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The founders and namesakes of the famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm A16Z decided to back Trump, and discussed why on a podcast.

Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge took one for the team and listened to the whole thing. It sounds like their sole reason for backing this extreme party, ultimately, is money:

this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit.

(From: The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - The Verge)

Selfishness and motivation by money isn't new (or inherently wrong). But A16Z-backed companies used to allude to more inspiring ideals, like changing the world for the better by connecting everyone. The marketing/morality ratio increasingly seems off.

Accessibility is easier when you do it earlier, I can't emphasise that enough. In his latest post, Eric posts research that shows how much easier:

Accessibility audits almost always happen after launch, as an afterthought. That means that errors that could have been found in the requirement analysis are 30 times harder to fix2 . This makes accessibility audits seem very inefficient.

(From: The infuriating inefficiency of accessibility audits · Eric Eggert)

Audits aren't useless. They have their place and are essential for monitoring accessibility within large organisations and for governments. Still, for your website or team, finding and fixing issues early is ideal. And it makes those audits easier and quicker too, as they'll need to report less low hanging fruit.

The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.

(From: "GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now)

TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade.

(From: Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified - The Verge)

The content on the relaunched site was LLM-generated, including author names and pictures. But then they used real author names from people who used to work at the site. Very uncanny.

After one of the former TUAW writers posted about what happened and threatened with legal action, the names have now been changed.

The problem isn’t that AI is using "too much" power from our current grid; it’s that our current grid still overwhelmingly runs on fossil fuels in the first place.

(From: @Westenberg | A question of power)

Vicky Teinaki urges us to revisit the discipline of information architecture:

for anyone designing flows with any amount of complexity (such as things that have repeat use), please have a look at information architecture as a discipline.

(From: A plea for the lost practice of information architecture)

In her post, she explains how the field got mostly erased over the last 15-20 years, with the rise of the ‘UX designer’ first then, followed by the popularity of agile delivery and lean startup.

IA is considered as ‘unsexy’, she explains, especially compared to full blown prototypes in Figma, but critical when you're designing complex structures: they need to be thought out or it will show.

Melanie Richards:

In all my years as an absolute book fiend with a personal website, I’ve never hosted my reading list here! That’s now changed

(From: New Reading page, powered by the Airtable API | Melanie Richards)

Love these kinds of pages, one of the hardest parts about reading more is to find out what's worth reading. Another person's opinion is worth more than a thousand algorithms.

Scott Riley:

Figma’s AI shit will suffer from the same problems every other company’s GenAI shit suffers from: the average input to its dataset is, almost by definition, mediocre and derivative. Especially when you consider the state we’re in by and large as an industry.

(From: On AI and the commoditisation of design – Scott Riley)

LLMs don't hallucinate or lie, they ‘bullshit’, in the sense that the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt, explain Glasgow researchers in their recent paper:

The problem here isn't that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It's that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text.

(From: ChatGPT is bullshit)

The paper explains Frankfurt's interesting distinction between ‘soft bullshit’ and ‘hard bullshit’, reasoning that ChatGPT is definitely the former and in some cases arguably the latter.

It's crucial to replace phrases like ‘hallucinate’ or ‘lie’ with a word like ‘bullshit’, not to try and be witty, but because the phrases shape how investors, policymakers and general public think of these tools. Which in turn impacts the decisions they make about using them.

Lea Verou explains how we could do if statements, that are coming to CSS, today.

She explored various very clever ways to do it.

Great point on abstractions:

Ugliness is only acceptable if it’s encapsulated and not exposed to component users.

(From: Inline conditionals in CSS, now? • Lea Verou)