This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

I have a preprint out estimating how many scholarly papers are written using chatGPT etc? I estimate upwards of 60k articles (>1% of global output) published in 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16887

How can we identify this? Simple: there are certain words that LLMs love, and they suddenly start showing up a lot last year. Twice as many papers call something "intricate", big rises for "commendable" and "meticulous".

Zach Seward, “the editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times” over slechte en goede voorbeelden van het gebruik van AI bij nieuwsplatforms.

People look at tools like ChatGPT and think their greatest trick is writing for you. But, in fact, the most powerful use case for LLMs is the opposite: creating structure out of unstructured prose.

Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Partici- pants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code.

it's worse than AI being merely inadequate for software development. Developing that mental model requires learning about the system. We do that by exploring it. We have to interact with it. We manipulate and change the system, then observe how it responds. We do that by performing the easy, simple programing tasks. Delegating that learning work to machines is the tech equivalent of eating our seed corn

Via https://hidde.blog/links/losing-the-imitation-game/

The AI hype is collapsing faster than the bouncy house after a kid’s birthday. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to.

For a start, take a look at Microsoft—which made the biggest bet on AI. They were convinced that AI would enable the company’s Bing search engine to surpass Google.

They spent $10 billion dollars to make this happen.

And now we have numbers to measure the results. Guess what? Bing’s market share hasn’t grown at all. Bing’s share of search It’s still stuck at a lousy 3%.

In fact, it has dropped slightly since the beginning of the year.

What’s wrong? Everybody was supposed to prefer AI over conventional search. And it turns out that nobody cares.

the power plant is home to the World’s Southernmost Flush Toilet!

While taking the train was more expensive for two people, our snapshot research found two of the three European services were cheaper for families of four and six. Groups of four could save £94, while a bigger group could reduce their holiday bill by a whopping £267.

Kort verhaal over de nobele bescherming van archeologische vondsten en kunstschatten.

We selected these archaeological sites based on their importance to our collective understanding of human and galactic history, and their immediate risk of irreparable harm from pollution, climate change, neglect, and looting. We are sympathetic to claims that preserving these sites in their “original” context is important, but our duty of care outweighs such emotional considerations

Via Jeremy Keith

This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large-language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals

Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to a smörgåsbord of infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine. To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues.

Adobe komt ook tot het inzicht dat meer niet altijd beter is?

In recent years, additional tools and frameworks have often been considered essential to build modern websites and Web applications

As developers we are often attracted to shiny new toys, but there’s lots of value in making the best use of our existing tools and refining how we use them.

Any piece of code that you add to your project has a cost, and if you can pass that cost on to browser makers everybody benefits in the end.

Yaml aims to be a more human-friendly alternative to json, but with all of its features, it became such a complex format with so many bizarre and unexpected behaviors, that it is difficult for humans to predict how a given yaml document will parse. Via Chris Coyier

365 Knitting Clock stitches time as it passes by. It knits 24 hours a day, one year at the time, presenting the physical representation of time as a creative and tangible force. After 365 days the clock has turned the passed year into a two-meter long scarf. Now the past can be carried out into the future and the upcoming year is hiding in a new spool of thread, still unknitted. via kottke

The Minimalist Photography Award is the only foundation that deals extensively and professionally with minimalist photography as a branch of photography in which the photographic artistic vision takes the lead

via Kottke

Sometimes we can’t avoid a large dependency: many projects built with React or Vue or similar frameworks would be unfathomably complicated to manage without. But these frameworks have relatively quick release cycles, and require maintenance to keep up to date.

By comparison, web standards evolve comparatively slowly, but they evolve slowly for a reason: features that are added now need to be supported forever. They are not designed to become obsolete. So whenever possible, the safest, and most future-proof bet is to use the native features of the web platform.

there is no supply chain here. Because there is no supplier. I am not providing you something that you bought for me. There is no relationship. I put something online because I wanted to. The fact you made your product depend on it is your responsibility. Not mine.

we send a header which is a date set to the beginning of each day:

last-modified: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

From now on, every time this request is made again, the server receives the date and adjusts it by one second, and returns it to the browser:

last-modified: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:01 GMT

This way, the server can calculate the distance in seconds since midnight to give us a visit count.

Niks aan de hand, tot je een blokje draait.

This series contain some of Helga's best known works. Playfulness and simplicity of the idea is contrasted by fine details of the fabrics used and of the landscape. Each character has their unique personality, distinctive voice, and a story to tell.

via

Progressive enhancement assists in web accessibility by encouraging teams to build resilient services.

