

Journal 2955 Links 9842 Articles 82 Notes 6911
Friday, March 24th, 2023
Hello, internet | Sam O’Neill
I have been reminded time and time again of the utility of writing. How it is a way to turn messy thoughts into coherent ideas, and how – as we all know – practice makes perfect. So I’m going to give it a go.
Welcome to the indie web, Sam!
Thursday, March 23rd, 2023
Eight years ago today I published the first of 100 posts where I’d write exactly 100 words every day:
https://adactio.com/journal/8577
It was fun!
https://adactio.com/journal/tags/100words
I should do it again sometime.
Techbros seem to love spelling their half-baked creations with capital letters to make them seem important.
It’s a small act of resistance, but I write them as regular words. The added readability is a nice bonus.
Steam
Picture someone tediously going through a spreadsheet that someone else has filled in by hand and finding yet another error.
“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!” they cry.
The year was 1821 and technically the spreadsheet was a book of logarithmic tables. The frustrated cry came from Charles Babbage, who channeled his frustration into a scheme to create the world’s first computer.
His difference engine didn’t work out. Neither did his analytical engine. He’d spend his later years taking his frustrations out on street musicians, which—as a former busker myself—earns him a hairy eyeball from me.
But we’ve all been there, right? Some tedious task that feels soul-destroying in its monotony. Surely this is exactly what machines should be doing?
I have a hunch that this is where machine learning and large language models might turn out to be most useful. Not in creating breathtaking works of creativity, but in menial tasks that nobody enjoys.
Someone was telling me earlier today about how they took a bunch of haphazard notes in a client meeting. When the meeting was done, they needed to organise those notes into a coherent summary. Boring! But ChatGPT handled it just fine.
I don’t think that use-case is going to appear on the cover of Wired magazine anytime soon but it might be a truer glimpse of the future than any of the breathless claims being eagerly bandied about in Silicon Valley.
You know the way we no longer remember phone numbers, because, well, why would we now that we have machines to remember them for us? I’d be quite happy if machines did that for the annoying little repetitive tasks that nobody enjoys.
I’ll give you an example based on my own experience.
Regular expressions are my kryptonite. I’m rubbish at them. Any time I have to figure one out, the knowledge seeps out of my brain before long. I think that’s because I kind of resent having to internalise that knowledge. It doesn’t feel like something a human should have to know. “I wish to God these regular expressions had been calculated by steam!”
Now I can get a chatbot with a large language model to write the regular expression for me. I still need to describe what I want, so I need to write the instructions clearly. But all the gobbledygook that I’m writing for a machine now gets written by a machine. That seems fair.
Mind you, I wouldn’t blindly trust the output. I’d take that regular expression and run it through a chatbot, maybe a different chatbot running on a different large language model. “Explain what this regular expression does,” would be my prompt. If my input into the first chatbot matches the output of the second, I’d have some confidence in using the regular expression.
A friend of mine told me about using a large language model to help write SQL statements. He described his database structure to the chatbot, and then described what he wanted to select.
Again, I wouldn’t use that output without checking it first. But again, I might use another chatbot to do that checking. “Explain what this SQL statement does.”
Playing chatbots off against each other like this is kinda how machine learning works under the hood: generative adverserial networks.
Of course, the task of having to validate the output of a chatbot by checking it with another chatbot could get quite tedious. “I wish to God these large language model outputs had been validated by steam!”
Sounds like a job for machines.
Learn Privacy
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet
I’ve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.
There’s a more subtle problem with ChatGPT’s code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPT’s general “bullshit” problem.
Home | The Component Gallery
Here’s an aggregator of components from multiple design systems.
Smoke screen | A Working Library
The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished.
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session 🎻🎻🎻🎶 — with Jessica
In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt
Temporal standards bodies.
Disclosure
You know how when you’re on hold to any customer service line you hear a message that thanks you for calling and claims your call is important to them. The message always includes a disclaimer about calls possibly being recorded “for training purposes.”
Nobody expects that any training is ever actually going to happen—surely we would see some improvement if that kind of iterative feedback loop were actually in place. But we most certainly want to know that a call might be recorded. Recording a call without disclosure would be unethical and illegal.
Consider chatbots.
If you’re having a text-based (or maybe even voice-based) interaction with a customer service representative that doesn’t disclose its output is the result of large language models, that too would be unethical. But, at the present moment in time, it would be perfectly legal.
That needs to change.
I suspect the necessary legislation will pass in Europe first. We’ll see if the USA follows.
In a way, this goes back to my obsession with seamful design. With something as inherently varied as the output of large language models, it’s vital that people have some way of evaluating what they’re told. I believe we should be able to see as much of the plumbing as possible.
The bare minimum amount of transparency is revealing that a machine is in the loop.
This shouldn’t be a controversial take. But I guarantee we’ll see resistance from tech companies trying to sell their “AI” tools as seamless, indistinguishable drop-in replacements for human workers.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2023
Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog
How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).
The perfect link - The A11Y Collective
How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.
Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.
Monday, March 20th, 2023
Adoption. — Ethan Marcotte
Ethan highlights a classic case of the McNamara Fallacy—measuring adoption of design system components.
The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.
Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2023 Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Keith
Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.
Sunday, March 19th, 2023

Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday session 🎶🎻
50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum
A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.