Jeremy Keith

The people holding up the internet | Data Drop

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347.

A Place Among the Fiddlers - Longreads

An in-depth report from Galax, the Old Time equivalent of the fleadh.

In some ways, the short story is the ideal format for science fiction. If science fiction is all about ideas, a short story is a way to take an idea and play it out without any obligation to build a bigger world around it.

But short stories can work the other way too. If you have a bigger world that’s been established in full-length novels, a short story can be just the right format for exploring another corner of that world.

In Lake Of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie, you get both.

The stories are split into three categories. The first has standalone stories. The second has stories from the universe established in the Imperial Radch series. The third has stories from the world of The Raven Tower.

In my opinion, the standalone stories are really good. The Imperial Radch stories are also great. But the stories from world of The Raven Tower are best of all. Something about the fable-like premise of that world makes it ideal for short stories that are like twisted little fairy tales.

At this point I think I’ve read everything that Ann Leckie has published so I feel safe in saying you can’t go wrong if you pick up any of her books. There’s something deeply humanist about her writing.

Why don’t more developers “use the platform”? | Read the Tea Leaves

Thought-provoking musings from Nolan.

This hue shall pass | Colour contrast checker by Clearleft

My Clearleft colleagues have made this tool to check if your colour palette has enough contrast to be accessible.

But let’s face it, the best part is the name—chef’s kiss!

This hue shall pass is an accessibility tool that helps you review and refine your brand’s digital colour palette. It shows you a matrix of all possible colour combinations and which ones pass or fail your accessibility criteria. It then helps you make adjustments to unlock more usable combinations.

Commodified Intelligence | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE

We may end up with a full “hidden economy”: People working on their own passion projects, building things for their own sake, and for recognition from their peers. Work done without real compensation, to express personal ideas, moods, and visions, with personal lines drawn on when AI usage is acceptable, and when it isn’t.

This bifurcation would affect everyone. For every single hobby activity in your life you’ll have to make a decision: Do you care about the “outcome”, or do you care about doing it yourself, about going through the steps, learning, and doing it badly?

Say, do you just want to eat something, or do you want to know how to cook?

Do you just want a drawing, or do you want to learn how to express yourself in art, in a way that’s impossible to articulate or explain through a chat interface?

AI is a Boring Technology - Christopher Butler

A thoughtful comparison of “AI” and electricity:

The work is in two places. Regulation, which first requires the political will to want it, and which nobody gets to skip by hoping the technology will mature into fairness on its own. And efficiency — continued ground gained on open models small enough to run on ordinary machines. The future I want is local — off-grid AI. A model on a laptop that belongs to the person using it, the way a lamp belongs to the person who switches it on.

On this day, twenty five years ago, I wrote my first journal entry on this website.

Twenty five years! A quarter of a century! That’s a significant portion of the lifetime of the World Wide Web itself.

Actually, this site did exist before September 30th, 2001 but it was very different. You can still look at the very first version of adactio.com if you want to wallow in the glory days of framesets and DHTML. But it was twenty five years ago that I started publishing my thoughts here, making adactio.com my online home.

The funny thing is, I distinctly remember when I started writing that I was getting into this whole blogging thing really late. So many others had been doing it for a while at that point. Now there aren’t many of them left.

It’s not just the journal though. At some point I added the links section. Later still, I added notes. Between those three sections, I usually end up posting something on this website at least once a day.

But I don’t put any pressure on myself. That might be the secret to the longevity of the site. I don’t worry about running out of things to write about. If I go for a while without writing anything, that’s okay. But that rarely happens. There’s almost always something I want to share. Like I said in that first ever post:

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.

I also wrote:

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.

I think the tech stuff has decreased over the past few years. I’m more likely to write about music or books. I expect that trend will continue.

I certainly have no plans to stop. It feels good to have my own little homestead on the web where I can do whatever I want.

After twenty five years, it feels good to occasionally peruse the archive and revisit the past.

Here’s to the next twenty five.

Justice for CSS | WIRED

In defense of the girliest programming language.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a blog post of mine quoted in this article.

The death of web development education – Rescuing a field from disappearing

A grim tally.

If you’re anything like me, you’re sick of hearing about so-called “AI”. We are not a fringe. The majority consensus amongst actual regular people is that this is being forced down our throats and stuffed into our eyes and ears.

That’s why it pains me that I’m about to add more fecal matter onto the ever-growing pile of shit by writing yet another hot take related to large language models.

If you stop reading now, I don’t blame you. In fact, I applaud you.

Anyway…

The last time I made the mistake of writing about large language models, I set out my stall thusly:

Software is almost certainly the killer app for large language models.

I think the artists, writers, and musicians will be okay, or at least as okay as they ever were. It turns out that humans like things made by other humans.

