Hidde's links

Filler text no one wants to read or write

2023-07-04T00:00:00Z

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’:

Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write

Originally posted on 4 July 2023 on Hidde's blog.

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Algorithmic thatcherism

2024-01-03T00:00:00Z

Dan McQuillan says AI is algorithmic Thatcherism:

“Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn't provide insights as it's just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences.”

(via Ethan Marcotte)

Originally posted on 3 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Encapsulating components

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

Nolan Lawson on the problem of component encapsulation:

Overall, what I would love to see is a thorough synopsis of the various groups involved in the web component ecosystem, how the existing solutions have worked in practice, what’s been tried and what hasn’t, and what needs to change to move forward.

Originally posted on 4 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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AI terminology

2024-01-07T00:00:00Z

I've been using “AI”, with quotes, a bunch on this website. I feel the industry is calling things artificially intelligent way beyond the scope of what that (admittedly hard to define) phrase actually means. That makes criticial analysis harder… that's good for marketeers, not so much for others.

Simon Willison agrees that “spicy autocomplete” is a good analogy for how LLMs work today, but at the same, it's ok to call it artificial intelligence:

We need an agreed term for this class of technology, in order to have conversations about it. I think it’s time to accept that “AI” is good enough, and is already widely understood.

Originally posted on 7 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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How engineers see the web

2024-01-07T00:00:00Z

In Weird things engineers believe about Web development, Brian Birtles talks about different assumptions of developers of websites and and web browsers:

it’s easy to assume our experience of the Web is representative of Web development in general

Yup, checks out.

Originally posted on 7 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Losing the imitation game

2024-01-07T00:00:00Z

Jennifer Moore on what LLMs can and cannot do:

The fundamental task of software development is not writing out the syntax that will execute a program. The task is to build a mental model of that complex system, make sense of it, and manage it over time.

From: Losing the imitation game

Originally posted on 7 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Design systems and the promise of solving inconsistency

2024-01-10T00:00:00Z

Design systems aren't a silver bullet to align teams and magically make digital products more consistent. In Through a design system, darkly, Ethan Marcotte describes two issues:

Design systems haven’t “solved” inconsistency. Rather, they’ve shifted how and when it manifests.

Many design systems have introduced another, deeper issue: a problem of visibility.

Originally posted on 10 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Inspecting a scam site

2024-01-11T00:00:00Z

Hui Jing had fun inspecting a site:

I just got a scam SMS and thought it’d be fun to inspect how the phishing website works

Hope you recover soon, my friend!

(From: Let's inspect a phishing site)

Originally posted on 11 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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More unnecessary AI

2024-01-11T00:00:00Z

One of the things that I keep circling back to when reading about ‘AI’ is the kind of problems people are trying to solve with it, so many of which are completely futile.

Chris Person on the ‘rabbit’:

What’s most annoying about all of this is the sheer repeated imposition of this horseshit. I’m sick of being forced to think about generative AI, large language models and large action models. I’m tired of these adult toddlers who need an AI to tie their shoes and make bad Pixar characters for them. Microsoft and Google keep shoving AI features into their software, and I absolutely should not have to worry about this garbage from Firefox of all places.

(from: Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing? - Aftermath)

Originally posted on 11 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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WCAG 2.2 in GOV.UK design system

2024-01-11T00:00:00Z

Design systems can be a super effective way to propagate a lot of accessibility at once, across many services. Not just as part of components that have good defaults, but also, maybe especially, in written documentation that helps people understand better what to do.

The GOV.UK Design System was updated to add an accessibility section and specific guidance on meeting WCAG 2.2 across the different component pages.

Originally posted on 11 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Meta's Fediverse plans

2024-01-12T00:00:00Z

Tom Coates went to a Meta event about Threads and the Fediverse:

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Data Dialogue event at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. The event was designed to reach out to people in the ‘Fediverse’ community, tell us their plans for their product “Threads” and get a bit of feedback about the policy and privacy implications.

His post has a detailed analysis of the pros and cons: How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse – plasticbag.org

Originally posted on 12 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Human curation is best

2024-01-14T00:00:00Z

Cassidy Williams:

In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the latest thing because you decided to go do it. Now, all of this content is pushed in your face, designed to be as addicting as possible, so you keep coming back.

