Tags: journal

Partnering with an AI company means I can no longer trust your output

Trust.

I wrote close to a hundred entries in my journal—or blog—in 2023. Here are some entries I like:

• Blood — One hundred duck-sized Christs is better than one horse-sized Jesus.
• Tragedy — Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.
• Reaction — Weekend action, weekend reaction.
• Conduct — Kindnesses and cruelties.
• Lovers in a dangerous time — Europe, 1991.

I wrote some actually useful stuff about web design and development too.

• Three attributes for better web forms — Better UX through better HTML: inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete.
• Read-only web apps — It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
• event.target.closest — DOM scripting and event handling.
• HTML web components — Don’t replace. Augment.

That last one really resonated with people, which is very gratifying. It was so nice seeing the web mentions come in when people wrote responses on their own blogs.

It feels like there’s been a resurgence in this kind of blog-to-blog conversation since Elongate. Personal publishing is reviving as Twitter is dying (I’m not going to call it X—if he’s going to deadname his own daughter, I’m going to do the same to his company).

If you have your own website, I’m looking forward to reading your words in 2024.

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

• Be skeptical of PR hype
• Question the training data
• Evaluate the model
• Consider downstream harms

How you want me to cover artificial intelligence

Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI

1. Be rigorous with your definitions.
2. Predict less, explain more.
3. Don’t hype things up.
4. Focus on the people building AI systems — and the people affected by its release.
5. Offer strategic takes on products.
6. Emphasize the tradeoffs involved.
7. Remember that nothing is inevitable.

s13e17: A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More

When Dan wrote this a week ago, I thought it sounded very far-fetched. Now it sounds almost inevitable.

On this day twenty years ago I wrote the first entry in my online journal. In the intervening two decades I’ve written a further 2,817 entries.

I am now fifty years old, which means I’ve been blogging for two fifths of my lifetime.

My website has actually been around for longer than twenty years, but its early incarnations had no blog. That all changed when I relaunched the site on September 30th, 2001.

I wrote at the time:

I’m not quite sure what I will be saying here over the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Honestly I still feel like that.

I think it’s safe to assume an “anything goes” attitude for what I post here. Being a web developer, there’s bound to be lots of geeky, techy stuff but I also want a place where I can rant and rave about life in general.

That’s been pretty true, although I feel that maybe there’s been too much geeky stuff and not enough about everything else in my life.

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. Hopefully, I’ll be updating the journal on a daily basis.

I made no promises but I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Many’s the blogger who has let the weeds grow over their websites as they were lured by the siren song of centralised social networks. I’m glad that I’ve managed to avoid that fate. It feels good to look back on twenty years of updates posted on my own domain.

Anyway, let’s see what happens. I hope you’ll like it.

I hope you still like it.

Here are some of my handpicked highlights from the past twenty years of blogging:

• Hyperdrive, April 20th, 2007

  Last night in San Francisco.

• Design doing, November 11, 2007

  The opposite of design thinking.

• Iron Man and me, December 1st, 2008

  The story of how one of my Flickr pictures came to be used in a Hollywood movie.

• Seams, May 12th, 2014

  There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

• Web! What is it good for?, May 28th, 2015

  Not absolutely nothing, but not absolutely everything either.

• Split, April 10th, 2019

  Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.

• From: jeremy@adactio.com
• To: guardian.readers@theguardian.com

Hello,

My name is Jeremy and I’ve been a paid subscriber to The Guardian for a few years now. But I’m considering cancelling my account after reading this editorial.

On the face of it, the headline of the article sound reasonable and hard to disagree with. But the substance of the article downplays anti-trans views as simply being “gender critical.” This is akin to describing segregationist views as “integration critical.”

This line is particularly egregious:

As a society, we need to resolve the question of how to protect the privacy, dignity and rights of trans women while also respecting the privacy, dignity and rights of those born female.

Setting up these positions as though one in any way invalidates the other gives oxygen to those who wish to paint someone’s identity as a threat. I’m very disappointed to see this viewpoint expressed in an editorial on The Guardian website.

Yours,

Jeremy Keith

100words — 🐙 woohooctopus

Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.

And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).

Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney

I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.

