Links

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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)

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:

1. Design systems haven’t “solved” inconsistency. Rather, they’ve shifted how and when it manifests.
2. Many design systems have introduced another, deeper issue: a problem of visibility.