This is from her recent post in which she explains why she misses human curation, it ties in nicely with why I got into reading (and, as of recently, ow writing) link blogs.

Cassidy is right about algorithmic curation, I feel the same when scrolling modern social media. The sites found out I liked a couple of things, then bombard me with just more of those things. It's better to optimise for human context and intention than for algorithms, they quickly get boring.

Originally posted on 14 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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A system of common components

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

In A Global Design System, Brad Frost makes a case to:

centralize common UI components, reduce so much of this unnecessary duplication, integrate with any web-based tech stack, and create a connected vehicle for delivering front-end best practices to the world’s web experiences.

His proposal explicitly isn't “new HTML features”. We're working on that over at Open UI, and it's fruitful and good, but also hard, because web compatibility is complicated. It's challenging to get accessibility “built-in” in: these web platform features, like a fully customisable select, need to be flexible and styleable enough so that people actually want to use them, but also inflexible enough so that people can't accidentally use them to make something inaccessible. Or maybe “inflexible” isn't the right word… it's a matter of adding “guardrails” to these features: what sort of ARIA relationships and states should apply when? Browsers can't guarantee what developers are trying or going to do.

Anyway, Brad's “global design system“ is not that, it's proposed as a layer on top of HTML, a common library between design systems. That too resonates with me. In fact, it is close to what NL Design System is setting out to do. Different government departments and layers maintain their own design systems, but share a common architecture and reuse themeable components and tests from one another.

Originally posted on 15 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Books with music

2024-01-16T00:00:00Z

Melanie made a new website called Lit Tapes:

I read a couple books in the past few months that heavily featured music throughout the plot, and thought it would be fun to create playlists for those books.

(From: New project: Lit Tapes | Melanie Richards)

It looks gorgeous.

Books that feature a lot of music are my jam, so I love this idea. I'm currently reading Whites can dance too by Kalaf Epalanga, but in this genre I also liked Mix tape by Jane Sanderson and everything by Haruki Murakami.

Originally posted on 16 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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AI images look cheap and easy

2024-01-17T00:00:00Z

iA write excellent posts that put “AI” into context. In their latest, they compare these images, that ‘often miss realness, depth, and originality’, to stock photos. This comes with a business risk: your content looks cheaper, of less value:

using AI images makes all of your content feel ordinary. Good images enrich your article, bad images devalue it. Your audience thinks: “If they use AI for images, they probably use it for content, too.”

(From: AI Art is The New Stock Image)

Unless there's a load of generated images that are so good that we can't recognise them, and we don't realise, I think iA are right: they're super obvious to spot and already look old.

Further down in the post, they predict the lack of creativity in machines may spark more human creativity:

Photography has made us question traditional art. Similarly, AI can make us question empty off-the-shelf communication. Ironically, machine-generated content might catalyze a fresh wave of humane creativity and hand-crafted innovation in verbal and visual storytelling.

I sure hope so. If we are to create things worth having around, we've got to make our choices and intentions matter.

Originally posted on 17 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Billions for “AGI” and “metaverse”

2024-01-18T00:00:00Z

“Artificial general intelligence” is a phrase different people assign different meanings to. Few think is actually within the realm of possibility. Yet, Zuckerberg talked to The Verge to announce Meta's new focus on trying to find out:

While he doesn’t have (…) an exact definition for it, he wants to build it.

(From: Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence at The Verge)

In the same interview he also wanted to “unequivocally state” they're still focused on “the metaverse” and will spend more than 15 billion dollars per year on that. Imagine that sort of budget to go to solving some of the world's more clearly defined problems.

Originally posted on 18 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Standards in 2024

2024-01-26T00:00:00Z

In a blog post, W3C's new CEO Seth Dobbs outlines a focus on putting people first. He explains global standards, like the W3C's, are essential to:

[ensure technologies] are accessible by all, secure, maintain privacy, respect the planet, and work anywhere in the world

Originally posted on 26 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Work and life

2024-01-26T00:00:00Z

Mandy Brown suggests we should give less fucks about work:

Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft.

