Bruce Taylor • Web Developer & UI Engineer
“El Estepario Siberiano” (Jorge Garrido) isn’t someone who usually posts videos like this. I think it’s a very well articulated and important message of outrage from him. Being a hugely prominent and influential musician (drummer) and content creator, maybe this message (video) could prove to be a marker of sorts. A shift in people saying enough is a enough. I hope so. Well worth a watch and…
Happy 96 th birthday dad . I miss and love you. Reply via email
Happy 58 th birthday Pete . I miss you my dear friend xx Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: chriscoyier.net Alignment being the bottleneck. Yup. But not alignment as in getting the “Ai” aligned with human values etc. It’s more about humans aligning with each other. As in, what we think should or shouldn’t be built, how it should be built, and how it should be used. And I don’t think this necessarily needs to be seen as a bad thing. It can often prove to…
You’re starting your career. So is Ai. Hmmm… 🤔 planforai.org Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: focalcurve.com There is so much that resonates in this article by Craig Cook. One: fuck offices Two: fuck AI Three: fuck React He concludes with fuck work — except that’s (unfortunately) not really an option I can entertain at this point in time. Anyway… The end. Reply via email
I am, to put it mildly, skeptical of the value of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” in its current form. That current form being not remotely intelligent in any way. Large language model chatbots are black-box hallucination engines, complex statistical models that pick the next most-likely word but are incapable of understanding anything at all. They may sound intelligent because they’re…
Still so much truth in this quote. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. — Ian Malcolm, Jurrasic Park You could replace the ”Your scientists” part with say… ”Ai tech companies” … and it still rings true. Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: whitep4nth3r.com Salma’s post sure does touch a nerve. There is so much that she’s vulnerably articulated here about the current state of things in the tech industry and Ai that resonates deeply. Well worth a read — or watch of the video if you prefer. Video version of Salma’s post # Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: gomakethings.com Chris has always been good at pointing out what those of us choose not to see. I’m amazed at how many developers are gleefully, enthusiastically training their own replacement. And… AI code can be generated fast, producing short-term gains with massive long-term costs. Code you don’t understand is a liability. It’s code you can’t test. It’s code…
Original source can be viewed at: adactio.com Jeremy clarifies ‘magic’ in this context. I’m not talking about acts of prestidigitation and illusion. I mean the kind of magic that’s used to market technologies. It’s magic. It just works. Don’t think about it. Thanks to our acceptance and adoption of coding abstraction layers — (think frameworks & libraries) — it was pretty much inevitable that we’d…
Original source can be viewed at: blog.jim-nielsen.com And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). Love Jim’s approach. This is a really neat idea and I reckon I may give this a whirl on some of my projects. I think this is a good example of leveraging the grain of the web. It’s really easy to build a simple website when you can shift your perspective to viewing on-page interactivity as…
Original source can be viewed at: matuzo.at Nice tip from Manuel to use an anonymous @layer for the CSS reset rules, to ensure their specificity is lower than other rules. Reply via email
Doing some dabbly dabbles with Astro to create a possible version of my site . Very early days for sure — but interested to see how it compares to my usual Eleventy setup. Also gonna use this little project as an experiment to see how far I can push stuff with as little NPM dependencies as possible — leaning only on vanilla JS and CSS wherever I can. Reply via email
I wonder how close to midnight the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board will say we are tomorrow at the 2026 Doomsday Clock reveal . Reply via email
On refection I find I’ve changed my mind about the weight I put behind Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. Beyond the often one-sided Western narrative about Russian aggression in Ukraine and the risks it poses to global security, Mark Carney’s speech felt like a marker of sorts — one we may look back on as signalling a significant shift in global geopolitics. Perhaps the end of the unipolar world…
Original source can be viewed at: denodell.com There’s a lot of good stuff in this article from Den. Here are just a few excerpts that got my attention… Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not…
Original source can be viewed at: robinrendle.com A wonderful reminder from Robin not to try to be palatable to everyone on the web. It’s a well worn path that many of us end up going down at some point, trying to make our personal websites more ‘professional’ or ‘acceptable’ to a wider audience. But in doing so we often lose the very thing that makes our personal websites special and unique. A…
Original source can be viewed at: www.cubic.dev Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn’t write and the AI barely explained? Most teams haven’t realized this shift yet. They’re optimizing for code generation speed…
Original source can be viewed at: piccalil.li Very helpful article from Kilian Valkhof on some of the programming principles / computer science fundamentals that self taught front-end developers (like myself) often miss out on. Well worth a read if you’re keen to improve your code in the long term. Good code is easy to reason about and things are easy to reason about when it’s clear what each part…
Gosh, it’s been 13 years already. I love and miss you dad . Reply via email