Late weeknotes 024 - Attitude of Ingratitude

This might be the most insightful thing that Dan has written since his seminal 2013 Medium article:

The problem with Scrappy Doo, isn’t that he’s annoying, which he is, but that the ghosts suddenly became real, which is an afront to science.

I know this hot-take is about 40 years old, but I’ve been bottling it up.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.

We’re all hunkering down in our homes. That seems to be true of our online homes too.

People are sharing their day-to-day realities on their websites and I’m here for it. Like, I’m literally here for it. I can’t go anywhere.

On an episode of the Design Observer podcast, Jessica Helfand puts this into context:

During times of crisis, people want to make things. There’s a surge in the keeping of journals when there’s a war… it’s a response to the feeling of vulnerability, like corporeal vulnerability. My life is under attack. I am imprisoned in my house. I have to make something to say I was here, to say I mattered, to say this day happened… It’s like visual graphic reassurance.

It’s not just about crisis though. Scott Kelly talks about the value of keeping a journal during prolonged periods of repitition. And he should know—he spent a year in space:

NASA has been studying the effects of isolation on humans for decades, and one surprising finding they have made is the value of keeping a journal. Throughout my yearlong mission, I took the time to write about my experiences almost every day. If you find yourself just chronicling the days’ events (which, under the circumstances, might get repetitive) instead try describing what you are experiencing through your five senses or write about memories. Even if you don’t wind up writing a book based on your journal like I did, writing about your days will help put your experiences in perspective and let you look back later on what this unique time in history has meant.

That said, just stringing a coherent sentence together can seem like too much during The Situation. That’s okay. Your online home can also provide relief and distraction through tidying up. As Ethan puts it:

let a website be a worry stone

It can be comforting to get into the zone doing housekeeping on your website. How about a bit of a performance audit? Or maybe look into more fluid typography? Or perhaps now is the time to tinker about with that dark mode you’ve been planning?

Whatever you end up doing, my point is that your website is quite literally an outlet. While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

The Markup

A new online publication from Julia Angwin:

Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.

…and they’re not going to track you.

I’m in San Francisco to speak at An Event Apart, which kicks off tomorrow. But I arrived a few days early so that I could attend Indie Web Camp SF.

Yesterday was the discussion day. Most of the attendees were seasoned indie web campers, so quite a few of the discussions went deep on some of the building blocks. It was a good opportunity to step back and reappraise technology decisions.

Today is the day for making, tinkering, fiddling, and hacking. I had a few different ideas of what to do, mostly around showing additional context on my blog posts. I could, for instance, show related posts—other blog posts (or links) that have similar tags attached to them.

But I decided that a nice straightforward addition would be to show a kind of “on this day” context. After all, I’ve been writing blog posts here for eighteen years now; chances are that if I write a blog post on any given day, there will be something in the archives from that same day in previous years.

So that’s what I’ve done. I’ll be demoing it shortly here at Indie Web Camp, but you can see it in action now. If you look at the page for this blog post, you should see a section at the end with the heading “Previously on this day”. There you’ll see links to other posts I’ve written on December 8th in years gone by.

It’s quite a mixed bag. There’s a post about when I used to have a webcam from sixteen years ago. There’s a report from the Flash On The Beach conference from thirteen years ago (I wrote that post while I was in Berlin). And five years ago, I was writing about markup patterns for web components.

I don’t know if anyone other than me will find this feature interesting (but as it’s my website, I don’t really care). Personally, I find it fascinating to see how my writing has changed, both in terms of subject matter and tone.

Needless to say, the further back in time you go, the more chance there is that the links in my blog posts will no longer work. That’s a real shame. But then it’s a pleasant surprise when I find something that I linked to that is still online after all this time. And I can take comfort from the fact that if anyone has ever linked to anything I’ve written on my website, then those links still work.

The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising - The Correspondent

The benchmarks that advertising companies use — intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed — are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

It gets worse: the brightest minds of this generation are creating algorithms which only increase the effects of selection.

A terrificly well-written piece on the emperor’s new clothes worn by online advertising. Equal parts economic rigour and Gladwellian anecdata, it’s a joy to read! Kudos to Alana Gillespie for the great translation work (the original article was written in Dutch).