(From: A unified theory of fucks)

Originally posted on 26 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Costs of running Signal

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

Signal shares what it costs to make Signal:

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate (…)

Here we review some of these costs and where this money goes, [and] help clarify just what is required to fulfill the dream of privacy-preserving alternative technology, and contribute to establishing a solid foundation from which we can grow alternatives that contest tech surveillance and the incentives behind it.

(From: Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive on fhe Signal blog)

They do all this with donations, not investors.

Originally posted on 28 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Custom elements in React

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

It took a while, but it's happening!

React 19 […] will have direct support for custom elements. Developers can expect that all tests on custom-elements-everywhere.com will pass by default going forward, like they currently do in the experimental channels. Release date, as well as docs for what's supported, still to be announced.

(From: RFC: Plan for custom element attributes/properties in React 19 · Issue #11347 · facebook/react)

Originally posted on 28 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Indie web and IndieWeb

2024-01-28T00:00:00Z

The web is yours. You can put up a website where you share whatever it is that you want to share with others.

(From: The indie web | James' Coffee Blog)

Originally posted on 28 January 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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The LLM search engine

2024-02-01T00:00:00Z

Ben Werdmuller tried Arc's new “AI”-based search and shares his concerns in Stripping the web of its humanity.

Like all these tools, it outputs falsehoods. But that isn't the worst issue, he explains. Without attribution, the tool gives a false sense of objectivity and hides away bias:

If I search for “who should I follow in AI?” I get the usual AI influencers, with no mention of Timnit Gebru or Joy Buolamwini (who would be my first choices). If I ask who to follow in tech, I get Elon Musk. It undoubtedly has a lens through which it sees the world.

It's a particular kind of bubble where Elon Musk is worth following and Timnit Gebru is not suggested (would very much recommend following her instead).

Ben also notes that when bots consume content instead of humans, that threatens the ecosystem of content and writing:

If we strip [payments or donations to writers] away, there’s no writing, information, or expression for the app to summarize.

Who's going to make the input these tools grab in order to generate their output? Google faced various legal issues around displaying excerpts of news outlets on their news website. But they did at least quote and attribute them, while linking to the original. The automated processing basically strips away any opportunity for writers to be paid (or known) for their work.

Originally posted on 1 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Bazaar vs cathedral people management

2024-02-06T00:00:00Z

As a manager, you should ask yourself: are you building a cathedral or a bazaar? And as an employee, you should ask yourself: do you prefer working in a cathedral or a bazaar?

In Cathedral vs Bazaar People Management, Ben Balter explains how these two styles of software development are indeed also styles of people management. He also explains how they can differ by industry (eg army needs more hierarchy than startup), individual (junior might need more structure than senior) and role (of course, it depends on what you do).

Originally posted on 6 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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The tech a VC does believe in

2024-02-08T00:00:00Z

Molly White wrote an excellent review of a book written by Chris Dixon, an investor specialised in crypto companies and blockchain at Andreessen Horowitz. Like Molly, I’m very scepticical of crypto companies. While I understand people want to try and get rich from tech investments, and that creating hype could help with such goals, I continue to not get the premise of this particular hype.

We’ve now had many years of solid crypto and blockchain criticism. From Molly’s review I gather Dixon’s book doesn’t really engage with that criticism, at all. He just dismisses it. While bashing on other technologies, like RSS. Strikes me as ironic that Dixon can’t see the use cases for RSS, while advocating for blockchaim, a technology still in search for a compelling application. Is it that RSS isn’t ‘monetised’, and that the ’value‘ he’s looking for is ’value as in money‘? Rather than ‘is how podcasts work and lots of people use this to keep up to date with content’?

Or, as Ahmet A. Sabanc wrote, in RSS is not dead:

RSS was never dead. I don’t know why people claimed that just because a tech overlord decided something is not profitable for them. People are still using it and it’s as good and alive as it’s always been.

