Links

9842 sparkline

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

Learn Privacy

Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!

  1. Use just the data you need
  2. Third parties
  3. Fingerprinting
  4. Encryption
  5. Best practices

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

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.

Monday, March 20th, 2023

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

Design notes on the 2023 Wikipedia redesign

So then the question becomes: how do you most effectively communicate designs, to facilitate the best discussions about those designs? My answer is: lots of little prototypes built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Artificial Guessing

Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.

Robin picks up on my framing.

Instead of brainstorming, discussing, iterating, closely inspecting a product to understand it and figure out what to show on a page, well, we can just let the machines figure it out for us! This big guessing machine can do our homework and we can all pack up and go to the beach.

ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem

It doesn’t bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.

Yes! Like I said:

Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.

Saturday, March 18th, 2023

Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier

Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.

Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:

How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

Dumb Password Rules

A hall of shame for ludicrously convoluted password rules that actually reduce security.

Modern Font Stacks

This is handy—a collection of font stacks using system fonts. You can see which ones are currently installed on your machine too.

The most performant web font is no web font.