Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

Hire HTML and CSS people

Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”

Qubyte Codes - IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024

Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker

Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

Once again, absolutely spot-on analysis from Ted Chiang.

I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker

A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.

When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.

Baldur Bjarnason -

This is kind of brilliant:

Maybe what’s needed for websites and web apps is a kind of Prepper Web Dev?

Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter | The New Yorker

In this piece published a year ago, Ted Chiang pours cold water on the idea of a bootstrapping singularity.

How much can you optimize for generality? To what extent can you simultaneously optimize a system for every possible situation, including situations never encountered before? Presumably, some improvement is possible, but the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achieved. This is a very strong claim. If someone is asserting that infinite optimization for generality is possible, I’d like to see some arguments besides citing examples of optimization for specialized tasks.

The cost of opinion – Dimitri Glazkov

This is a terrific analysis of why frameworks exist, with nods to David Hume’s is-ought problem: the native features are what is, and the framework features are what somebody thinks ought to be.

I’ve been saying at conferences for years now that if you choose to use a framework, you need to understand that you are also taking on the philosophy and worldview of the creators of that framework. This post does a great job of explaining that.

Future Scenarios Generator - Third Wave

A slot machine for speculation. Enter a topic and get a near-future scenario on that topic generated automatically.

Diving into the ::before and ::after Pseudo-Elements / Coder’s Block

A thorough deep dive into generated content in CSS.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.

Nested Media Queries – Bram.us

Huh. I don’t think I ever thought about nesting media queries …and yet I’m pleasantly surprised that it works!

world smallest office suite

I like this idea for a minimum viable note-taking app:

data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:20px;">

I have added this to bookmarks and now my zero-weight text editor is one keypress away from me. You might also use it as a temporary clipboard to paste text or even pictures.

See also: a minimum viable code editor.

Pausing a GIF with details/summary | CSS-Tricks

This is such a clever and useful technique! It’s HTML+CSS only, and it’s a far less annoying way to display animated GIFs.

(Does anybody even qualify the word GIF with the adjective “animated” anymore? Does anyone know that there used to be such a thing as non-animated GIFs and that they were everywhere?)

Ariel Waldman: The colorful critter world of microbes in Antarctica | TED Talk

Ariel gave a TED talk and it’s mind-blowingly good!

Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović

A score of 100 in Lighthouse or 0 errors in axe doesn’t mean that you’re done, it means that you’re ready to start manual testing and testing with real users, if possible.

Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In - Electric Literature

Ted Chiang’s hot takes are like his short stories—punchy, powerful, and thought-provoking.

Accessible HTML Elements | Amber’s Website

Amber runs through some HTML elements that help you provide semantic information—and accessibility—for your website: headings, paragraphs, lists, and more:

You may be aware that ARIA roles are often used with HTML elements. I haven’t written about them here, as it’s good to see how HTML written without ARIA can still be accessible.

Why These Social Networks Failed So Badly

Ignore the clickbaity headline and have a read of Whitney Kimball’s obituaries of Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, OpenSocial, ConnectU, Tribe.net, Path, Yik Yak, Ello, Orkut, Google+, and Vine.

I’m sure your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is perfectly safe.

Jeremy Keith: Going offline - YouTube

Here’s the opening keynote I gave at Frontend United in Utrecht a few weeks back.