I've got strong opinions about this, and Lea nails it with:

Users do not seek out solutions to problems they don’t currently have.

I personally (for my own tools) tend to go further and just have the UI toggle based on the system by default and not even offer the option in the main interfaces (for personal tools I probably won't bother with a toggle at all, for published projects, I'll put the control in a settings page).

If my users are focusing on whether the page is light or dark, then I've definitely done something wrong…

Original link: lea.verou.me/[…]/dark-mode-toggles

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if it happened one more time, he’d be fired. “I’ve never had quality issues like this before in my career.”

I personally use AI quite blindly in my own personal "toy" projects that are consumed only by me. My work is more of a mix but I'm definitely feeling this weird unease under my own feet with respect to LLM generated code and the reviews around them.

I think there’s a lot more work to be done trying to figure out how to integrate AI into this industry in a way that actually works.

Definitely feeling those vibes myself.

Original link: calnewport.com/on-ai-coding-and-its-discontents

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I can confidently say that the best approach to making a web site accessible (to screen readers or not) is by using proper HTML. If done well, ARIA is only needed for complex controls (tabs, trees, carousels, …).

Screen reader users still benefit the same way sighted users do from hidden elements, particularly visual (and in this case auditory) assaults such as mega menus

Original link: adrianroselli.com/[…]/not-all-screen-reader-users-are-blind.html

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Original link: www.stefanjudis.com/a-firefox-only-minimap

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

VPNs in particular have been tossed around as something that the UK government would like to ban (citation needed/lacking!), which is why this article is particularly interesting:

The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that publishers and VPN providers aren't liable for copyright infringement

Geo-blocking is the copyright holder's problem, not the VPN's. Providers are not liable for users bypassing restrictions

Hopefully this draws a simple line in the sand for the UK government, and yet, who really knows what's going through their head at any one time!

Original link: www.techradar.com/[…]/vpns-are-lawful-technical-tools-says-eu-court-in-landmark-anne-frank-copyright-ruling

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Specifically he considers the options carefully and was able to make use of local hardware (i.e. his laptop) and "ethically" trained model (from Flickr and creative commons licensed images).

Closing with a quote from Scott Jenson, that I can absolutely relate to:

While the utility is there, the current landscape of these frontier corporate models comes with massive ethical and environmental baggage. This is not a long term solution!

Original link: adactio.com/[…]/22657

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Under Assembly Bill 1709 by Democratic Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, social media companies might soon be forced to remove addictive features.

infinite scroll, auto play, recommended algorithms, and push notifications are product features. They are not speech.

Original link: www.sfgate.com/[…]/meta-social-media-teenagers-22337724.php

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Chock full of quotable lines, way too many to include to do the post any justice, save perhaps Lea's last headline:

Polyfills make the Web faster, inclusive, and more robust

Highly recommend reading for a greater understanding of the role of polyfills on the web.

Original link: lea.verou.me/[…]/polyfills

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I appreciate there's some folks out there that don't want to touch LLM generated content or have it in your tool chains, I'm just going to assume that's going to be very hard as time goes on.

Though I do also appreciate there are projects working thanklessly to achieve just that.

Original link: github.com/[…]/d7971544fe17378f44f49983010dbfc1834f7bef

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Still, it's useful to be reminded that AI generated content is much, much farther reaching.

This project used a Chrome extension (with paid users, from what I could test) and collected a tonne of data and shows for products like LinkedIn, Medium and Twitter, it's anything from 30-50% of AI slop.

Lots of easy to scan charts.

I tend to only use LinkedIn to post about FFConf, then I immediately leave, and I use Reddit for either Gameboy or Home Assistant content, so I'm not really coming across this kind of content myself (or that I've noticed).

Original link: www.pangram.com/[…]/ai-in-your-feed

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I especially like these two from the post:

Text overflow truncation from centre…

And:

More pseudo-classes. :sticky for if an element is currently sticky, :overflow for if overflowing, etc

Which falls consistently into the category of "JavaScript is used to do this, it shouldn't need to".

Original link: vale.rocks/[…]/web-platform-wishlist

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

parentNode.querySelectorAll('> *') you get an error: '> *' is not a valid selector.. That doesn't work...

Using :scope first fixes the "missing scope".

Original link: siderite.dev/[…]/queryselector-immediate-children-with-scope

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

This post gives a good high level overview of my own concerns about Bluesky being that hub, and though the post doesn't explain how they moved to Eurosky (and funnily enough then link to follow them on Bluesky) - it tries to demonstrate that it is possible to move data around.