Over betuttelende technologie:

You can’t solve culture with technology. If you need to rely on software to police your employee’s language, you’ve got bigger fucking problems.

via Paul van Buuren

I hope this short read has convinced you of the perils and pitfals of using [closed, closed] intervals. My guess is that the reason people sometimes fall for them is because they look nice and symmetric, and in fact work most of the time.

It's only in the edge cases that they start to break down. But that is exactly how you should evaluate how good a design is: by testing it against the edge cases.

A proton should be one of the simplest objects in physics. It’s a basic building block of all atoms, or, alternatively, the simplest possible atom all by itself, since hydrogen (one positively charged proton plus one negatively charged electron) is still hydrogen when it’s ionised.

Most of the atoms in the Universe are hydrogen, as are most of the atoms in your body. In fact, since electrons are tiny and weigh very little, it’s straightforward to conclude that you are mostly, specifically, protons.

Given all this, you’d think physicists would understand protons very well by now. You would be wrong.

I hear layout and grid talked about in extremes: it’s either this totally easy, trivial thing or a totally unknowable, unsolvable riddle. Like most things, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle. There indeed an art to crafting an elegant, intuitive layout and grid solution for a design system. On the other hand, all we’re really doing is putting a couple boxes beside one another. It’s hard. It’s easy. It’s weird.

Het gebruik van dingen die al aanwezig zijn in je HTML om je CSS op te targeten. Ik vind dit altijd een goede reden om dit meer te doen:

This promotes an a11y-first mindset — if there is no attribute or pseudo selector available to represent the state we wish to style, should we add one? Are we using the right HTML element? We are forced to go through a mental flow chart of native, semantic HTML and CSS features we could tap into before resorting to classes.

Het helpt ook andersom: Als je per ongeluk de juiste attributen vergeet, ziet het er ook niet ok uit.

It feels to me as though we’ve become so fixated on the mechanisms that make it possible to deliver those promises—of efficiency, consistency and scale—that we’ve lost sight of the why.

Because if we can use our design systems to speed up meaningful work, standardise things to a high quality, and scale the things we actually want to reproduce - then the reverse is also true.

1. Not using the tab key for navigating
2. Home link alt text
3. The importance of descriptive link text
4. Not using the full screen
5. None used skip links

“It's important to note that "skip" links provide distinct benefits for sighted keyboard users, even if their usage among screen reader users is mixed.”

Nowadays people use tools like figma. These tools use a subset of css, which means that it is much easier to build a working website from a figma mockup, without using any hacks. These new tools are holding us back though.

The write-ups I’ve seen have all been deeply technical and more or less bury the lede, so let me begin with a quick summary of the three issues that have pivoted my impression of Azure from “serious contender, albeit one that targets a different market than the ones I talk to” to “this is a security clownshow that should be actively avoided.”

Some painful truths

• All common software now tracks what we do and reports on it by default
• Basically impossible to escape from this situation
• If you are a dysfunctional organization, your own on-premise efforts will not be good enough
• Cloud may be the best you can do
• Securing software is very hard to do, especially if dysfunctional ○ As a service may be the best you can do
• oftware is indeed terrible, the business model for good software is dead ○ “Only free software can afford to be good”
• Yet, even the most professional organizations have now given up
• We have globally accepted a terrible situation

If the View Transitions API works across page navigations, it could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years. If the View Transitions API only works for single page apps, it could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.

Programming portals are small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that give users access to command lines and text-based programmaing. They open a little window into the underlying functionality of an interface.

via

Yes, the genie is out of the bottle. Doesn’t mean I have to make wishes.

via

The next version of Adobe's apps will require you to pay that $21/month Pantone fee, or any Pantone-defined colors in your images will render as black. That's true whether you created the file last week or 20 years ago.

Doubtless, Adobe will blame Pantone for this, and it's true that Pantone's greed is the root cause here. But this is an utterly foreseeable result of Adobe's SaaS strategy.

Again I thought about going the JavaScript route, but I’m trying to keep to the Web’s slower pace layers as much as possible in this project for maximum compatibility over time and technology.

then I thought I heard about people using npm to do the same thing for client-side code. “That can’t be right!” I thought. I must’ve misunderstood. So I talked to someone from npm and explained how I must be misunderstanding something. But it turned out that people really were treating client-side JavaScript no different than server-side JavaScript. People really were pulling in megabytes of other people’s code to ship to end users so that they could, I dunno, left pad numbers or something. Listen, I don’t care what you get up to in the privacy of your own codebase. But don’t poison the well of the web with profligate client-side JavaScript.