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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.

What I Want From The Internet - Christopher Butler

You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. It’s not perfect. It leaves an enormous amount of signal unheard. It requires more work to find things, and to be found.

But you can do it. And I hope you do, in some way.

Talk: The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Maggie Appleton:

An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content.

Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.

ActivityPub is the next big thing in social networks - The Verge

After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.

The Intelligence Illusion

Baldur has new book coming out:

The Intelligence Illusion is an exhaustively researched guide to the business risks of Generative AI.

LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content

I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.

This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.

Erin Kissane

Erin is back! Add this beautiful blog’s RSS feed to your reader now.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

Designing for colorblindness - The Verge

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?

Andy describes life online with deuteranopia and dispenses some practical advice for designers:

If there’s any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures to each meaningful color of your design will make it accessible to many more people, regardless of their ability to perceive color.

GB Renewables Map

A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:

It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.

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!

When is :focus-visible visible? | bitsofcode

1. Has the user expressed a preference for always visible focus?
2. Does the focused element support keyboard input?
3. Is the user interacting with the focused element with a non-pointing device?
4. Did a script cause focus to move from a previously visibly-focused element?

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.

I doubled-down on RSS – Eric Bailey

In which Eric says:

Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.

I’ll take it.

Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.

Fujichia: Sayable Space

This game is hard:

Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.

Montaigne

This is an interesting little blogging tool: it turns a folder of notes on your Mac into a website.

1. Create dedicated folder in the Apple Notes.
2. Connect it to Montaigne.
3. Add notes with your content.
4. Everything will be published to the web automatically.

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter | WIRED

Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

So many gems in this piece by Paul Ford:

The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?

Streams of Consciousness · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.