Welcome to Jeremy Keith's Cyber-Home!
Making websites. Writing books. Hosting a podcast. Speaking at events. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email. Journal
Making websites. Writing books. Hosting a podcast. Speaking at events. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email. Journal
3146 sparkline Links  10582 sparkline Articles 85 sparkline Notes 7749
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Saturday, April 12th, 2025
Rock’n’roll bus stop
9:02am
Also on Mastodon Bluesky
Better typography with text-wrap pretty | WebKit
Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.
7:32am
Tagged with css text-wrap pretty balance webkit browsers widows orphans typography type css styling reading readability design frontend development safari
Friday, April 11th, 2025
Reading A Psalm For The Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.
7:02pm
Also on Bookshop Open Library Soon…
6:55pm
Also on Mastodon Bluesky
Thursday, April 10th, 2025
Thursday session
9:12pm
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Salter Cane unplugged in Lewes
This Saturday, April 12th, is Record Store Day. To mark the occasion, Salter Cane will be playing a stripped-down set at Union Music Store in Lewes. That’s the place that Jamie used to run, so it has a special place in our hearts. Liza Low will be playing at midday. Salter Cane are on at 1pm. If you’re in the neighbourbood, please swing by! We’re really looking forward to playing a mix of some old songs and some brand new songs from our brand new album.
12:50pm
Tagged with salter cane music concert gig unplugged songs lewes
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
Tuesday session
7:09pm
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‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath
Grim reading from the games industry, especially if you work at Shopify where the CEbrO has just mandated that you have to use this shite.
12:50pm
Tagged with ai machine learning language models generative tools work misery games gaming ethics waste
Oh man, this tune by Adrian is so good!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsJihAhX5P4
12:12pm
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Monday, April 7th, 2025
Happy 25th anniversy to A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp:
https://alistapart.com/article/dao/
Still relevant after all these years!
8:07pm
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Went for a stroll around The Shire this afternoon.
6:17pm
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Ah, Shopify! Where would Breitbart be without you?
Now the CEO of Shopify demands that every developer there uses “AI” to enable swastika merchants to make even more moolah.
(Hi to my “friends” who work there!)
5:16pm
Also on Mastodon Bluesky
Once Again From the Top • Jason Santa Maria
Welcome back, Jason!
1:04pm
Tagged with blogs blogging indie web writing sharing personal publishing
Denial
The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.
Drew DeVault puts it more bluntly, saying
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face:
Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.
And no, a robots.txt file doesn’t help.
If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned.
Free and open source projects are particularly vulnerable.
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
You try to do the right thing by making knowledge and tools freely available. This is how you get repaid.
AI bots are destroying Open Access:
There’s a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.
My own experience with The Session bears this out.
Ars Technica has a piece on this:
Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries.
So does MIT Technology Review:
AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone.
When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem that’s just getting worse.
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.
If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.
12:58pm
Tagged with ai machine learning language models generative tools bots scraping ddos servers sysadmin ethics open source access information knowledge
I’m sitting comfortably in my chair at home while my brother is running a 300 mile race through Arizona.
https://trackleaders.com/monster25i.php?name=Eoin_Keith
8:43am
Also on Mastodon Bluesky
A pragmatic browser support strategy | Go Make Things
Basic functionality should work on any device that can access the web. Extras and flourishes are treated as progressive enhancements for modern devices.
The UI can look different and even clunky on older devices and browsers, as long as it doesn’t break rule #1.
8:29am
Tagged with frontend development progressive enhancement browsers support
Snook Dreams of the Web - Snook.ca
If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.
8:08am
Tagged with frontend development html css javascript mastery jiro sushi craft career
AI ambivalence | Read the Tea Leaves
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.
8:06am
Tagged with ai machine learning language models generative tools software coding code ambivalence linguistics computation work career
Saturday, April 5th, 2025
Happy Caturday from Coco!
3:42pm
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2025
Thursday session
8:25pm
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Generate your own 90s page here!