We currently assume that advertising companies always benefit from more data. … But the majority of advertising companies feed their complex algorithms silos full of data even though the practice never delivers the desired result. In the worst case, all that invasion of privacy can even lead to targeting the wrong group of people.

This insight is conspicuously absent from the debate about online privacy. At the moment, we don’t even know whether all this privacy violation works as advertised.

The interaction design of this article is great too—annotations, charts, and more!

A Public Record at Risk: The Dire State of News Archiving in the Digital Age - Columbia Journalism Review

This well-researched in-depth piece doesn’t paint a pretty picture for archiving online news:

Of the 21 news organizations in our study, 19 were not taking any protective steps at all to archive their web output. The remaining two lacked formal strategies to ensure that their current practices have the kind of longevity to outlast changes in technology.

JournalBook

A small but perfectly formed progressive web app. It’s a private, offline-first personal journal with no log-in and no server-stored data. You can read about the tech stack behind it:

Your notes are only stored on your device — they’re never sent to a server. You don’t even need to sign-in to use it! It works offline, so you can reflect upon your day on the slow train journey home.

A little while back, I switched from using Chrome as my day-to-day browser to using Firefox. I could feel myself getting a bit too comfortable with one particular browser, and that’s not good. I reckon it’s good to shake things up a little every now and then. Besides, there really isn’t that much difference once you’ve transferred over bookmarks and cookies.

Unfortunately I’m being bitten by this little bug in Firefox. It causes some of my bookmarklets to fail on certain sites with strict Content Security Policies (and CSPs shouldn’t affect bookmarklets). I might have to switch back to Chrome because of this.

I use bookmarklets throughout the day. There’s the Huffduffer bookmarklet, of course, for whenever I come across a podcast episode or other piece of audio that I want to listen to later. But there’s also my own home-rolled bookmarklet for posting links to my site. It doesn’t do anything clever—it grabs the title and URL of the currently open page and pre-populates a form in a new window, leaving me to add a short description and some tags.

If you’re reading this, then you’re familiar with the “journal” section of adactio.com, but the “links” section is where I post the most. Here, for example, are all the links I posted yesterday. It varies from day to day, but there’s generally a handful.

Should you wish to keep track of everything I’m linking to, there’s a twitterbot you can follow called @adactioLinks. It uses a simple IFTTT recipe to poll my RSS feed of links and send out a tweet whenever there’s a new entry.

Or you can drink straight from the source and subscribe to the RSS feed itself, if you’re still rocking it old-school. But if RSS is your bag, then you might appreciate a way to filter those links…

All my links are tagged. Heavily. This is because all my links are “notes to future self”, and all my future self has to do is ask “what would past me have tagged that link with?” when I’m trying to find something I previously linked to. I end up using my site’s URLs as an interface:

• adactio.com/links/tags/serviceworkers or
• adactio.com/links/tags/sci-fi

At the front-end gatherings at Clearleft, I usually wrap up with a quick tour of whatever I’ve added that week to:

• adactio.com/links/tags/frontend

Well, each one of those tags also has a corresponding RSS feed:

• adactio.com/links/tags/serviceworkers/rss
• adactio.com/links/tags/sci-fi/rss
• adactio.com/links/tags/frontend/rss

…and so on.

That means you can subscribe to just the links tagged with something you’re interested in. Here’s the full list of tags if you’re interested in seeing the inside of my head.

This also works for my journal entries. If you’re only interested in my blog posts about frontend development, you might want to subscribe to:

• adactio.com/journal/tags/frontend/rss

Here are all the tags from my journal.

You can even mix them up. For everything I’ve tagged with “typography”—whether it’s links, journal entries, or articles—the URL is:

• adactio.com/tags/typography

The corresponding RSS feed is:

• adactio.com/tags/typography/rss

You get the idea. Basically, if something on my site is a list of items, chances are there’s a corresponding RSS feeds. Sometimes there might even be a JSON feed. Hack some URLs to see.

Meanwhile, I’ll be linking, linking, linking…

Disturbances #16: Digital Dust

From smart dust and spimes, through to online journaling and social media, to machine learning, big data and digital preservation…

Is the archive where information goes to live forever, or where data goes to die?

How accessible is your website for the disabled? Consider doing an audit to find out | Poynter

Melody Kramer interviews Eric Bailey, formerly of the Boston Globe.