Originally posted on 8 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Apple removes PWA support

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

Bruce on how Apple now seems to plan for breaking PWAs:

Presumably Apple doesn’t want PWAs to open in third-party browsers that have more powerful features than Safari, because those would directly compete with native apps in its own App Store. However, in the EU, it can’t privilege PWAs in Safari with its own private APIs any more. And so its solution, in its spirit of malicious compliance, seems to be “if we can’t have them, nobody can!”

(From: Bruce Lawson's personal site : Is Apple breaking PWAs out of malicious compliance?)

I loved to see Apple invest in web platform features and Safari a lot more in recent years. I hate to see the way they seem to want to place themselves above (what seems to
me is fair) European law.

Originally posted on 9 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Opportunities for AI in accessibility

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

Aaron Gustafson:

AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

(From: Opportunities for AI in Accessibility – A List Apart)

In this post, Aaron shares some examples of where ‘AI’ could be used to make content more broadly accessible. This is a controversial subject, because there are many automated ‘solutions’ that don't actually remove barriers, so caution is warranted. Such solutions often focus on people who want to comply with accessibility instead of people with disabilities. And accessibility is about people with disabilities, period. Aaron acknowledges this in the post, and calls for including people with disabilities.

What if, he suggests, users could ask specific questions about complex charts? As Aaron acknowledges, hallucinations exist, there could still be a use, especially with more diverse training data. Other examples of where ‘AI’ could remove barriers in his post: voice preservation, voice recognition and text transformation.

I'm still sceptical, because I've seen too many claims from automated tools that don't work that well in practice, but I understand it's worth to at least explore different options, and weigh them against the reality of today's web. For the voice and text tools I am actually somewhat optimistic.

Originally posted on 9 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Questioning practices for a more ethical web

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

Every day, I get to work with people who do good work, who care about things like privacy, ethics and accessibility. We exist. We just are drowning, drowning in algorithmically-guarded walled gardens that are nothing more than quagmires of enshittification, of AI-generated content, of snake-oil solutions.

(From: Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? - Nic Chan)

This piece from Nic resonated. There's a lot of good people in the web industry, doing good things. But there's also a lot of very bad practices that have an impact way beyond their initial uses. From content optimised for search engines (and thus not for humans) to extreme tracking (very far from just figuring out how many people visit which pages).

To avoid bad practices and build more ethically as an industry, I think what Nic shares would actually be the most effective way: to actively question practices and orders we receive as individuals in teams. In What kind of ethics do front-end developers need? I listed a bunch of other things that individuals in teams can make a fuss about.

Originally posted on 9 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Don't disable form fields

2024-02-12T00:00:00Z

In Don’t Disable Form Controls, Adrian Roselli explains that, while it sometimes can be ok to disable buttons, it's never ok to disable submit buttons (or any form fields):

Telling authors not to disable submit buttons is too narrow. Authors should not disable any form fields.

Originally posted on 12 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Django's accessibility improvements

2024-02-14T00:00:00Z

In Django accessibility in 2023 and beyond, the accessibility team of Python framework Django reflects on their work in the year 2023 and looks to the future. This makes me happy to see, as I'm a bit of a CMS/built-in accessibility nerd (see this intro to CMS accessibility with ATAG and Your CMS is an accessibility assistant). CMS and framework accessibility projects have the potential to increase a lot of accessibility at once: better defaults, better guidance and better output can all lead to a ripple effect. Better admin interfaces can increase how many people can make content for the web, which, again, is great.

Django updated forms in their core, improved the admin UI in lots of ways, updated guidance and automated tooling (including CI/CD). On top, they improved their website and did a bunch of outreach. Great to see it, may more CMSes follow suit (shoutout to WordPress Accessibility Day and Drupal's Accessibility Project).

Originally posted on 14 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Webmentions and Sundays

2024-02-14T00:00:00Z

Wouter Groeneveld ran a Webmentions server then decided to stop running it, because it costs him too much time:

I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else.

(From: Why I Retired My Webmention Server | Brain Baking)

He questions if it's worth having mentions at all if most are likes and most are sent from Bridgy, a centralised service.

Food for thought. I think I like even the mentions that are just likes… not as some vanity metric, but because it adds a layer of humanity and, community, at least in my bubble. But it is at the expense of privacy. And simplicity (shoutout to Mu-An and Robb's OpenHeart, which is indeed “much, much, much simpler”). And efficiency, especially if you recheck for deletion of replies, as Robb concludes you probably should (not the same Robb).