I wonder how far we are from being able to self host and connect into the network to disseminate (I think this is the "relay" and I'm fairly sure this is far from trivial for a self-host job).

Still, one I'm keeping my eye on.

Source: waag.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

There's lots in there, but I particularly like the section starting Web Components that writes about how they're progressively enhancing and how there's thought to the components (such as their mdn-dropdown styles).

I also really like this pattern where modules are auto-loaded and it's easy to switch JS enabled modules off for testing:

for (const element of document.querySelectorAll("*")) {
  const tag = element.tagName.toLowerCase();
  if (tag.startsWith("mdn-")) {
    const component = tag.replace("mdn-", "");
    import(`../components/${component}/element.js`);
  }
}

Source: developer.mozilla.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

/* this is gross and I hate it but it works to fix 
   Safari’s layout of the table’s top headers */
@supports (font: -apple-system-body)

Gross, and horrible, but 🙏

Source: meyerweb.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

<div id="meter" data-props-for="range">
  <input type="range" min="0" max="100" value="42">
</div>

With CSS like:

@container style(--live-value: 100) {
  .gauge__num { color: var(--max-tint); }
  .gauge__flag::after { content: 'max'; }
}

Lots of useful categories too.

Source: prop-for-that.netlify.app

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I wanted to pull a few quotes:

The Internet Watch Foundation reported that child sexual extortion cases in the UK rose 72% in a single year — criminals tricking young people into sending nude images, then blackmailing them. In 97% of those cases, the victims are boys.

Sacha also spots this:

Buried in the coverage is the acknowledgement that all adults will need to verify their age if they want to take or view nude images on their own devices. [...] You’ll have to prove you’re an adult to own and use a phone.

On one hand, to own a phone requires (since the availability of mobile phones) proof of being an adult, because to get a contract of any sort you had to have a bank account. This obviously changes with "burner" phones (a £10 job from ASDA) and a PAYG sim.

On the other hand, who am I proving I'm an adult to - which walks a weird line of privacy invasion.

Quoted within Sacha's article is Signal's response, and exactly what I was thinking when I saw the announcement too: isn't this at odds with the UK wanting to take some kind of lead in international AI?

Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting.

An excellent post well worth the review, regardless of parent status, it's going to affect us all.

Source: newsletter.sachajudd.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

It's not, it's masonry (which, why not display: masonry 🤷

There's a also a decent (albeit stiff) video on how it works.

TL;DR: mostly you can swap display: grid for display: grid-lanes (but Jeremy goes further to actually add the CSS support check first).

Source: adactio.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

In our household we've already had this restriction in place (at a network/DNS level) so it doesn't impact our kids experiences at all, but I do know from talking to the kids that the do wish their friends had it too. I would add that I'm in no doubt that kids will find work arounds, but the larger effect of this, I think, is important.

A few quotes that interest me from the GOV.UK news post:

The ban will therefore include platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. We do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban

I'm assuming that "like" refers to the user-to-user definition, and I'd expect or hope to see pretty clear definitions (though the government doesn't particularly have a track record on clear definitions).

The government will also be looking in more detail at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18-year-olds and will set out more detail in July.

In particular the breaks in infinite scrolling - though I've been personally arguing that it could be banned altogether - the only function it serves from a UX perspective is "stickiness" aka - addition.

I'm sceptical about the implementation rules and I'm particularly worried about how the government goes about setting the definitions of what products will need to do.

Source: www.gov.uk

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

I think what I find interesting here is after the jQuery mobile themes and especially Bootstrap you come to just visually adapt the most common style.

What this author has done is asked for the design systems of existing software to be adopted into the code.

What frustrates me a little bit is that I actually like the "Original" style, which is what AI is pumping out at the moment, as what I see all the time, which just says that I'm not very original…

Source: envs.net

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

The UK government's ultimatum to Apple and Google is a blueprint for mass surveillance. A warning on why "nothing to hide" won't protect your digital freedom.

...

We're being steered toward a future where "safety" is just a euphemism for "unrestricted access."

If I had read this a few years ago, I'd assume it was the plot for some dystopian novel, but no, it's reality today under (what was supposed to be) the progressive government - not even the Tories.

As per the author, I don't expect any of the Big Tech to do anything about it if it means it affects their share of the gold.

