You Can Just Say No to the Data - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Appealing to data as the ultimate authority — especially when fueled by engineered desire — isn’t neutrality, it’s an abdication of responsibility.
Link tags: data
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Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Beautiful Public Data
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
Own what’s yours
Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani
This is one way of putting things into perspective.
What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far | Seldo.com
LLMs are good at transforming text into less text
Laurie is really onto something with this:
This is the biggest and most fundamental thing about LLMs, and a great rule of thumb for what’s going to be an effective LLM application. Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
Depending how much of the hype around AI you’ve taken on board, the idea that they “take text and turn it into less text” might seem gigantic back-pedal away from previous claims of what AI can do. But taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market. It’s still very exciting, all the more exciting because it’s got clear boundaries and isn’t hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are.
Public Domain Image Archive
Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
CCC | Ban tracking and personalised advertising
A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).
1 dataset. 100 visualizations.
The same small dataset visualised in a hundred different ways, with notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982) - YouTube
Wow! Grace Hopper has always been a hero to me, but I had no idea she was such a fantastic presenter. She’s completely engaging, with the timing and deadpan delivery of a stand-up comedian at times.
DOC • The power of beauty in communicating complex ideas
As designers creating images to communicate complex ideas, we rationalize our processes, we bring objectivity to our craft, we want our clients to think that our decisions are based on reasoning. However, we should also defend our intuitions, our subjectivity. We should also defend pursuing beauty as it is one of our most powerful tools.
A microdata enhanced HTML Webcomponent for Leaflet | k-nut — Blog
Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.
Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.
The global fight against polio — how far have we come? - Our World in Data
I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.
The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.
Historical Trails
Maggie explores different ways of visualising journeys on the web, including browser histories:
Perhaps web browsing histories should look more like Git commit histories? Perhaps distinct branches could representing different topics and research avenues?
Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems
A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.
scottjehl/PE: declarative data binding for HTML
This is an interesting idea from Scott—a templating language that doesn’t just replace variables with values, but keeps the original variable names in there too.
Not sure how I feel about using data- attributes for this though; as far as I know, they’re intended to be site-specific, not for cross-site solutions like this.
Apocalypse-Proof
Back in 2017 when I was in New York, I went on a self-guided infrastructure tour: 32 Avenue of the Americas, 60 Hudson Street, and the subject of this article, 33 Thomas Street. One of my pictures is used to illustrate its creepiness, both in real life and as an evil lair in fiction:
A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That has made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.
Counting Ghosts
Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.
This article is spot-on!
I don’t want your data – Manu
I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.
Same!