Originally posted on 14 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Software quality and developer leverage

2024-02-17T00:00:00Z

Isaac Lyman (Stack Overflow) looks at whether software gets worse. He notices software, unlike sandwiches and movie tickets, is hard to sell:

There are only two demographics that are willing to pay for good software: corporations and video gamers. We’ve somehow blundered our way into a world where everyone else expects software to be free.

(From: Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow)

Developers have leverage, the post concludes, they have the power to insist on quality, but aren't really using it. This seems unlikely to change overnight, says Isaac.

Originally posted on 17 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Paying people to work on open source is good

2024-02-18T00:00:00Z

paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money.

(From: Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Originally posted on 18 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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New cypher

2024-02-19T00:00:00Z

TIL that UK monarchs choose their own Royal Cypher, a “symbol to represent their personal authority”.

In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher features the Tudor Crown, rather than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.

On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings.

(From: Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK)

With a government wide design system, the digital version of that can be rolled out much more efficiently. Yay design systems!

Originally posted on 19 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Stitching together

2024-02-19T00:00:00Z

Brian Merchant explains in Let's not do this again, please that OpenAI's new image generating thingy is mostly a “promotial narrative” to try and seek more investment money (OpenAI's server spend, the article says, is over 1 million USD per day).

The tech stitches together imagery, rather than create new imagery, Brian says:

It’s not that Sora is generating new and amazing scenes based on the words you’re typing — it’s automating the act of stitching together renderings of extant video and images.

Originally posted on 19 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Design that encourages deletion

2024-02-21T00:00:00Z

In Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data, Michelle talks about the environmental cost of creating and storing so much of our data in the ‘cloud’:

the need for limitless digital storage bumps up against the very real physical limits of our planet.

(From: CSS { In Real Life } | Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data)

She explains it's not only a huge amount of data, a lot of it is probably unnecessary:

It’s estimated that up to 88% of the data stored in the cloud is ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) data, or “dark data”: data collected by companies in the course of their regular business activities, but which is not used for any other purpose. It all amounts to a lot of junk data that has no purpose, that will never be needed or looked at again.

Yup, I definitely store a lot of photos and emails that I will never need to look at again. I should set aside some time for cleanup.

I agree with Michelle. Design could help consumers decrease their storage. I want my software to encourage deletion, not (or not just) addition, bring it on!

Originally posted on 21 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Invisible systems

2024-02-28T00:00:00Z

On the work the GOV.UK Design System team do:

it’s the invisible systems work that has a bigger impact. Reviewing. Advising. Organising. Co-ordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting. Allowing the innovation happening at the edges of the ecosystem to feed back into the centre, to be consolidated and standardised for the benefit of everyone.

(From: How far we’ve come: What it would mean to lose the GOV.‌UK Design System)

Originally posted on 28 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Switch in HTML

2024-02-29T00:00:00Z

Apple is experimenting with a new HTML form control: a switch (see WHATWG/HTML issue #9546). It is designed as an attribute for <input type="checkbox">, you'd turn a checkbox into a switch by adding the switch attribute:

<input type=checkbox switch checked>

In terms of pseudos:, they're experimenting with ::thumb and ::track pseudo elements for styling the parts of the switch. Unlike the checkbox, it has no ::indeterminate pseudo class, because it has no indeterminate state.

The colour can be set with accent-color. For browsers that don't support this new switch attribute, the element simply falls back to a checkbox.

There is some accessibility support: a switch gets a switch role under the hood, and the element respects the “differentiate without color“ setting in iOS and “on/off labels” on iOS.

Their blog post on when to use it:

Generally, we recommend using a switch when the end user understands the user interface element as a setting that is either “on” or “off”. A checkbox is well suited for when the end user would understand the element as something to be selected.

(From: An HTML Switch Control | WebKit)

Originally posted on 29 February 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Hallucination is inevitable

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z

Researchers show that hallucination is inevitable:

LLMs cannot learn all of the computable functions and will therefore always hallucinate. Since the formal world is a part of the real world which is much more complicated, hallucinations are also inevitable for real world LLMs.

