Dispatches From The Internets

Excellent write-up of Bing Search’s wilder interactions, why they’re happening, and a bunch of fun t-shirt ideas.

Progressive enhancement doesn’t have to be more work

As of this year, I’ve officially been beating the drum of progressive enhancement for decades. With an “s.” And it’s still a philosophy that is foundational to building resilient, accessible projects on the web. Full stop.

Chris offers a great intro/reminder here. And when you want to dig in more, you should read my book.

I love this method to teaching folks about how to use prompt-driven AI by putting structure around how they are expected to use it. The different prompting approaches were spot-on too.

I love how people are considering the potential of conversational AIs (like ChatGPT) as assistive technology.

ChatGPT could be considered an “assistive technology” if it assists people with communication disability to get their message across more efficiently or effectively.

Setting aside my employers’ service offerings promoted in this piece, I appreciate its focus on creating more opportunities for everyone, regardless of ability or disability. The more ways we enable people to consume or interact with our products, the more they will tailor their experience to their own needs and take advantage of affordances that will make them more efficient, productive, and comfortable.

So much worthy of reflecting on on this piece!

I do not believe you can codesign your way to justice.

Certain institutions and design ideas are fundamentally oppressive, and the only way to achieve radical transformation at scale is with collective action and policy change.

Imagination is key, but imagination in the right way:

Imagination is not a splashy poster of a sci-fi movie but a daily act of resistance we must engage in despite how tired we might be.

Following this framing, author Alba Villamil walls through a ton of actionable above and examples of how to bring imagination to hear on our UX work. Well worth your time!

So much goodness in this release!

• Scroll to Text Fragment
• Service Workers and Shared Workers can access the Permissions API.
• Notification API in dedicated workers.
• Reporting API.
• Screen Orientation API.
• Screen Wake Lock API.
• unprefixed Fullscreen API
• Push in web apps saved to the home screen on iOS
• “id” member in Web App Manifest
• Badging API.
• third-party browsers can Add to Home Screen

Interesting panel on AI investing, which has some good call-outs with respect to bias in data and the importance of diverse teams working on this stuff.

I found this post really helpful in porting my old Jekyll front matter-based redirects (which use the redirect_from key) to Eleventy & Netlify.

There is so much to unpack in this piece, but it offers a really helpful metaphor for understanding Large Language Models.

This excerpt, in particular, really hit me… hard. Using AI to generate content and put it on the web would eventually result in a huge reduction of quality, just like making a photocopy of a photocopy:

Even if it is possible to restrict large-language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large-language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large-language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.