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Tina He explains our discomfort with AI:

What unsettles us is AI's supreme indifference, or commonly called "slop," which is also synonymous with the lacking of soul.

Software doesn’t hate, plot, or hold a grudge. It optimizes. That optimization, crucially, includes the effectiveness of language—words as system output, not as evidence of intent.

(From: AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion - by Tina He - Fakepixels)

And then explains that this indifference, that leads to humans being reduced to function, ‘cuts at the heart of our dignity’. Yup yup yup, and that's very, very dystopian.

The W3C published Privacy Principles as a Statement, meaning a document the Members approved.

It has definitions, meant to aid policy, as well as principles, to be more precise:

a set of privacy principles that should guide the development of the web as a trustworthy platform

(From: Privacy Principles)

Blogging ✨ works ✨!

4 years ago, I wrote A case for accessibility statements in app stores.

This week, Apple announced “Nutrition Labels“:

Accessibility Nutrition Labels bring a new section to App Store product pages that will highlight accessibility features within apps and games. These labels give users a new way to learn if an app will be accessible to them before they download it, and give developers the opportunity to better inform and educate their users on features their app supports. This includes VoiceOver, Voice Control, Larger Text, Sufficient Contrast, Reduced Motion, captions, and more.

jk, but very glad to see it, I think the visibility it brings will be helpful!

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)