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Posts about what I read elsewhere. Subscribe with RSS
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Broaden your frame of reference
Sean Voisen recommends to not stick to a particular technology:
Lose the label and become T-shaped. Stay curious. Keep learning. Go deep in a specific technology or framework or programming language, but develop breadth in adjacent technologies that will help inform your work and develop new perspectives.
(From: On being a ‹insert favorite technology here› “guy” | Sean Voisen)
Coincidentally, Jonathan Snook posted similar advice this week, in Shifting identifies.
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Jakob Nielsen's problematic claims about accessibility
Jakob Nielsen wrote a post in which he states “the accessibility movement has been a miserable failure’ (his words) and claims that generative “AI” can somehow magically remove the need for accessibility research and testing.
Note, there's currently no evidence that what he proposes is desirable (by users) or possible (with the tech). It is, however, clear that testing with users and meeting WCAG is desirable and possible.
Léonie explains Nielsen needs to think again:
Nielsen thinks accessibility has failed.
Nielsen thinks that generative AI will make my experience better. Nielsen apparently doesn't realise that generative AI barely understands accessibility, never mind how to make accessible experiences for humans.
I think Nielsen needs to think again.
Matt May said we need to talk about Jakob:
This part of the post isn’t so much an argument on the merits of disabled access as it is a projection of himself in the shoes of a blind user, and how utterly miserable he thinks it would be. At no point in any of this—again, classic Jakob Nielsen style—does he cite an actual blind user, much less any blind assistive technology researchers or developers
Per Axbom wrote:
the published post is misleading, self-contradictory and underhanded. I'll walk you through the whole of it and provide my commentary and reasoning.
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Hallucination is inevitable
Researchers show that hallucination is inevitable:
LLMs cannot learn all of the computable functions and will therefore always hallucinate. Since the formal world is a part of the real world which is much more complicated, hallucinations are also inevitable for real world LLMs.
(From: [2401.11817] Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models)
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Switch in HTML
Apple is experimenting with a new HTML form control: a switch (see WHATWG/HTML issue #9546). It is designed as an attribute for
<input type="checkbox">
, you'd turn a checkbox into a switch by adding theswitch
attribute:<input type=checkbox switch checked>
In terms of pseudos:, they're experimenting with
::thumb
and::track
pseudo elements for styling the parts of the switch. Unlike the checkbox, it has no::indeterminate
pseudo class, because it has no indeterminate state.The colour can be set with
accent-color
. For browsers that don't support this newswitch
attribute, the element simply falls back to a checkbox.There is some accessibility support: a switch gets a
switch
role under the hood, and the element respects the “differentiate without color“ setting in iOS and “on/off labels” on iOS.Their blog post on when to use it:
Generally, we recommend using a switch when the end user understands the user interface element as a setting that is either “on” or “off”. A checkbox is well suited for when the end user would understand the element as something to be selected.
(From: An HTML Switch Control | WebKit)
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Invisible systems
On the work the GOV.UK Design System team do:
it’s the invisible systems work that has a bigger impact. Reviewing. Advising. Organising. Co-ordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting. Allowing the innovation happening at the edges of the ecosystem to feed back into the centre, to be consolidated and standardised for the benefit of everyone.
(From: How far we’ve come: What it would mean to lose the GOV.UK Design System)
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Design that encourages deletion
In Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data, Michelle talks about the environmental cost of creating and storing so much of our data in the ‘cloud’:
the need for limitless digital storage bumps up against the very real physical limits of our planet.
(From: CSS { In Real Life } | Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data)
She explains it's not only a huge amount of data, a lot of it is probably unnecessary:
It’s estimated that up to 88% of the data stored in the cloud is ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) data, or “dark data”: data collected by companies in the course of their regular business activities, but which is not used for any other purpose. It all amounts to a lot of junk data that has no purpose, that will never be needed or looked at again.
Yup, I definitely store a lot of photos and emails that I will never need to look at again. I should set aside some time for cleanup.
I agree with Michelle. Design could help consumers decrease their storage. I want my software to encourage deletion, not (or not just) addition, bring it on!
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Stitching together
Brian Merchant explains in Let's not do this again, please that OpenAI's new image generating thingy is mostly a “promotial narrative” to try and seek more investment money (OpenAI's server spend, the article says, is over 1 million USD per day).
The tech stitches together imagery, rather than create new imagery, Brian says:
It’s not that Sora is generating new and amazing scenes based on the words you’re typing — it’s automating the act of stitching together renderings of extant video and images.
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New cypher
TIL that UK monarchs choose their own Royal Cypher, a “symbol to represent their personal authority”.
In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher features the Tudor Crown, rather than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.
On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings.
(From: Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK)
With a government wide design system, the digital version of that can be rolled out much more efficiently. Yay design systems!
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Paying people to work on open source is good
paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money.
(From: Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
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Software quality and developer leverage
Isaac Lyman (Stack Overflow) looks at whether software gets worse. He notices software, unlike sandwiches and movie tickets, is hard to sell:
There are only two demographics that are willing to pay for good software: corporations and video gamers. We’ve somehow blundered our way into a world where everyone else expects software to be free.
(From: Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow)
Developers have leverage, the post concludes, they have the power to insist on quality, but aren't really using it. This seems unlikely to change overnight, says Isaac.