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Can WCAG be applied to mobile? Well, sort of… it maps quite well, as long as you carefully assess how each criterion works in the mobile context.

That's what the W3C's Mobile Accessibility Task Force has done, with a group of experts. They've just published their first public working draft of WCAG2Mobile: Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.2 to Mobile Applications (WCAG2Mobile)

Ana is on point re the value of conferences:

The point of a conference shouldn't be to provide ready-made solutions to specific workplace problems. A 40 minute code-heavy presentation might offer some technical pointers, but these will never truly address your specific challenges.

(From: Oh Hello Ana - A forty minute tech talk might not fix a very specific code problem at work, but it might leave you inspired to fix everything else)

Computer scientist Clayton Ramsey shares reasons why people use generative AI to write: they don't care enough, they believe LLM results are better or the writing was never meant for human consumption anyway.

Focusing mostly on the first two, he concludes he would rather read the prompt than the result:

The resulting output has less substance than the prompt and lacks any human vision in its creation. The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience - if there’s no experience to share, why bother?

(From: I'd rather read the prompt)

This was one of the conclusions in my talk Creativity cannot be computed,too. The point of a lot of art is that some human wanted, intended, decided to do something… not as much the artifact they created.

on web we could simply start our font stacks with Verdana, pick a couple of reasonable fallbacks, and get IKEA branding effectively for free. Everyone wins.

Or at least that was the plan, but there turned out to be a problem that developed over time.

(From: IKEA’s web fonts - Robin Whittleton)

IKEA happily used Verdana on the web. Until they expanded business across Asia and the Middle East, and found the supported languages of Verdana were lacking.

In this post, Robin Whittleton explains how this situation lead to Noto IKEA.

IETF works on building blocks to let websites declare if crawlers can take their content for traininy:

Right now, AI vendors use a confusing array of non-standard signals in the robots.txt file (defined by RFC 9309) and elsewhere to guide their crawling and training decisions. As a result, authors and publishers lose confidence that their preferences will be adhered to, and resort to measures like blocking their IP addresses.

(From: IETF | IETF setting standards for AI preferences)

Fascinating read on the weakening position of US big tech firms in Europe:

Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe.

(From: The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War | Foreign Affairs)

Tante thinks that Open AI didn't just steal Studio Ghibli's art to show they're still relevant, they did it to move the goalposts, and stretch what people will accept as behaviour:

It’s not that they just picked something cute and accidentally the co-founder of that studio hates their whole approach from the bottom of its heart. OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.

It is a display of power: You as an artist, an animator, an illustrator, a writer, any creative person are powerless. We will take what we want and do what we want. Because we can.

(From: Vulgar Display of Power)

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, who was head of public policy for Bangladesh for Meta, reviewed Sarah Wynn-Willams memoir Careless people, which I'm currently reading.

She says it is incomplete:

the author glosses over her own indifference to repeated warnings from policymakers, civil society, and internal teams outside the U.S. that ultimately led to serious harm to communities.

She explains how the people at headquarters were detached:

Every visit to a country or a high-profile meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos or the U.N. was the product of weeks of intense coordination across regional policy, legal, security, business, and operations teams. When they left after a few days, teams on the ground like my own had to spend months cleaning up the mess they left behind. That included frequently expending local policy and diplomatic relationships built over a decade, and chasing promises made to policymakers and civil society for more resources that rarely got approved.

She does call the book brave and interesting:

Despite telling an incomplete story, Careless People is a book that took enormous courage to write. This is Wynn-Williams’ story to tell, and it is an important one. It goes to show that we need many stories — especially from those who still can’t be heard — if we are to meaningfully piece together the complex puzzle of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

(From: Careless People book review: Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Facebook memoir reveals Meta’s global problems - Rest of World)

Thomas Broyer on what battles are most worth picking when you want to make software more sustainable:

So, what have we learned so far?

• It's important that end users keep their devices longer,
• we can't do much about networks,
• the location (geographic region and datacenter) of servers matter a lot, more so than how and how much we use them.

(From: Climate-friendly software: don't fight the wrong battle)

The crawlers that collect data to train LLMs on cost sysadmins lots of time, writes Drew DeVault:

instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale

(From: Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face)