Tags: ors

168

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Monday, July 10th, 2023

Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog

I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.

Monday, June 12th, 2023

A history of metaphors for the internet - The Verge

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.”

Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte

The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.

Friday, May 19th, 2023

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

Monday, January 9th, 2023

The Year of the Personal Website · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Especially if you are a designer, an artist, a photographer, a writer, a blogger, a creator of any kind, owning your work is as important as ever. Social media platforms might be great for distributing your content and creating a network of like-minded people around you. But they will always be ephemeral, transient, and impermanent – not the best place to preserve your thoughts, words, and brushstrokes.

Sunday, December 4th, 2022

dbohdan/classless-css: A list of classless CSS themes/frameworks with screenshots

A collection of stylesheets that don’t use class selectors. Think of them as alternatives to default user-agent stylesheets.

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

What it’s like working with an editor

This piece by Giles is a spot-on description of what I do in my role as content buddy at Clearleft. Especially this bit:

Your editor will explain why things need changing

As a writer, it’s really helpful to understand the why of each edit. It’s easier to re-write if you know precisely what the problem is. And often, it’s less bruising to the ego. It’s not that you’re a bad writer, but just that one particular thing could be expressed more simply, or more clearly, than your first effort.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2022

Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error :: Aaron Gustafson

A handy little script from Aaron to improve the form validation experience.

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more | WebKit

A terrific tour of just some of the fantastic ways you can use :has() in CSS.

The section on using it with sibling selectors blew my mind:

How often have you wanted to adjust the margins on a headline based on the element following it? Now it’s easy. This code allows us to select any h2 with a p immediately after it.

h2:has(+ p) { margin-bottom: 0; }

Amazing.

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

Sunday, May 29th, 2022

OutHorse Your Email

I must remember to try this out-of-office email strategy.

Sunday, March 13th, 2022

Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick

A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.

Wednesday, January 26th, 2022

Here’s what I didn’t know about :where() - Manuel Matuzović

I feel like I’m starting to understand how the CSS :where pseudo-class works and why it’s useful. The cogs are slowly turning in my brain.

Sunday, January 2nd, 2022

Metaphors We Web By: Paper and Place

Out of all of these metaphors, the two most enduring are paper and physical space.

Wednesday, September 29th, 2021

Locus. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan documents the sad plague of app-install banners on the web.

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021

Coaching on the Clearleft podcast

Season three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

The first episode is a nice gentle one to ease into things. It’s about coaching …and training …and mentorship. Basically I wanted to find out what the differences are between those three things.

But I must confess, there’s a commercial reason why this episode is coming out now. There’s a somewhat salesy promotion of an upcoming coaching programme with Julia Whitney. This is definitely the most overt marketing I’ve done on the Clearleft podcast, but if you listen to the episode, I think you’ll agree that it fits well with the theme.

Fear not, future episodes will not feature this level of cross-promotion. Far from it. You can expect some very revealing podcast episodes that pull no punches in getting under the skin of design at Clearleft.

The stars of this episode are my colleagues Rebecca and Chris, who were an absolute joy to interview.

Have a listen and hear for yourself.

Saturday, August 21st, 2021

Scope Proposal & Explainer

This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.

Saturday, August 7th, 2021

Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today

Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:

Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.

Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.

I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:

Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.

Hell, yeah!

Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).

Monday, May 31st, 2021

Summertime in England

On Thursday of last week, Summer arrived in England. I accept full responsibility for this. That morning I left the house early and wore a winter coat. So of course the day was filled with glorious sunshine.

I was up early to head into the Clearleft studio to do a tech check and some pre-records for the upcoming UX Fest. We’ve turned a meeting room into a very swanky-looking recording studio with proper lights, mics, and camera. I’ll be hosting UX Fest, channeling my inner Alan Partridge and Ron Burgundy.

Recording an interview with the brilliant @KrysHiggins for next week’s @UXLondon #UXFest. (I made sure my shirt matched her excellent new book, Better Onboarding by @ABookApart.) https://abookapart.com/products/better-onboarding

Being back in the studio was nice. Some of my Clearleft colleagues joined the agency during The Situation so this was my first chance to meet some of them face to face (or facemask to facemask at least).

The next day I had even more opportunity to see my co-workers without the barriers of computer screens. We had a workplace walk in the countryside to mark one year of becoming an employee-owned agency. We rendezvoused at Devil’s Dyke and walked a bit of the Sussex countryside, just enough to work up an appetite and a thirst to be satiated at the nearby Shepherd and Dog pub in Fulking (near the brilliantly named Fulking Hill). We sat at tables outside, had pints of ale, and a proper pub lunch, chatting all the while, just like in The Before Times.

A nice day for a @Clearleft walk in the country.

When I got back to Brighton I met up with Jessica for a beer in the sun before wandered down to the beach together to meet our friend Kate and celebrate her birthday.

Hanging out on the beach.

Two days of good weather was a blessing, but it didn’t stop there. The next day, Saturday, was even sunnier. We spent the day working in the garden. We planted salads in our raised beds and then fortified those raised beds to make them impenatrable to the family of foxes living in our neighbourbood. Don’t get me wrong, the fox cubs are very cute. I just don’t want them digging up our salads.

There are multiple fox cubs hanging out in the garden. Fuzzy little cuties! 🦊

On Sunday, Jessica and I sauntered up the hill to Brighton Racecourse so we could cheer on Jake as he finished his hundred kilometre walk from London to Brighton. Normally this would be a very strange behaviour, but it was all for a good cause.

After that, we had a pub lunch (outdoors, of course) before heading home. I spent the rest of the day sitting out in the garden, admiring the handiwork of the previous day, reading and occasionally dozing.

Today it’s more of the same. Glorious sunshine. Sitting in the garden. Reading. Playing some tunes on the mandolin. Looking forward to grilling outside for the third evening in a row.

Sitting in the sunshine, playing tunes on my mandolin. ☀️ 🎶

It feels like something is changing and it’s not just the weather. The Situation, while far from ending, is certainly morphing. I still don’t plan on spending any time indoors, but with weather this good, I don’t need to.

In two weeks time I’ll get my second jab of vaccine. Two weeks after that I can start letting my guard down a bit more. Until then, I’ll be staying outdoors. If the weather continues like this, that won’t be a hardship.