Links

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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)

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)

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.

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)

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