your ai slop bores me
Mutually assured Mechanical Turk.
This is genuinely much more interesting and wholesome than a chat interface powered by a large language model.
Link tags: fun
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AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You
Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.
DOCTYPE magazine 🚀⌨️
’80s BASIC type-in mags are back, but this time for HTML!
10 wonderful web apps, including games, toys, puzzles and utilities
No coding knowledge needed, you just type
Introducing: Webbed Sites (Webbed Briefs)
I heard you like divs…
Back to the Crazebox! - Toons Back To A Website - Homestar Runner
Let’s go back to a website!
This page is under construction - localghost
I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.
Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.
In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide
This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!
Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.
Why “AI” projects fail
“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.
And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.
The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves
Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.
IndieWeb principles · Paul Robert Lloyd
I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:
- Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
- Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
- Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.
Antidepressants or Tolkien
This is harder than it sounds. I got 19 out of 24.
Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American
In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.
Future-first design thinking
If we’re serious about creating a sustainable future, perhaps we should change this common phrase from “Form follows Function” to “Form – Function – Future”. While form and function are essential considerations, the future, represented by sustainability, should be at the forefront of our design thinking. And actually, if sustainability is truly at the forefront of the way we create new products, then maybe we should revise the phrase even further to “Future – Function – Form.” This revised approach would place our future, represented by sustainability, at the forefront of our design thinking. It would encourage us to first ask ourselves, “What is the most sustainable way to design X?” and then consider how the function of X can be met while ensuring it remains non-harmful to people and the planet.
TimeGuessr
Where and when were these photographs taken?
It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.
Fujichia: Sayable Space
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game
This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.
A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn
This is design engineering.
A year of new avenues
All along, from the frothy 1990s to the percolating 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been growing and maturing, sprouting new capabilities. From my vantage point, that growth has seemed to accelerate in the past five years; CSS, in particular, has become incredibly flexible and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.
For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, permissionless system claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; sometimes maddening. But that’s every creative medium. That’s life.