I admire Patagonia . Always have done. They consistently lead by example, showing that it’s possible to run a successful business while prioritising the planet and its people. [...] businesses must exist to do more than provide a good service or make a quality product, and they definitely need to exist to do more than enrich a handful of individuals. They can and should exist to solve problems.…
Of Ai I think we should ask: To what 'problem' is Ai the solution? And, with many instances of Ai, the answer is far from clear. Now, a default answer to that question, as [you] pointed out, citing some of the techno optimists and enthusiasts, is efficiency. But, the ultimate efficiency to the point where we can replace work. But why is replacing work taken to be, without argument or reflection, a…
Still amazes me that custom [HTML] elements can be named using unicode characters. Wild. < wassup-🤙 > Hey, wassup? </ wassup-🤙 > Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: ethanmarcotte.com For those of us that may have sipped a little too much of the “Ai” cool-aid, Ethan challenges the semantics of how we’re using the word “hallucination” — and brings a much needed nudge back to reality. If you read about the current crop of “artificial intelligence” tools, you’ll eventually come across the word “hallucinate.” It’s used as a…
Pete , I can’t believe it’s been 5 years since you passed away. In some ways it feels like it’s been a lot longer. I think about you often and miss you my dear friend. Here’s also wishing you a happy 57 th birthday. Reply via email
I so want Hamilton to get to grips with Ferrari and win his 8th F1 championship with them. It’s not looking so promising at the moment though. Reply via email
30 years married to a gorgeous gem of a human being. I’m so grateful she stuck with me. Reply via email
Would it be ok with y’all if we scooted back a bit further from midnight ? Please. Reply via email
Ok, could somebody please wake me up from whatever this is. Reply via email
We keep hearing about this £22bn ‘black hole’ in our nation’s finances that needs to be filled… and that they’ll need to make “tough choices”, like tax changes , to help claw this back. But we somehow seem to still have enough money to send heaps of it elsewhere . Like £12.8 billion. I mean… WTF?! Reply via email
Just watched the Lockerbie TV mini series. Gosh that was a tough and disquieting watch. Reply via email
I wrote a post a few days ago about my robots.txt file — and how I thought I was being clever by disallowing OpenAI from indexing my personal website.,And how not-so-clever (and naive) of me it had turned out to be. A little preamble… Ethan Marcotte wrote a post, “ Blockin’ bots ”, last year. It was his attempt at trying to block the bots from scraping his site — but I was also struck by the…
Just over 18 months ago, there were a bunch of conversations on the web talking about how you can disallow OpenAI from indexing your personal website using a robots.txt file. User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / “Ah!” I thought, “I should do that too!”. Thinking I’d be clever and ( of course ) outsmart all the LLM bots that were crawling the web… I did. I even spent the time writing a little bit of code…
Ok 2025, what you got in store for us? Reply via email
Gosh, another birthday already! Reply via email
It’s a relief knowing today’s the shortest day of the year . I’m not a fan of the cold, dark, short days. Reply via email
A new documentary, “ Thank You Dr. Fauci ”, that may help lift the veil on what actually happened with the COVID-19 debacle. I don’t imagine it’ll be an easy watch. Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: www.keithcirkel.co.uk This article by Keith is spot on. I get it that it’s probably worth learning enough React to maybe land a gig, or to be useful in a context that has already chosen this as its web solution. I have. But… try not reach for it as some sort of default solution — no matter what you’re building. All too often this ends up stunting a web developer’s…
Original source can be viewed at: adactio.com Jeremy has very kindly released his book Going Offline , online , for free. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018 — and is a real gem if you’re keen to make your websites work offline. Jeremy’s technical writing is as superb as always. Similar to his first book for A Book Apart, which cleared up all my confusions about HTML5, Going Offline…
My ‘little girl’ turned 16 today. How did that happen so quickly?! She truly is one of the beautiful lights in my life. Reply via email
Gees Biden! Nothing like chucking a grenade as a parting gift to the incoming administration. Reply via email
Winnie Lim’s post on leading a purposeless life resonated deeply. I honestly felt so seen and have been thinking about it alot the last few days. Reply via email
It’s been 12 years. I miss you dad . I’d so love to chat to you about what’s going on in the world at the moment. I do chuckle when I think of what you may say. Reply via email
If you’re a MacOS user, open your terminal and type in networkquality . $ networkquality Gaboosh! No need to use speedtest.net all the time. Ctrl+C to end. Reply via email
Ok. Hold onto your hats! Reply via email
Here we are on the eve of what may well turn out to be a pivotal moment in the “western world”. And quite possibly the world as a whole. Reply via email
Okay, so that’s the UK Budget announcements out of the way. Time to see what shockwaves next week’s US Election has in store for us. Reply via email
Original source can be viewed at: blog.jim-nielsen.com Jim makes reference to Nicholas Carr’s writing — and in particular a blog post he wrote recently called “ Dead Labor, Dead Speech ”. I’d never heard of Nicholas Carr before until seeing this post of Jim’s. And it sounds like Nicholas has been fairly quiet of late until starting this new blog of his. This: LLMs…feed “vampire-like” on human…
Watching the Ancient Apocalypse TV series at the moment and finding it absolutely fascinating. Reply via email