WTF is the Lean Web, anyways? | Go Make Things

Three principles:

1. Embrace the platform
2. Favor small, modular tools
3. Build a web for everyone

Nobody cares about your blog.

I just don’t care what you think, here’s my post and you can do nothing about it :)

Why design systems fail by Karen Vanhouten

1. No shared (and contextual) sense of purpose
2. Overbuilding, or scaling too early
3. Inability to make decisions and move forward quickly
4. Lack of clear ownership and dedicated resources
5. Lack of cultural alignment

The common thread among these issues is that none are related to technical or tooling decisions —or even to the components themselves.

New Low in the Accessibility “Industry:” Overlay Company Sues Globally-Recognized Accessibility Expert

Lainey Feingold on the ongoing court proceedings against Adrian Roselli:

This lawsuit against Adrian Roselli impacts every person who cares about including disabled people in the digital world. It impacts all of us who speak, write, and advocate for digital accessibility that is fair, equitable, and ethical.

Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell

I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.

How to Identify “Truthy” Tech Trends

Amber points out the commonalities between self-driving cars, the metaverse, “AI”, and whatever tech trend is in the headlines next week:

• It was first depicted in TV & movies.
• Seemingly everyone is rushing into it for fear of missing out.
• It promises to do too many major things too soon.
• It inspires fear in the popular imagination.

A principled approach to evolving choice and control for web content

This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.

But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.

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.

Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift – Another angry woman

On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex.

Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

• Be skeptical of PR hype
• Question the training data
• Evaluate the model
• Consider downstream harms

Legibility

Mary Dyson’s short book is available for free online as a lovely web book:

1. What do we mean by legibility?
2. How we read
3. Perspectives on legibility
4. What is measured and how
5. Overview of research: Type
6. Overview of research: Typography
7. Beyond legibility research

4 design principles I use every day to avoid bad UX and create products that work for everyone – Adam Silver – designer, London, UK

1. Good design works for everyone
2. Good design makes things obvious
3. Good design puts users in control
4. Good design is lightweight

UX London 2023 | Flickr

These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

Taken together, these flaws make LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline.

Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.

Imagine Google or a major tech company trying to fix their search engine by adding a psychic hotline to their front page? That’s what they’re doing with Bard.

Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco

Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?

In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.

Imagining a Future with Surgically Inserted Earbuds and Whale Concerts – Rolling Stone

Annalee Newitz:

When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.

The Cost Of JavaScript - 2023 - YouTube

A great talk from Addy on just how damaging client-side JavaScript can be to the user experience …and what you can do about it.

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge

Wanna get angry all over again?

(Now do Geocities!)

Introducing AI Help: Your Trusted Companion for Web Development | MDN Blog

As part of this pointless push, an “AI explain” button appeared on MDN articles. This terrible idea actually got pushed to production (bypassing the usual deploy steps) where it lasted less than a day.

You can read the havoc it wreaked in the short term. We’ll find out how much long-term damage it has done to trust in Mozilla and MDN.

This may be the worst use of a large language model I’ve seen since synthentic users (if you click that link, no it’s not a joke: “user research without the users” is what they’re actually proposing).