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The problem isn’t that AI is using "too much" power from our current grid; it’s that our current grid still overwhelmingly runs on fossil fuels in the first place.

(From: @Westenberg | A question of power)

Vicky Teinaki urges us to revisit the discipline of information architecture:

for anyone designing flows with any amount of complexity (such as things that have repeat use), please have a look at information architecture as a discipline.

(From: A plea for the lost practice of information architecture)

In her post, she explains how the field got mostly erased over the last 15-20 years, with the rise of the ‘UX designer’ first then, followed by the popularity of agile delivery and lean startup.

IA is considered as ‘unsexy’, she explains, especially compared to full blown prototypes in Figma, but critical when you're designing complex structures: they need to be thought out or it will show.

Melanie Richards:

In all my years as an absolute book fiend with a personal website, I’ve never hosted my reading list here! That’s now changed

(From: New Reading page, powered by the Airtable API | Melanie Richards)

Love these kinds of pages, one of the hardest parts about reading more is to find out what's worth reading. Another person's opinion is worth more than a thousand algorithms.

Scott Riley:

Figma’s AI shit will suffer from the same problems every other company’s GenAI shit suffers from: the average input to its dataset is, almost by definition, mediocre and derivative. Especially when you consider the state we’re in by and large as an industry.

(From: On AI and the commoditisation of design – Scott Riley)

LLMs don't hallucinate or lie, they ‘bullshit’, in the sense that the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt, explain Glasgow researchers in their recent paper:

The problem here isn't that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It's that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text.

(From: ChatGPT is bullshit)

The paper explains Frankfurt's interesting distinction between ‘soft bullshit’ and ‘hard bullshit’, reasoning that ChatGPT is definitely the former and in some cases arguably the latter.

It's crucial to replace phrases like ‘hallucinate’ or ‘lie’ with a word like ‘bullshit’, not to try and be witty, but because the phrases shape how investors, policymakers and general public think of these tools. Which in turn impacts the decisions they make about using them.

Lea Verou explains how we could do if statements, that are coming to CSS, today.

She explored various very clever ways to do it.

Great point on abstractions:

Ugliness is only acceptable if it’s encapsulated and not exposed to component users.

(From: Inline conditionals in CSS, now? • Lea Verou)

This post is a bit violent at times, but has some very, very good points on the “AI” hype from someone who actually knows the technology and sees through the hype:

You either need to be on the absolute cutting-edge and producing novel research, or you should be doing exactly what you were doing five years ago with minor concessions to incorporating LLMs. Anything in the middle ground does not make any sense unless you actually work in the rare field where your industry is being totally disrupted right now.

(From: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity)

Richard Rutter explains that maybe the ch unit isn't the best choice if you're trying to follow Robert Bringhurt's guidelines:

The important part of Bringhurst’s guideline is not the ’66-characters’ but the ‘satisfactory length’. This is about readability, and readability is affected by the length of a line more so than the number of characters in it.

(From: Use of ch unit considered inappropriate (in certain circumstances) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter)

Apple's ethos3 has always been about building tools to empower users to make art, to create, to be original. I don't know what is is, but it sure as hell isn't human creativity.

(From: roguelazer's website: oh, the humanity)

Rahim Abdi of Apple describes an effort to make it possible to test more web platform features for accessibility features:

what if we could regularly test the accessibility behavior of any and all web platform features on the latest browsers in an automated fashion? How much time and effort could this save?

(From: Improving Web Accessibility with Web Platform Tests | WebKit)