Jeremy Keith

The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson

Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.

So Many Websites

But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel

Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS - Web Performance Calendar

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

In an Irish session, tunes are almost never played in isolation. They’re played in sets.

A set of tunes might be as few as two. More usually, it’s three or more.

It’s unusual to change from one tune type into another. You tend to get a set of jigs, or a set of reels, or a set of hornpipes. But it’s very common to change key within a set. In fact, that’s often where a good set really stands out. There can be a real joy at that moment of switching. You might get a “Hup!” from someone listening to the session at that changeover.

So how do you decide what tunes to play in a set?

There are no real rules to this. Some people make up the set on the fly. Or you might try playing a set that you’ve heard other people play, maybe on a recording you like.

On the one hand, you’re looking for contrast. You probably don’t want to play three tunes all in the same key. On the other hand, it’s nice when there’s some kind of connection between the tunes—something about the phrasing or emphasis perhaps.

Pairing tunes for sets always reminds me of pairing typefaces. You don’t want the body copy and the headlines to be too similar, but you do want them to share some quality.

In his classic book, On Web Typography, Jason says:

When it comes to choosing and pairing typefaces, I keep two things in mind: distinction and harmony. To keep the system you’ve created for visual communication properly balanced, you need to choose typefaces that don’t compete too much with each other, but aren’t so similar as to be indistinguishable.

The same could be said for pairing tunes in sets!

Jason also says:

As another approach, opt for typefaces that share the same maker.

That can work for sets of tunes too. While most tunes are traditional, with no known composer, the really good composed tunes have entered the canon.

I’ve taken Jason’s advice for typefaces and applied to sets by playing a set of tunes by Junior Crehan or a set of tunes by Vincent Broderick.

Mostly though, there’s no real system to it. Or at least, not one that can be easily articulated. Like Jason says:

And we’re back to that old chestnut about rules: there are many right answers, and no answers are really wrong; there are just different degrees of good.

Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost

See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

Coming Soon · Gaeltacht Type

👀

Tá sceitimíní orm!

Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.

The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.

And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.

The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.

Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.

Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.

The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!

Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.

If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.

The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:

Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.

The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:

• 13 Minutes—the space race, from the perspective of the United States.
• The Bomb—the nuclear arms race, from Los Alamos to Cuba.
• The Santiago Boys—the CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist democracy in Chile.

Dissent | blarg

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.

There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.

AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You

Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.

There’s the old adage “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Or to put it more broadly, “everyone else is doing it.”

It’s dispiriting how often this explanation is given as justification for a dubious design decision, from home-page carousels to cookie banners.

Nic Chan has written a great post about designing a contact form and how the process was derailed by the client pointing to other people’s contact forms …even when they’ve got very, very different user needs.

It’s especially depressing when “everyone else is doing it” is used a substitute for any kind of accountability.

Building an email service that’s going to track when people click on links in an email? That sounds dodgy. On the other hand, everyone else is doing it.

Building a straightforward website, but making it a single-page app with client-side React that will be barely work on some devices and networks? That seems over-engineered. On the other hand, everyone else is doing it.

Sometimes the “everyone else is doing it” phenomenon leads to a chain reaction where nobody even knows why anyone ever did it in the first place.

Remember Flash? Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.

Instead of getting rid of the intros, we got “skip intro” links instead. This link was guaranteed to have a 100% clickthrough rate.

I’ve noticed something similar with conference talks. So many of them begin with a little spiel about the speaker, their background, and their work experience.

This might be interesting information, but this isn’t the right time or place for it. It’s already on the conference website, in the conference programme, and has probably just been reiterated by the conference host who just introduced the speaker.

When I’ve asked why people do this, the responses generally come down to “everyone else is doing it.” It’s become an expected part of the conference talk, just like a Flash intro used to be an expected part of a website.

When I’m curating a conference, I like to send speakers some information to help them prepare their talk. Some of this is practical stuff, like the tech set-up. Some of it is guidance for the slides, like ensuring sufficient colour contrast. And then there’s this:

Please don’t begin your talk with an introduction about yourself and your work history. You’ll be introduced on stage so it would be a shame to just repeat all that again. Also, it just gets in the way of the actual content of your talk. No need to provide your bona-fides.

Personally, I just find it super cringe. That’s why I don’t do it if I’m giving a talk myself.

As a host however, it’s a big part of my job. It’s way less cringe to have someone else big you up before the talk then doing it yourself.