Link tags: ar

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.

Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine

The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.

“AI is inevitable” is bullshit · Eric Eggert

LLMs are useful when you need a compromise between fast and good. You will never get a good outcome fast.

I’m afraid we are settling into a status of good enough when using “AI,” which is especially hurtful for accessibility.

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

Software can be finished - Ross Wintle

There’s quite a crossover between resilience and longevity:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Keep scope small and fixed
3. Reduce dependencies
4. Produce static output
5. Increase Quality Assurance

V7: Video Killed the Web Browser Star | Rob Weychert

Grrr… it turns out that browsers exhibit some very frustrating behaviour when it comes to the video element. Rob has the details…

The present and potential future of progressive image rendering - JakeArchibald.com

When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.

The Lifeblood of the Web · Matthias Ott

If you need to convince someone – your boss, your team, your family, or also yourself – then explain that going to a conference isn’t just another trip away from “real work.” No, this is the real work: investing in your craft, your connections, your growth.

Matthias nails why should go to events …like, say, Web Day Out.

There’s something magical about walking into a conference venue in the morning. The hum of first conversations, the smell of coffee, the anticipation, and the smiling faces. And the unspoken feeling that we all belong here, that we are here for the same reason: because we care about the same things and we all have, in some way or another, built our lives around the Web.

Default Isn’t Design

Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, more interoperable ecosystem. Psychologists call this reflex System Justification.

The explains a lot about React-driven front-end development!

When a single toolset becomes the default, we don’t just prefer it, we build narratives that justify it. And that’s when a tool quietly becomes a gate or even a destructive force.

Where’s the AI design renaissance?

I’ve had some incredibly productive moments with AI design tools. But I’ve had at least as many slogs, where I can’t get it to do some basic thing I should’ve done myself 45 minutes ago.

My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation 🤫

This, in my opinion, is how we end up with a firehose of AI hype, and yet zero signs of a software renaissance. As Mike Judge points out, the following graphs are flat: (a) new app store releases, (b) new domain names registered, (c) new Github repositories.

Who needs a flying car when you have display: grid

I’m not the only one who’s amazed by how much you can do with just a little CSS these days.

Interop Feature Ranking

This is a nifty initiative:

This site lets you rank the proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on for 2026.

For the record, here’s my top ten:

1. Cross-document view transitions
2. Speculation Rules API
3. img sizes="auto" loading="lazy"
4. Customizable/stylable select
5. Invoker commands
6. Interoperable rendering of HTML fieldset/legend
7. Web Share API
8. CSS scroll-driven animations
9. CSS accent-color property
10. CSS hanging-punctuation property

The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer

I prefer my tools to help me with repetitive tasks (and there are many of those in programming), understanding codebases, and authoring correct programs. I take offense at products that are designed to think for me. To remove the agency of my own understanding of the software I produce, and to cut connections with my coworkers. Even if LLMs lived up to the hype, we would still stand to lose all of that and our craft.

Why doesn’t anything work anymore? | Jason Rodriguez

I’ve worked in the tech industry for close to two decades at this point. I’ve seen how difficult it is to build quality products, but I’ve also seen that it can be done. It just feels like no one gives a shit anymore, beyond a handful of independent devs and small shops. It’s wild.

A cartoonist’s review of AI art - The Oatmeal

Stick with this. It’s worth it.

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

A great interview with Ted Chiang:

Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.

Decentralizing quality || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.

How to create a typographic hierarchy – Pangram Pangram Foundry

1. Start with the text
2. Use size intentionally
3. Contrast weights and styles
4. Play with spacing
5. Use colour, but don’t rely on it
6. Limit your font choices (but choose well and wisely)
7. Repeat, repeat, repeat
8. Test your system

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.