Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith

Making websites. Writing books. Hosting a podcast. Speaking at events. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.

Journal 2999 sparkline Links 10011 sparkline Articles 83 sparkline Notes 7153 sparkline

Saturday, September 30th, 2023

Just Another Music Monday - by Rusty Foster - Today in Tabs

I don’t read Today in Tabs with any expectation of insight (it’s more like a junk-food guilty pleasure), but these two remarks stand out for their clarity and correctness:

The more I hear people selling AI encouraging everyone to be scared of AI, the more certain I am that it’s nothing to worry about. A few months ago the same people were all shilling crypto.

And:

AI images were fascinating in the Deep Dream eyeballs everywhere era. The “better” AI gets, the blander its output becomes, and the more obvious and unacceptable its errors. We’ve already seen peak AI, and the only interesting use of it will continue to be in generating novel failure modes for human artists to explore.

Friday, September 29th, 2023

Thursday, September 28th, 2023

AI is not a paradigm shift. But it could be useful

What’s going to happen is this: in a few years, AI will come crashing down as everyone realizes it’s not going to be an evolution of human consciousness, and some other new technology will take its place. Valuations of AI companies will fall and some will go out of business. Then, some of the actual uses of the technology will become apparent and it’ll be a mainstream, but not dominant, part of the technology landscape.

The hype cycle is well-understood. What surprises me, again and again, is how thoroughly people follow it. Across industries, CEOs are right now thinking, “holy shit, if we don’t jump on AI, we’re going to be completely left behind. This is a paradigm shift.”

Introducing Enhance Music — Begin Blog

I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.

This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.

Resetting the counter to zero on the sign that reads, “Days since wanting to use custom properties inside media queries.”

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind - Josh Collinsworth blog

I suspect most people on opposing sides of the Tailwind debate actually complete agree on Tailwind itself. I don’t think we disagree on atomic CSS, or utility classes; I think our contention comes from the valuations we made long before we ever chose our tools. Where one of us sees a selling point, the other sees a flaw.

This is very much in line with what I’ve been talking about in my presentation on declarative design.

As Jeremy Keith put it so well: where it comes to styling, Builders want imperative programming; they want to specify what they want, where they want, how they want it. No surprises.

Crafters instead want declarative programming; they understand how to wield the power of creating rules of governance within a complex system, and wish to use that power, rather than micromanaging the browser.

A beautiful fluffy tabby cat lying on a pink crocheted blanket looks serenely at the camera.

I enjoyed working from Spain last week, but I’m also happy to be home with my co-worker. #NotMyCat

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

I’ve had a really good, productive, fun day programming HTML and CSS!