Link tags: complete

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.

What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far | Seldo.com

LLMs are good at transforming text into less text

Laurie is really onto something with this:

This is the biggest and most fundamental thing about LLMs, and a great rule of thumb for what’s going to be an effective LLM application. Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.

Depending how much of the hype around AI you’ve taken on board, the idea that they “take text and turn it into less text” might seem gigantic back-pedal away from previous claims of what AI can do. But taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market. It’s still very exciting, all the more exciting because it’s got clear boundaries and isn’t hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are.

Fine-tuning Text Inputs

Garrett talks through some handy HTML attributes: spellcheck, autofocus, autocapitalize, autocomplete, and autocorrect:

While they feel like small details, when we set these attributes on inputs, we streamline things for visitors while also guiding the browser on when it should just get out of the way.

Vibe Shift

Forget every article you’ve read that tries to explain large language models. Just read this post by Peter and feel it.

“Design System Coverage,” an article from SuperFriendly

I completely agree with Dan that when it comes to design systems, completeness is an over-rated—and even counter-productive—goal:

Some organizations seem to hold up the ideal that, once a design system exists, everything in an interface can and should be built with it. Not only is that an unrealistic goal for most enterprises, but it can often be a toxic mindset that anything less than 100% coverage is misuse of a design system at best or utter failure at worst.

The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system • Robin Rendle

I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:

If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.

Build a Better Mobile Input

This is such a handy tool for building forms! Choose different combinations of type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes on input elements and see how that will be conveyed to users on iOS and Android devices.

Better Form Inputs for Better Mobile User Experiences | CSS-Tricks

Here’s one simple, practical way to make apps perform better on mobile devices: always configure HTML input fields with the correct type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes. While these three attributes are often discussed in isolation, they make the most sense in the context of mobile user experience when you think of them as a team.

This is an excellent deep dive with great advice:

You may think that you are familiar with the basic autocomplete options, such as those that help the user fill in credit card numbers or address form fields, but I’d urge you to review them to make sure that you are aware of all of the options. The spec lists over 50 values!

HTML attributes to improve your users’ two factor authentication experience - Twilio

The many ways of improving a single form field in HTML.

I love these kinds of deep dives into markup!

An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle - Cloud Four

When I liveblogged Jason’s talk at An Event Apart in Chicago, I included this bit of reporting:

Jason proceeds to relate a long and involved story about buying burritos online from Chipotle.

Well, here is that story. It’s a good one, with some practical takeaways (if you’ll pardon the pun):

1. Use HTML5 input features
2. Support autofill
3. Make autofill part of your test plans

Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck

This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:

Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!

And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:

Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.

At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.

Insult Generator

Testing the theory that putting the word “total”, “complete”, or “absolute” in front of any noun automatically makes for an excellent insult.

alphagov/accessible-autocomplete: An autocomplete component, built to be accessible.

If you’re looking for an accessible standalone autocomplete script, this one from GDS looks very good (similar to Lea’s awesomplete).

Cancelling Requests with Abortable Fetch

This is a really good use-case for cancelling fetch requests: making API calls while autocompleting in search.

Improve Your Billing Form’s UX In One Day – Smashing Magazine

A few straightforward steps for improving the usability of credit card forms. The later steps involve JavaScript but the first step uses nothing more than straight-up HTML.

Oversharing with the browser’s autofill / Stoyan’s phpied.com

Equal parts clever and scary. By using autocomplete in HTML and some offscreen positioning in CSS, it’s possible to extract some unexpected personal information.

I expect browsers will be closing these holes pretty quickly.

» Autofill: What web devs should know, but don’t

Jason takes good look at the browser support for autocomplete values and then makes a valiant attempt to make up for the complete lack of documentation for Safari’s credit card scanning.

Touch Keyboard Type ‘Cheat Sheet’ - Labs - Baymard Institute

A useful primer on which combinations of attributes and values work best for which form fields: type, autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize.

Awesomplete: Ultra lightweight, highly customizable, simple autocomplete, by Lea Verou

Lea wasn’t happy with the lack of styling and extensibility of the datalist element, so she rolled her own lightweight autocomplete/type-ahead widget, and she’s sharing it with the world.

Google Poetics

The accidental beauty in Google’s autosuggest algorithm.