style="view-transition-name: recording-7812">The Banks Of The Moy</span></h1>
Why the span
? Well, like Dave, I noticed some weird tweening happening between block and inline elements. Dave solved the problem with width: fit-content
on the block-level element. I just stuck in an extra inline element.
Anyway, the important thing is that the name of the view transition matches: recording-7812
.
I also added a view transition to pages that have maps. The position of the map might change from page to page. Now there’s a nice little animation as you move from one page with a map to another page with a map.
That’s all good, but I found myself wishing that I could just have those enhancements. Every single navigation on the site was triggering a fade in and out—the default animation. I wondered if there was a way to switch off the default fading.
There is! That default animation is happening on a view transition named root
. You can get rid of it with this snippet of CSS:
::view-transition-image-pair(root) {
isolation: auto;
}
::view-transition-old(root),
::view-transition-new(root) {
animation: none;
mix-blend-mode: normal;
display: block;
}
Voila! Now only the view transitions that you name yourself will get applied.
You can adjust the timing, the easing, and the animation properites of your view transitions. Personally, I was happy with the default morph.
In fact, that’s one of the things I like about this API. It’s another good example of declarative design. I say what I want to happen, but I don’t need to specify the details. I’ll let the browser figure all that out.
That’s what’s got me so excited about this API. Yes, it’s powerful. But just as important, it’s got a very low barrier to entry.
Chris has gathered a bunch of examples together in his post Early Days Examples of View Transitions. Have a look around to get some ideas.
If you like what you see, I highly encourage you to add view transitions to your website now.
“But wait,” I hear you cry, “this isn’t supported in any public-facing browser yet!”
To which, I respond “So what?” It’s a perfect example of progressive enhancement. Adding one meta
element and a smidgen of CSS will do absolutely no harm to your website. And while no-one will see your lovely view transitions yet, once browsers do start shipping with support for the API, your site will automatically get better.
Your website will be enhanced. Progressively.
Update: Simon Pieters quite rightly warns against adding view transitions to live sites before the API is done:
in general, using features before they ship in a browser isn’t a great idea since it can poison the feature with legacy content that might break when the feature is enabled. This has happened several times and renames or so were needed.
Good point. I must temper my excitement with pragmatism. Let me amend my advice:
I highly encourage you to experiment with view transitions on your website now.

The near pavilions.
Monday, May 22nd, 2023
Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies
The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:
Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using
Proxy
andWebComponents
.
How to build lean efficient websites in 2023 | Go Make Things
- Start with mostly static HTML.
- Progressively enhance the dynamic parts.
- Pick small, focused tools.
Friday, May 19th, 2023
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
Thursday, May 18th, 2023
How you want me to cover artificial intelligence
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
- Be rigorous with your definitions.
- Predict less, explain more.
- Don’t hype things up.
- Focus on the people building AI systems — and the people affected by its release.
- Offer strategic takes on products.
- Emphasize the tradeoffs involved.
- Remember that nothing is inevitable.
Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session — with Jessica
To have “true AI,” we need much more than ChatGPT - Big Think
LLMs have never experienced anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and cannot, experience it themselves. They have no purpose other than to produce the best response to the prompt you give them.
This doesn’t mean they aren’t impressive (they are) or that they can’t be useful (they are). And I truly believe we are at a watershed moment in technology. But let’s not confuse these genuine achievements with “true AI.”
Talks and workshops at UX London 2023
Back in November of last year I announced that UX London would be returning in 2023 and that I’d be curating the line-up again. That’s where I’ve been putting a lot of my energy over the last six months.
The line-up is complete. If I step back and try to evaluate it objectively, I’ve gotta say …hot damn, that’s a fine roster of speakers!
Imran Afzal, Vimla Appadoo, Daniel Burka, Trine Falbe, Vitaly Friedman, Mansi Gupta, Stephen Hay, Asia Hoe, Amy Hupe, Paul Robert Lloyd, Stacey Mendez, Ignacia Orellana, Stefanie Posavec, Hannah Smith, and David Dylan Thomas.
Take a look at the complete schedule—a terrific mix of thought-provoking talks and practical hands-on workshops.
On day one, you’ve got these talks:
- Designing your design process,
- Thinking differently about digital sustainability,
- Let’s choose empathy,
- The lies we tell ourselves about design systems, and
- What if people weren’t the product? Building a web that loves humanity.
Then on day two:
- The necessity and practice of women-centric design,
- Time team: Documenting decisions and marking milestones,
- User experience beyond screens,
- Can designers save lives? Not by themselves, and
- Ghosts in the machine: AI, design, and ethics.
And that’s just the talks! You’ve also got these four excellent workshops on both days:
- Practical, ethical design,
- Designing for complex UIs,
- Strategies for creating and evolving design systems, and
- Dataviz sketching session.
