[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

Own what’s yours

Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.

Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.

My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani

This is one way of putting things into perspective.

The New York Good Times

Better than the real thing. All true too.

Refresh for more.

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.

Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

CCC | Ban tracking and personalised advertising

YES! THIS!!!

A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).

MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:

I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.

1 dataset. 100 visualizations.

The same small dataset visualised in a hundred different ways, with notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982) - YouTube

Wow! Grace Hopper has always been a hero to me, but I had no idea she was such a fantastic presenter. She’s completely engaging, with the timing and deadpan delivery of a stand-up comedian at times.

DOC •  The power of beauty in communicating complex ideas

As designers creating images to communicate complex ideas, we rationalize our processes, we bring objectivity to our craft, we want our clients to think that our decisions are based on reasoning. However, we should also defend our intuitions, our subjectivity. We should also defend pursuing beauty as it is one of our most powerful tools.

How would you build Wordle with just HTML and CSS? | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer

This is a great thought exercise in progressive enhancement …that Scott then turns into a real exercise!

A microdata enhanced HTML Webcomponent for Leaflet | k-nut — Blog

Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.

Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.

The global fight against polio — how far have we come? - Our World in Data

I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.

The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.

Miniver Cheevy: Decision-based evidence-making

Research is not validation:

My presumption that one should examine evidence before reaching a conclusion, rather than using it to support a conclusion, was not even an idea they could understand well enough to reject.

I am not against trying to be persuasive. That is a necessary art. But I was shaken they could not conceive of any use of information other than persuasion.

Historical Trails

Maggie explores different ways of visualising journeys on the web, including browser histories:

Perhaps web browsing histories should look more like Git commit histories? Perhaps distinct branches could representing different topics and research avenues?

A memex in every web browser!

Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems

A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.

scottjehl/PE: declarative data binding for HTML

This is an interesting idea from Scott—a templating language that doesn’t just replace variables with values, but keeps the original variable names in there too.

Not sure how I feel about using data- attributes for this though; as far as I know, they’re intended to be site-specific, not for cross-site solutions like this.

Apocalypse-Proof

Back in 2017 when I was in New York, I went on a self-guided infrastructure tour: 32 Avenue of the Americas, 60 Hudson Street, and the subject of this article, 33 Thomas Street. One of my pictures is used to illustrate its creepiness, both in real life and as an evil lair in fiction:

A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That has made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.

Counting Ghosts

Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.

This article is spot-on!