(From: [2401.11817] Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models)

Originally posted on 1 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Jakob Nielsen's problematic claims about accessibility

2024-03-07T00:00:00Z

Jakob Nielsen wrote a post in which he states “the accessibility movement has been a miserable failure’ (his words) and claims that generative “AI” can somehow magically remove the need for accessibility research and testing.

Note, there's currently no evidence that what he proposes is desirable (by users) or possible (with the tech). It is, however, clear that testing with users and meeting WCAG is desirable and possible.

Léonie explains Nielsen needs to think again:

Nielsen thinks accessibility has failed.

Nielsen thinks that generative AI will make my experience better. Nielsen apparently doesn't realise that generative AI barely understands accessibility, never mind how to make accessible experiences for humans.

I think Nielsen needs to think again.

Matt May said we need to talk about Jakob:

This part of the post isn’t so much an argument on the merits of disabled access as it is a projection of himself in the shoes of a blind user, and how utterly miserable he thinks it would be. At no point in any of this—again, classic Jakob Nielsen style—does he cite an actual blind user, much less any blind assistive technology researchers or developers

Per Axbom wrote:

the published post is misleading, self-contradictory and underhanded. I'll walk you through the whole of it and provide my commentary and reasoning.

Originally posted on 7 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Broaden your frame of reference

2024-03-11T00:00:00Z

Sean Voisen recommends to not stick to a particular technology:

Lose the label and become T-shaped. Stay curious. Keep learning. Go deep in a specific technology or framework or programming language, but develop breadth in adjacent technologies that will help inform your work and develop new perspectives.

(From: On being a ‹insert favorite technology here› “guy” | Sean Voisen)

Coincidentally, Jonathan Snook posted similar advice this week, in Shifting identifies.

Originally posted on 11 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Simpler businesses

2024-03-11T00:00:00Z

All of this leaves me wanting simpler businesses with simpler motives — I'll pay, you provide a product or service commensurate with the value. No opaque policies, no concerns about data. I'd love for you to be profitable and sustainable, without being obsessed with scale. I'd love you to build products for the customers, not the speculators, that have invested in you.

(From: Of course AI is extractive, everything is lately • Cory Dransfeldt)

Originally posted on 11 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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W3C and AI

2024-03-13T00:00:00Z

The W3C established articificial intelligence is having a “systemic impact on the web” and looked at how standardisation, guidelines and interoperability can help manage that:

Machine Learning models support a new generation of AI systems. These models are often trained on a large amount of Web content, deployed at scale through web interfaces, and can be used to generate plausible content at unprecedented speed and cost.

Given the scope and scale of these intersections, this wave of AI systems is having potential systemic impact on the Web and some of the equilibriums on which its ecosystem had grown.

This document reviews these intersections through their ethical, societal and technical impacts and highlights a number of areas where standardization, guidelines and interoperability could help manage these changes

(From: AI & the Web: Understanding and managing the impact of Machine Learning models on the Web)

Originally posted on 13 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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MEPs adopt new and first AI law

2024-03-14T00:00:00Z

On Wednesday, Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act that ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation.

(…)

It aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact.

(From: Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt landmark law | News | European Parliament)

Originally posted on 14 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Touchscreen accessibility

2024-03-17T00:00:00Z

Touch screens and buttonless designs on devices have become the norm, not a definition of the ultra-modern any more. Which means, as a blind individual, that finding accessible household appliances has become increasingly challenging.

(From: Devising devices with accessibility in mind)

Originally posted on 17 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Alt texts as meta data would and the need for context

2024-03-20T00:00:00Z

The idea of including alt text for images as metadata into image files pops up every now and then.

Eric Bailey explains some of the many reasons why this isn't as good of an idea as it seems:

The largest thing to grapple with is that images are contextual. Choosing to select and share one is a highly intentional act, and oftentimes requires knowing the larger context of how it will be viewed.

(From: Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images – Eric Bailey)

He explains describing images is a human to human thing, not a “problem” that just needs some tech thrown at it. Even if some of the tech can in some ways be helpful and powerful.