That’s a lot of great stuff packed into two days!
In case you haven’t guessed, I am very excited about this year’s UX London. I would love to see you there.
As an appreciation for you putting up with my child-like excitement, I’d like to share a discount code with you. You can get 20%—that’s one fifth!—off the ticket price using the code CLEARLEFT20.
But note that the standard ticket pricing ends on Friday, May 26th so use that code in the next week to get the most bang for your buck. After that, there’ll only be last-chance tickets, which cost more.
Looking forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd!
Tuesday, May 16th, 2023
The Industrial Hammer Complex
Coincidentally, I was just talking about hammers and nails in another context.
Progressive enhancement used to be a standard approach. Then React came along and didn’t support that approach. So, folks stopped talking about that and focused entirely on JS-centric client solutions. A few years later and now folks are talking about progressive enhancement again, under the new name of “islands”.
What is going on here?
It turns out, it’s the same old thing. Vendors peddling their wares. When Facebook introduced React, that act transformed the font-end space into a hype-driven, cult-of-personality disaster zone where folks could profit from creating the right image and narrative. I observed that it particularly preyed on the massive influx of young web developers. Facebook had finally found the silver bullet of Web Development, or so they claimed! Just adopt our tech, no questions asked, and you too can be a rock star making six figures! We’ve been living through this mess for ten years now.
The cosmic ballet goes on.
Reading Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

Nailspotting
I’m sure you’ve heard the law of the instrument: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There’s another side to it. If you’re selling hammers, you’ll depict a world full of nails.
Recent hammers include cryptobollocks and virtual reality. It wasn’t enough for blockchains and the metaverse to be potentially useful for some situations; they staked their reputations on being utterly transformative, disrupting absolutely every facet of life.
This kind of hype is a terrible strategy in the long-term. But if you can convince enough people in the short term, you can make a killing on the stock market. In truth, the technology itself is superfluous. It’s the hype that matters. And if the hype is over-inflated enough, you can even get your critics to do your work for you, broadcasting their fears about these supposedly world-changing technologies.
You’d think we’d learn. If an industry cries wolf enough times, surely we’d become less trusting of extraordinary claims. But the tech industry continues to cry wolf—or rather, “hammer!”—at regular intervals.
The latest hammer is machine learning, usually—incorrectly—referred to as Artificial Intelligence. What makes this hype cycle particularly infuriating is that there are genuine use cases. There are some nails for this hammer. They’re just not as plentiful as the breathless hype—both positive and negative—would have you believe.
When I was hosting the DiBi conference last week, there was a little section on generative “AI” tools. Matt Garbutt covered the visual side, demoing tools like Midjourney. Scott Salisbury covered the text side, showing how you can generate code. Afterwards we had a panel discussion.
During the panel I asked some fairly straightforward questions that nobody could answer. Who owns the input (the data used by these generative tools)? Who owns the output?
On the whole, it stayed quite grounded and mercifully free of hyperbole. Both speakers were treating the current crop of technologies as tools. Everyone agreed we were on the hype cycle, probably the peak of inflated expectations, looking forward to reaching the plateau of productivity.
Scott explicitly warned people off using generative tools for production code. His advice was to stick to side projects for now.
Matt took a closer look at where these tools could fit into your day-to-day design work. Mostly it was pretty sensible, except when he suggested that there could be any merit to using these tools as a replacement for user testing. That’s a terrible idea. A classic hammer/nail mismatch.
I think I moderated the panel reasonably well, but I have one regret. I wish I had first read Baldur Bjarnason’s new book, The Intelligence Illusion. I started reading it on the train journey back from Edinburgh but it would have been perfect for the panel.
The Intelligence Illusion is very level-headed. It is neither pro- nor anti-AI. Instead it takes a pragmatic look at both the benefits and the risks of using these tools in your business.
It has excellent advice for spotting genuine nails. For example:
Generative AI has impressive capabilities for converting and modifying seemingly unstructured data, such as prose, images, and audio. Using these tools for this purpose has less copyright risk, fewer legal risks, and is less error prone than using it to generate original output.
Think about transcripts of videos or podcasts—an excellent use of this technology. As Baldur puts it:
The safest and, probably, the most productive way to use generative AI is to not use it as generative AI. Instead, use it to explain, convert, or modify.
He also says:
Prefer internal tools over externally-facing chatbots.
That chimes with what I’ve been seeing. The most interesting uses of this technology that I’ve seen involve a constrained dataset. Like the way Luke trained a language model on his own content to create a useful chat interface.
Anyway, The Intelligence Illusion is full of practical down-to-earth advice based on plenty of research backed up with copious citations. I’m only halfway through it and it’s already helped me separate the hype from the reality.
Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple
This is the kind of press release I like.