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Most of What We Call Progress - Yusuf Aytas

Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.

The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.

Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker

A profile of Tim and the World World Web.

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Tonga | The Guardian

A fascinating look at the importance of undersea cables, taken from a new book called The Web Beneath the Waves.

The sound of inevitability | My place to put things

People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.

This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype

Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes.

The history of album art || Matthew Ström, designer-leader

An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.

AI doesn’t need to think. We do! - craigabbott.co.uk

A good overview of how large language models work:

The words flow together because they’ve been seen together many times. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. It just means they’re coherent.

“AI-first” is the new Return To Office - Anil Dash

AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

Bias in Design Systems - bencallahan.com

Thoughtful analysis from Ben (as always).

What we talk about when we talk about AI — Careful Industries

Technically, AI is a field of computer science that uses advanced methods of computing.

Socially, AI is a set of extractive tools used to concentrate power and wealth.

Petition · Defend the Internet Archive - United States · Change.org

Signed!

We, the undersigned, call on the record labels and members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)—including UMG, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI Recorded Music Assets, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music—to drop your lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

Better typography with text-wrap pretty | WebKit

Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.

Poisoning Well: HeydonWorks

Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.

Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the nofollow protocol.

Plane GPS systems are under sustained attack - is the solution a new atomic clock? - BBC News

A fascinating look at the modern equivalent of the Longitude problem.

CSS Form Control Styling Level 1

This looks like a really interesting proposal for allowing developers more control over styling inputs. Based on the work being done the customisable select element, it starts with a declaration of appearance: base.

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Generative AI use and human agency

You do not have to use generative AI.

AI itself cannot be held to account.

If you use AI, you are the one who is accountable for whatever you produce with it.

There are contexts in which it is immoral to use generative AI.

Correcting or fact checking generative AI may take longer than just doing a task yourself, or with conventional AI tools.

You do not have to use generative AI.

The Tyranny of Now — The New Atlantis

I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.

What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.

Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.