

Journal 2999 Links 10011 Articles 83 Notes 7153
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.
Randoma11y - Accessible color combinations
Unusual colour combinations that are also accessible—keep smashing that “New colors” button.
The Illusion Of Developer “Productivity” Opens The Door To Snake Oil – Codemanship’s Blog
There are a lot of astute observations in here.
Friday, September 29th, 2023
Using Stencil to make a live poll Web Component
Before getting into the details of the code, Matt hits the nail on the head talking about the the one thing that web components have that no framework can offer: longevity.
Quoting Stuart Brand:
Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.
Well! The web is an old system.
Going to Cork, like. brb
Thursday, September 28th, 2023
CSS Nesting and the Cascade | WebKit
As well as a very welcome announcement, Jen has a really good question for you about nesting in CSS.
If you have an opinion on the answer, please chime in.
Brian Koberlein
What a beautiful website!
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.”
Reading How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers by Tim Harford.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Wednesday night session.
Why multi-page apps? | Go Make Things
There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them.
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.

Depositing a Kubrickian Easter egg into a codebase.

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!
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole
Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.
Counting Ghosts
Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.
This article is spot-on!
What Are Accessibility Overlays? (Webbed Briefs)
All accessibility overlays are bad. Except the ones by overlay vendors planning to sue me. Those ones are good and I highly recommend them, despite what I may say during the video. If someone is asking for an accessibility overlay, either send them here or to overlayfactsheet.com.