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.
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.
No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”
But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.
This reminds me of that post by Winnie Lim I linked to a while back.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.
It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.
First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if
/else
statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.
Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.
In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.
I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.
We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:
Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.
That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:
Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.
To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.
So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”
AI becomes a stand-in term for whatever technologies and techniques are new, shiny, and just beyond the grasp of our understanding. We use it to gesture at a future we cannot fully comprehend or currently realise. As soon as we do, it will no longer be “AI.”
I really, really enjoyed this deep dive into practical HTML semantics. Sit back and enjoy!
A great introduction to structuring your content well:
Using semantic HTML as building blocks for a website will give you a lovely accessible foundation upon which to add your fancy CSS and whizzy JavaScript.
The quest for more is a kind of prison that we make for ourselves. The idea that if we work ourselves to the bone now we can live a better life later is a convenient lie that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.
An open and honest post from Ben.
I see decentralization as a way to lead to a more equitable society through disassembling existing hierarchies, for example, but I see straight through the people who see these ideas as a way to build a new hierarchy for their own benefit. We used to talk about abolishing gatekeepers in the early days of the web, too, until it became clear that many people just wanted to become a new kind of gatekeeper themselves.
The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.
The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is out. If you’re a subscriber, it will magically appear in your podcast software of choice using the power of RSS. If you’re not a subscriber, it isn’t too late to change that.
This week’s episode is all about design ops. I began contructing the episode by gathering raw material from talks at Leading Design. There’s good stuff from Kim Fellman, Jacqui Frey, Courtney Kaplan, and Meredith Black.
But as I was putting the snippets together, I felt like the episode was missing something. It needed a bit of oomph. So I harangued Andy for some of his time. I wasn’t just fishing for spicy hot takes—something that Andy is known for. Andy is also the right person to explain design ops. If you search for that term, one of the first results you’ll get is a post he wrote on the Clearleft blog a few years back called Design Ops — A New Discipline.
I remember helping Andy edit that post and I distinctly recall my feedback. The initial post didn’t have a definition of the term, and I felt that a definition was necessary (and Andy added one to the post).
My cluenessness about the meaning of terms like “design ops” or “service design” isn’t some schtick I’m putting on for the benefit of the podcast. I’m genuinely trying to understand these terms better. I don’t like the feeling of hearing a term being used a lot without a clear understanding of what that term means. All too often my understanding feels more like “I think I know it means, but I’m not sure I could describe it.” I’m not comfortable with that.
Making podcast episodes on these topics—which are outside my comfort zone—has been really helpful. I now feel like I have a much better understanding of service design, design ops and other topical terms. I hope that the podcast will be just as helpful for listeners who feel as bamboozled as I do.
The secret of design being useful in many places is not talking about design too much and just getting on with it. I sometimes think we create significant language barriers with job titles, design theory and making people learn a new language for the privilege of working with us.
I think there’s some truth to that. Andy disagrees. Strongly.
In our chat, Andy and I had what politicians would describe as “a robust discussion.” I certainly got some great material for the podcast (though some of the more contentious bits remain on the cutting room floor).
Calling on Andy for this episode was definitely the right call. I definitely got the added oomph I was looking for. In fact, this ended up being one of my favourite episodes.
There’s a lot of snappy editing, all in service of crafting a compelling narrative. First, there’s the origin story of design ops. Then there’s an explanation of what it entails. From around the 13 minute mark, there’s a pivot—via design systems—into asking whether introducing a new term is exclusionary. That’s when the sparks start to fly. Finally, I pull it back to talking about how Clearleft can help in providing design ops as a service.
The whole episode comes out at 21 minutes, which feels just right to me.
I’m really pleased with how this episode turned out, and I hope you’ll like it too. Have a listen and decide for yourself.
There is a huge world out there where design isn’t embraced, where designers are clawing for resources, and where design isn’t prioritized. Most of the organizations that are changing your world don’t know much about design, aren’t looking for designers, and won’t even understand what designers are talking about when they show up at the front door.
The transcript of David Heinemeier Hansson keynote from last year’s RailsConf is well worth reading. It’s ostensibily about open source software but it delves into much larger questions.
Here, then, is my speculation. Work is something we struggle to get and strive to keep. We love-hate it (usually not in equal measure). Sometimes it seems meaningless. I’m told this is the case even for surgeons, teachers and disaster-relief workers: those with jobs whose worth seems indisputable. For the mere facilitators, the obscure cogs in the machinery of the modern economy whose precise function and value it takes some effort to ascertain, the meaning in what we do often seems particularly elusive (I should know). I contend, however, that while our lives need to be meaningful, our work does not; it only has to be honest and useful. And if someone is voluntarily paying you to do something, it’s probably useful at least to them.
Programming lessons from Umberto Eco and Emily Wilson.
Converting the analog into the digital requires discretization, leaving things out. What we filter out—or what we focus on—depends on our biases. How do conventional translators handle issues of bias? What can programmers learn from them?
When in doubt, label your icons.
When not in doubt, you probably should be.
It turns out that “it turns out” is a handy linguistic shortcut for making an unsubstaniated assertion.
A short text file, imbued with meaning and memory.
I love this deep dive that Sara takes into the question of marking up content for progressive disclosure. It reminds me Dan’s SimpleQuiz from back in the day.
Then there’s this gem, which I think is a terrificly succinct explanation of the importance of meaningful markup:
It’s always necessary, in my opinion, to consider what content would render and look like in foreign environments, or in environments that are not controlled by our own styles and scripts. Writing semantic HTML is the first step in achieving truly resilient Web sites and applications.
I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.
HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.
I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.