Originally posted on 20 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Content that's worth our time

2024-03-26T00:00:00Z

Cory Dransfeldt explains that while we are developing technology that can generate and produce a larger amount of content, the real problem is the quality of that content:

I'm more and more concerned that we're heading to a place that will make it ever more difficult to find anything that's actually worth our time.

(From: We have a content quality problem, not a content quantity problem // Cory Dransfeldt)

Originally posted on 26 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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AI uses too much energy

2024-03-30T00:00:00Z

If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year — the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.

(From: AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning. - Vox)

This is from an interview with Sasha Luccioni, climate researcher at Hugging Face. In it, she explains what the power and water consumption of AI, specifically LLMs, looks like today. It's bad, the amount of energy required is enormous. One example in the post is that a query to an LLM cost almost 10 times as much energy as a query to a regular search engine. That's unsustainable, even if we manage to use 100% renewable energy and water that we really didn't need for anything else.

Once again, this begs the question if we really need all the AI applications companies are rushing into their products. It's often completely unnecessary.

It reminds me of eating animals. With all we know about animal welfare and climate impact, we've got to consider if (regularly) eating animals has benefits that outweigh those downsides.

Everyone can choose to do whatever they want with the information they have available to them. As a person or as a company. But if you're deciding for a company, the impact is larger, it's the decision times the amount of users. For me it's increasingly clear I don't want to use these “AI” solutions in personal workflows, suggest we might as well use them when I give talks, let alone push for integrating them into the products I work on.

Originally posted on 30 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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WebAIM Million 2024

2024-03-30T00:00:00Z

The WebAIM Million 2024 report is out! More errors were detected, but also pages with fewer errors generally got better.

If this inspired you to go fix low hanging fruit in your projects, I previously wrote about ways to fix common accessibility issues, and a part 2 with more issues to fix. Making websites perfectly accessible can be hard, but reducing fruit that is both low-hanging and very common, is not.

Originally posted on 30 March 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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What ARIA attributes do

2024-04-04T00:00:00Z

Kitty explains the difference between disabled and aria-disabled:

[disabled and the aria-disabled attribute] are both meaningful attributes with their own pros and cons

(From: On disabled and aria-disabled attributes | Kitty Giraudel)

There's a lesson in here that applies more generally: ARIA attributes always merely set ‘accessibility semantics’, they don't have side effects like affecting discoverability. It also means when you use them and want behaviours associated with the attributes, you need to add those yourself. So if you add a button role, it won't behave like a button upon adding that attribute, you need to add click and keyboard handlers (and more) yourself.

Originally posted on 4 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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AI, accessibility and fiction

2024-04-05T00:00:00Z

This week, once again, someone suggested that “AI” could replace (paraphrasing) normative guidelines (ref: mailing list post of AGWG, the group that produces WCAG).

Eric Eggert explains why this seems unnecessary:

The simple fact is that we already have all the technology to make wide-spread accessibility a reality. Today. We have guidelines that, while not covering 100% of the disability spectrum, cover a lot of the user needs. User needs that fundamentally do not change.

(From: “AI” won’t solve accessibility · Eric Eggert)

I cannot but disagree with Vanderheiden and Nielsen. They suggest (again, paraphrasing) that we can stop making accessibility requirements, because those somehow “failed” (it didn't, WCAG is successful in many ways) and because generative AI exists.

Of course, I'm happy and cautiously optimistic that there are technological advancement. They can meet user needs well, like how LLMs “effectively made any image on the Web accessible to blind people”, as Léonie Watson describes in her thoughtful comment. If people want to use tools meet their needs, great.

But it seems utterly irresponsible to have innovation reduce websites' legal obligations to provide basic accessibility. Especially while there are many unresolved problems with LLMs, like hallucinations (that some say are inevitable), environmental cost, bias, copyright and social issues (including the working conditions of people categorising stuff).

Originally posted on 5 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Statistical illusion

2024-04-07T00:00:00Z

Baldur Bjarnason, author of the excellent “The intelligence illusion”, on business risks of Generative AI (recommended!):

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.

