Adactio: Journal—Robustness and least power
A tale of two principles.| adactio.com
Tim recently gave a talk at Smashing Conference in New York called One Step Ahead. Based on the slides, it looks like it was an excellent talk. Towards the end, there’s a slide that could be the tagline for Web Day Out: Betting on the browser is our best chance at long-term success. Most of the talk focuses on two technologies that you can add to any website with just a couple of lines of code: view transitions and speculation rules. I’m using both of them on The Session and I can testify...| Adactio: Journal
I don’t get out to gigs as much as I’d like. But for some reason, the past week has been packed with live music. On Tuesday I saw Ye Vagabonds. I’m particularly partial to their nice mandolin playing. It was a nice concert that felt like being in a Greenwich Village folk club in the ’60s. It’s great to see how popular Ye Vagabonds are with indie kids, even if I’m slightly perplexed by the extent of the popularity—see also Lankum. On Thursday it was time for Robert Forster and hi...| Adactio: Journal
Suppose somebody is using a blade. Perhaps they’re in the bathroom, shaving. Or maybe they’re in the kitchen, preparing food. Suppose they cut themselves with that blade. This might have happened because the blade was too sharp. Or perhaps the blade was too dull. Either way, it’s going to be tricky to figure out the reason just by looking at the wound. But if you talk to the person, not only will you find out the reason, you’ll also understand their pain.| Adactio: Journal
I was messing about with some images on a website recently and while I was happy enough with the arrangement on large screens, I thought it would be better to have the images in a kind of carousel on smaller screens—a swipable gallery. My old brain immediately thought this would be fairly complicated to do, but actually it’s ludicrously straightforward. Just stick this bit of CSS on the containing element inside a media query (or better yet, a container query): display: flex; overflow-x: ...| Adactio: Journal
When I talk about large language models, I make sure to call them large language models, not “AI”. I know it’s a lost battle, but the terminology matters to me. The term “AI” can encompass everything from a series of if/else statements right up to Skynet and HAL 9000. I’ve written about this naming collision before. It’s not just that the term “AI” isn’t useful, it’s so broad as to be actively duplicitous. While talking about one thing—like, say, large language models...| Adactio: Journal
I was supposed to be in Cork over the weekend. Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar. We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed. See, Storm Amy was moving in...| Adactio: Journal
While I’ve been listening to Hounds Of Love, I’ve also been reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Here’s a passage from an early chapter as the crew of the International Space Station watch a typhoon forming: How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the lat...| Adactio: Journal
The album Hounds Of Love by Kate Bush turned 40 years old this month. It has really stood the test of time. It still sounds like nothing else. It’s kind of two albums in one. There’s the A side with all those perfect pop songs—Running Up That Hill, Hounds Of Love, Cloudbusting, The Big Sky—each one brilliant and self-contained. Then there’s the B side, The Ninth Wave. It’s like its own concept album within an album. It’s weird and challening, but I love it. At times it’s downr...| Adactio: Journal
If you work at a clever company, then you should let them know about sponsoring Web Day Out. All the details are in this PDF sponsorship pack. Basically there are three (and only three) spots available, at three different levels of sponsorship. One of the best things about the venue for Web Day Out is that always having an excellent auditorium, the Studio Theatre has a really nice space for the breaks. It would be the perfect spot to set up a stand and chat with all the smart attendees. All t...| Adactio: Journal
Using generative large-language model tools? Sleeping well at night?| adactio.com
Whether you’re generating slop or code, underneath it’s the same shoggoth with a smiley face.| adactio.com
The best of the web is under continuous attack from the technology that powers your generative “AI” tools.| adactio.com
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.| adactio.com
Self-hosted sabotage as a form of collective action.| adactio.com
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.| adactio.com
Citing Frank Chimero, Debbie Chachra, and Lisa O’Neill.| adactio.com
Progressive enhancement, developer convenience, and isomorphic JavaScript.| adactio.com
Defining the inputs instead of trying to control the outputs.| adactio.com
You can launch web apps as standalone apps on Mac now.| adactio.com
Enhance your website, progressively.| adactio.com