I guess I'll be looking around for alternatives soon enough too (and then for the kids, and the extended family). Yay.

Source: the.unknown-universe.co.uk

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

This is the extension of a previous post, Molly Guard in reverse which introduces the molly guard with:

…the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.

Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would.

Then she did it again later the same day.

Love it.

But what's more to love about this particular post, is that Marcin found the actual Molly with her dad!

Source: unsung.aresluna.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

The "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results.

This is really interesting and I would love to see this set the tone for other countries (::cough UK::).

If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google but for other providers of similar services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.

Big Tech helped themselves to our content. The content bloggers put out on the web was always intended to be consumed freely, but it we didn't agree that you (Big Tech) could use it for massive profits without the least bit of credit (let alone royalties for the content being used).

The big AI companies have harvested and thrown the web into their models without moderation causing all kinds of real-world harm, so this looks to be a positive step to forcing them to take some real responsibility.

Source: the-decoder.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well.

This does remind me of the story of ELIZA and Joseph Weizenbaum, which people quickly attributed intelligence to the bot. With 6 months of ELIZA's debut (in 1966), he warned loudly and publicly about the perils of anthropomorphism. He continued this campaign until his death in 2008. Yet, here we are again.

Source: www.theatlantic.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: dbushell.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: thingsithinkithink.blog

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: automerge.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: blog.johnozbay.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: nielsleenheer.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: gradient.style

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: writing.jan.io

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: platforms.service.gov.uk

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: opensource.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There's so much push in the web development scene to use AI for jobs and my own LinkedIn feed is chock full of "AI to do X", such as generate articles, and amass content, but, as this quote so simply puts it, the actual human input is so utterly thin. To me, it makes that AI generated content unwhelming and unimpressive because it lacks so much of the individual's own input.

Source: www.newyorker.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Luddites understand tech better than you and or I do because you have to know something on an intimate level to stage a coordinated push back against the particular tech. I feel like these are my people and want to actively push back against the companies in the arms race for our intimacy. Find some quiet time and read this post.

Source: robertkingett.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

The SENDUNE email designer focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It is light-weight. It does pure HTML - no intermediate code wranglers like mjml. There is no lock-in of any kind. Save HTML output as a template and use with ANY email service provider.I can't get over how any simple design is still so stupidly hard in 2024. Hoping this is a simpler tool (without having to fork over the farm!)

Source: designer.sendune.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: front-end.social

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: meryl.net

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited. Sure, AI can be treated as the unpaid intern, but do we really want the unpaid intern to be committing the majority of our code to production? (Also, pay your interns…yikes).

Source: visualstudiomagazine.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: jan.prima.de

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: randoma11y.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: www.infoq.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: www.opengraph.xyz

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Source: minimon.scyl.us

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Policies and law haven't been written and it's the experts that don't even have the confidence you'd hope to hear about:

50% of A.I. researchers believe there's a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss the risk to society and how safety measures are far from adequate and laws need to be implemented.

When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities

It's a long watch at a little over an hour, but strongly recommend as we plough head long into a future where AI is inter-tangled with society.

Source: www.youtube.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

What's neat is that you register a database with the system, then you can query against that particular database.

Very nice that I can use this on the command line and then pipe into jq for more data manip.

Source: sq.io

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Being a JS developer first and foremost since pre-Node days, it puts me in a funny spot that I absolutely agree with everything said in this article, whilst also considering that I pick JS on the server to suit me.

When it comes to the front-end, I'm pretty sick of the poison that's been sold to us for over a decade.

The web's war for JS libraries/etc summarised excellently with:

It’s a popularity contest. Plain and simple.

And that popularity contest can change on a dime.

10 years ago, it was AngularJS.

Today, it’s React.

Tomorrow, it will be something else because that’s inevitable.

Absolutely this - I felt exactly the same when I had peers and colleagues trying to shove Angular down my throat.

But it's the future, the kids who come to the industry and will continue it. As Jared White writes,

but all those bright-eyed eager newcomers getting churned out of code schools knowing only React?

Those jobs will be gone. 😕

Grim future.

Source: www.spicyweb.dev

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Specifically, and TIL - the inputmode can be different, i.e. using a type="text" field but inputmode="url" to help with partials like ".com" (if the input field didn't need URL validation for instance).

/via Bruce's reading list 300

Source: better-mobile-inputs.netlify.app

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log