And y’know what? If I had to choose which endeavour I’d rather see automated away—programming or art—it’s no competition.

I stand by that. But it doesn’t mean that software development gets a free pass to use exploitative extractive tools with a clear conscience.

You can use these tools in a thoughtless way or you can use them thoughtfully. I really like Robin Sloan’s approach:

The consensus vision seems to involve AI working for you day-to-day, a constant ambient presence, sparkles in everything; even cautious Apple has succumbed. I’m not interested in that.

My alternative: get your wish, then stuff the genie back into the lamp.

He’s got a set of rules:

1. You must actually and consistently use anything you build for two months before posting about it.
2. Ideally, never post about it. (I know I am breaking this rule, but my purpose is pedagogical, and anyway, I’ve got more apps I didn’t tell you about.)
3. Don’t let the AI agent name the app. You pick the name.
4. Don’t distribute the app, not even for free. Don’t post the code on GitHub. This is not software for glory; it is software for you.

For most of my career, I’ve wanted web development to become something that anyone could do. I really like the World Wide Web and I think it would be great if more people had their own websites. But I totally get that most people have no interest in learning HTML.

One of my biggest fears for the web was that it would become the domain of professionals only; a gatekeeping priesthood who get to make stuff while everyone else goes without.

The efficacy of large language models for coding would seem to lessen that possibility. Especially if you apply Robin’s approach.

The Session has an API. There are also weekly data dumps of everything on the site. The idea is that other people can use these to build other useful tools for themselves.

Lately, there’s been a big uptick of these kinds of tools, mostly made by someone with the help of large language models. Often they have no previous experience of making software.

This is good. But I get uneasy when I see people selling these tools to other people. Call me old-fashioned but I feel that if you’re going to ask people to pay for a thing, you should understand that thing. I think that’s why Robin’s list of suggestions resonates with me.

But…

To build software with large language models today, you pretty much have to pay some money to the absolute worst sort of people, the ones pedalling tokens to their “hyperscale” products. You can’t avoid being complicit because there isn’t really an alternative.

I think that might change.

I’m not going to make predictions. That’s a mug’s game. But I might attempt a gentle unspooling of one potential future…

First off, there’s a crash coming. That’s pretty much inevitable at this point. The only question is how much collatoral damage it’s going to do to the world.

Right now, tokens are subsidised. The hyperscalers lose money when people use their products. It’s possible that we are now living through a golden age of making software relatively cheaply with large language models. That will change when the hyperscalers start charging for the true cost of tokens.

Not for everyone though. I believe that enterprise software companies will happily pay the true price for tokens. It’ll be like Google Glass; that was an absolute disaster for the consumer market but went on to have a productive second life in factories.

You know when you’re in an airport and you see advertisements that are not for you, but for faceless corporations? You know the ones. They’re all “cloud” this and “sap” that. Now they’re all about “AI”. It’s not for us. It’s for them.

Does this spell the end of making home-cooked apps with large language models?

I don’t think so.

The hyperscalers might become unaffordable to most people, but keep an eye on open models. And keep your other eye on local models.

Right now, open local models aren’t as good as the large language models that require data centres of computation and energy. But they aren’t massively far behind. And if the recent history of large language models has taught us anything, it’s that “good enough” is fine.

Take Google Search. They decided to fuck it up by forcing generated summaries into your eyeballs above the actual search results. These summaries aren’t 100% accurate. Let’s be generous and say they’re accurate more than 90% of the time. According to Google, that’s good enough.

So, sure, local open models may never reach the levels of data-centre-powered large language models. But they don’t need to. They just need to be good enough.

I’m really looking forward to that.

My issue with large language models has never been the actual technology, which is genuinely fascinating. My issue is with the power dynamics, of being robbed of agency, of the over-inflated hype and criti-hype being used to convince us of an inevitable future where a small group of very rich men are masters over our lives.

I’d love to see the technology decoupled from the current depressing narrative. I’d love to see a thousand homemade software flowers bloom from open local language models.

Is AI ruining my brain?

I am an AI skeptic/hater/slow adopter, due to a combination of concerns about the ethics and environmental impact of AI and the fact that I like doing things myself. I knit my own socks, I built a swing for my porch this summer, and every Thanksgiving I make pies from scratch — even the crust (do you like my handmade em dash?).

[this is aaronland] it’s a funny way to tell a story

Aaron’s talk at Papercamp opened with this:

Fun fact: Alex and I first met 19 years ago at a conference in Paris where, coincidentally, I was speaking about something I referred to as the “Papernet”. Amazingly there are no photographs, that I could find online, of either of us speaking. This is a nice passage that Jeremy Keith wrote about the event at the time.