(From: The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con)

In his post, Baldur warns us once again not to imagine functionality that doesn't exist, he says it's all a ‘statistical illusion’.

Originally posted on 7 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Opening

2024-04-21T00:00:00Z

To convince a reader or conference attendee that your content is something to pay attention to, try opening strong.

I don't think I'm very good at this, so I loved Maggie Appleton's latest piece. It's full of useful advice:

For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone. You have to have some kind of problem that matters.

(…)
Once you know you have a consequential problem for a community and some sense of a solution, you get to play with narrative details. This is the fun storytelling part.

(From: On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars)

Originally posted on 21 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Popover in Baseline

2024-04-29T00:00:00Z

With Firefox 125 shipping the feature, good news on popover:

This web feature is now available in all three major browser engines, and becomes Baseline Newly Available as of April 16, 2024.

(From: Popover API lands in Baseline | Blog | web.dev)

Originally posted on 29 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Reducing complexity

2024-04-29T00:00:00Z

Tim Paul on how complexity can increase unexpectedly if we automate:

handling complexity isn't the same as reducing it.

In fact, by getting better at handling complexity we're increasing our tolerance for it. And if we become more tolerant of it we're likely to see it grow, not shrink.

(From: Tim Paul | Automation and the Jevons paradox)

Originally posted on 29 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Screenreader only component

2024-04-29T00:00:00Z

Donny D'Amato on making a design system component for content that is meant for screenreaders:

there has been one concept that I’ve stuggled to put into this component-driven ecosystem; screenreader only as it has traditionally existed as a class (eg., .sr-only) added to an otherwise benign element

(From: Screenreader only)

Originally posted on 29 April 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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EN 301 549 vs WCAG

2024-05-03T00:00:00Z

Accessibility standards veteran and axe-core product owner Wilco Fiers explains how he sees EN 301 549 relate to WCAG:

EN 301 549 steadily gained importance. It is often dismissed as “WCAG with a different number slapped on it,” but it is far more than that.

(From: 301,549 ways to improve accessibility: EN 301 549 | Deque)

In the post, he explains the EN is broader than WCAG in various ways:

it has more requirements, like for browser settings to be respected by websites (11.7 User preferences)
it applies to more than web content (apps, kiosks), a scope WCAG explicitly doesn't support
it and derivatives of it apply in more and more places, way beyond the EU (Canada, Japan, Australia)

On the authoring tool requirements bit that Wilco mentioned, I wrote a blog post to summarise our group's thoughts: On authoring tools in EN 301 549.

Originally posted on 3 May 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Less perfectionism, more humanism

2024-05-03T00:00:00Z

In Branch, Michelle Barker suggests a new mindset for the web:

If “move fast and break things” is Silicon Valley’s rallying cry, then the flip-side is “move slow and mend things”.

(From: The perfect site doesn’t exist - Branch)

She says we should center sustainability in our work on the web, be intentional in content and code, and prioritise being human to being perfectionist. I could not agree more.

Originally posted on 3 May 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Public speaking tips

2024-05-04T00:00:00Z

I’ve got a few tips for you--and anyone--about speaking. I think I can sum it all up pretty well in one phrase: GET COMFORTABLE.

(From: “Get Comfortable,” an article by Dan Mall)

I hadn't seen this post by Dan Mall about speaking when it came out, but read it as it was shared on Mastodon today. This week I gave a talk that I was quite nervous for beforehand and quite happy with afterwards; from my experience I would second all the advice he gives here on public speaking.

Originally posted on 4 May 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Live regions

2024-05-07T00:00:00Z

Live regions have a reputation for being "flaky" and inconsistent. While this can be attributed in part to shortcomings in current implementations, the problem can also be caused by developers misunderstanding how live regions are intended to work.

(From: Why are my live regions not working? - TetraLogical)

Excellent post by Patrick Lauke!

Originally posted on 7 May 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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Mastodon's DDoS'ing

2024-05-07T00:00:00Z

I've noticed that whenever I (or someone else) posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, the decentralised nature of the platforms effectively DDoS's me.

(From: Mastodon Is DDoSing Me | Kev Quirk)

Originally posted on 7 May 2024 on Hidde's blog.

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