A prayer wheel for capitalism
Why “AI” won’t help you get past the blank page in any meaningful way:
The value in writing lies in what we discover while writing.
Link tags: ink
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A very simple rule
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.
Erin Kissane
Erin is back! Add this beautiful blog’s RSS feed to your reader now.
Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.
Stéphanie has gathered a goldmine of goodies:
Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins and books to design accessible products
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub
An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.
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.
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.
Buttons, links, and focus – tempertemper
This is a handy guideline to remember, even if there exceptions:
When a keyboard user follows a link, their focus should be taken to the new place; when a keyboard user presses a button, focus should remain on that button.
Explore the In Our Time archive | Braggoscope
Matt made this lovely website for spelunking and hyperlinking through the thousand episodes of Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time programme.
He’s also written a little bit about how he made it using some AI (artificial insemination) for the categorisation code.
How We Verified Ourselves on Mastodon — and How You Can Too – The Markup
It gives me warm fuzzies to see an indie web building block like rel="me" getting coverage like this.
Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog
I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others.
jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet
If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
I’m not fucking about, I’m internalising | Monospaced Monologues
It me (or at least, this is what I like to tell myself):
A lot of the time, it looks like I’m fucking about, but I’m really just internalising the problem at hand, and clearing space for it in my brain.
Towards Growing Peaches Online - by Claire L. Evans
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
Filtered for the miracle of writing (Interconnected)
You don’t need to write for anyone else. You don’t need to share, or even keep it. You just need the act of it. Writing is a particle collider for reality and the imagination. And new discoveries are the result.
(That’s why I write here, of course. It’s how I think.)
It me.
Fermented Code: Modelling the Microbial Through Miso - Serpentine Galleries
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
A Well-Known Links Resource - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I really like this experiment that Jim is conducting on his own site. I might try to replicate it sometime!
On Design Thinking
Design Thinking didn’t change business at all, rather it changed Design into business, adopting its language, priorities and techniques. It sold out Design in an attempt to impress those in power, and in so doing lost its heart.
Shame. – Dirty Feed
Deleting your old thoughts may be giving your older self a kick they really don’t deserve. And the beauty of having an archive is that you don’t need to decide whether you were right or not. Your views, with a date attached, can stand as a reflection of a specific moment in time.
Reconciling every past view you’ve ever had with how you feel now isn’t required. It sounds exhausting, frankly.
The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet · Yiqin Fu
Imagine a world without hyperlinks or search:
Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:
- It doesn’t allow any external links;
- Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
- You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Search engine indexing is key to content discovery in the knowledge creation domain, but in a mobile-first world, it is extremely difficult to pull content across the walled gardens, whether or not there is a profit incentive to do so.
Again, the issue here is not censorship. Had China relaxed its speech restrictions, a search start-up would’ve faced the same level of resistance from content platforms when trying to index their content, and content platforms would’ve been equally reluctant to create their own search engines, as they could serve ads and profit without a functional search engine.