Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 9

What price?

I���ve noticed a really strange justification from people when I ask them about their use of generative tools that use large language models (colloquially and inaccurately labelled as artificial intelligence).

I���ll point out that the training data requires the wholesale harvesting of creative works without compensation. I���ll also point out the ludicrously profligate energy use required not just for the training, but for the subsequent queries.

And here���s the thing: people will acknowledge those harms but they will justify their actions by saying ���these things will get better!���

First of all, there���s no evidence to back that up.

If anything, as the well gets poisoned by their own outputs, large language models may well end up eating their own slop and getting their own version of mad cow disease. So this might be as good as they���re ever going to get.

And when it comes to energy usage, all the signals from NVIDIA, OpenAI, and others are that power usage is going to increase, not decrease.

But secondly, what the hell kind of logic is that?

It���s like saying ���It���s okay for me to drive my gas-guzzling SUV now, because in the future I���ll be driving an electric vehicle.���

The logic is completely backwards! If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let���s be generous), then that���s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.

You don���t get companies to change their behaviour by rewarding them for it. If you really want better behaviour from the purveyors of generative tools, you should be boycotting the current offerings.

I suspect that most people know full well that the ���they���ll get better!��� defence doesn���t hold water. But you can convince yourself of anything when everyone around is telling you that this is the future baby, and you���d better get on board or you���ll be left behind.

Baldur reminds us that this is how people talked about asbestos:

Every time you had an industry campaign against an asbestos ban, they used the same rhetoric. They focused on the potential benefits ��� cheaper spare parts for cars, cheaper water purification ��� and doing so implicitly assumed that deaths and destroyed lives, were a low price to pay.

This is the same strategy that���s being used by those who today talk about finding productive uses for generative models without even so much as gesturing towards mitigating or preventing the societal or environmental harms.

It reminds me of the classic Ursula Le Guin short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas that depicts:

���the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child.

Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked and disgusted, ultimately acquiesce to this one injustice that secures the happiness of the rest of the city.

It turns out that most people will blithely accept injustice and suffering not for a utopia, but just for some bland hallucinated slop.

Don���t get me wrong: I���m not saying large language models aren���t without their uses. I love seeing what Simon and Matt are doing when it comes to coding. And large language models can be great for transforming content from one format to another, like transcribing speech into text. But the balance sheet just doesn���t add up.

As Molly White put it: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?:

Even as someone who has used them and found them helpful, it���s remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.

Manual ���till it hurts

I’ve been going buildless���or as Brad crudely puts it, raw-dogging websites on a few projects recently. Not just obviously simple things like Clearleft’s Browser Support page, but sites like:

The Clearleft podcastPatterns DayUX London

They also have 0 dependencies.

Like Max says:

Funnily enough, many build tools advertise their superior ���Developer Experience��� (DX). For my money, there���s no better DX than shipping code straight to the browser and not having to worry about some cryptic node_modules error in between.

Making websites without a build step is a gift to your future self. When you open that project six months or a year or two years later, there’ll be no faffing about with npm updates, installs, or vulnerabilities.

Need to edit the CSS? You edit the CSS. Need to change the markup? You change the markup.

It’s remarkably freeing. It’s also very, very performant.

If you’re thinking that your next project couldn’t possibly be made without a build step, let me tell you about a phrase I first heard in the indie web community: “Manual ‘till it hurts”. It’s basically a two-step process:

Start doing what you need to do by hand.When that becomes unworkable, introduce some kind of automation.

It’s remarkable how often you never reach step two.

I’m not saying premature optimisation is the root of all evil. I’m just saying it’s premature.

Start simple. Get more complex if and when you need to.

You might never need to.

Belfast, Brighton, Cork, Boston, Pittsburgh, Saint Augustine

I���ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks.

At Clearleft, you���re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven���t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot.

My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alternating between travel and homebodying.

Belfast

The first week was spent in Belfast at the excellent Belfast Trad Fest. There were workshops in the morning, sessions in the afternoon, and concerts in the evening. Non-stop music!

This year���s event was a little bit special for me. The festival runs an excellent bursary sponsorship programme for young people who otherwise wouldn���t be able to attend:

The bursary secures a place for a young musician to attend and experience a week-long intensive and immersive summertime learning course of traditional music, song and dance and can be transformative.

Back in April, I did a month-long funding drive on The Session:

Starting from today, and for the whole month of April, any donations made to The Session, which normally go towards covering the costs of running the site, will instead go towards sponsoring bursary places for this year���s Belfast Summer school.

I was really hoping to hit ��1000, which would cover bursary sponsorship for eight students. In the end though, the members of The Session contributed a whopping ��3000!

Needless to say, I was thrilled! The Trad Fest team were very happy too���they very kindly gave me a media pass for the duration of the event, which meant I could go to any of the concerts for free. I made full use of this.

That said, one of the absolute highlights of the week wasn���t a concert, but a session. Piper Mick O���Connor and fiddler Sean Smyth led a session out at the American Bar one evening that was absolutely sublime. There was a deep respect for the music combined with a lovely laidback vibe.

Brighton

There were no shortage of sessions once Jessica returned from Belfast to Brighton. In fact, when we got the train back from Gatwick we hopped in a cab straight to a session instead of going home first. Can���t stop, won���t stop.

The weather hadn���t been great in Belfast, which was fine because we were mostly indoors. But once we got back to Brighton we were treated to a week of glorious sunshine.

Needless to say, Jessica did plenty of swimming. I even went in the ocean myself on one of the hottest days.

I also went into the air. Andy took me up in a light aircraft for a jolly jaunt over the south of England. We flew from Goodwood over the New Forest, and around the Isle of Wight where we landed for lunch. Literally a flying visit.

I can attest that Andy is an excellent pilot. No bumpy landings.

Cork

Our next sojourn took us back to the island of Ireland, but this time we were visiting the Republic. We spent a week in the mightiest of all the Irish counties, Cork.

Our friends Dan and Sue came over from the States and a whole bunch of us went on a road trip down to west Cork, a beautiful part of the country that I shamefully hadn���t visited before. Sue did a magnificent job navigating the sometimes tiny roads in a rental car, despite Dan being a nervous Nellie in the passenger seat.

We had a lovely couple of days in Glengarriff, even though the weather wasn���t great. On the way back to Cork city, we just had to stop off in Baltimore���Dan and Sue live in the other Baltimore. I wasn���t prepared for the magnificent and rugged coastline (quite different to its Maryland counterpart).

Boston

We were back in Brighton for just one day before it was time for us to head to our next destination. We flew to Boston and spent a few days hanging around in Cambridge with our dear friends Ethan and Liz. It was a real treat to just pass the time with good people. It had been far too long.

I did manage to squeeze in an Irish music session in the legendary Druid pub. ���Twas a good night.

Pittsburgh

From Boston we went on to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza. I���ve already told you all about how great that was:

It was joyous!

Saint Augustine

After all the excitement of Frostapalooza, Jessica and I went on to spend a week decompressing in Saint Augustine, Florida.

We went down to the beach every day. We went in the water most days. Sometimes the water was a bit too choppy for a proper swim, but it was still lovely and warm. And there was one day when the water was just perfectly calm.

When we weren’t on the beach, we were probably eating shrimp.

It was all very relaxing.

Brighton

I���ve spent the sixth and final week of my sabbatical back in Brighton. The weather has remained good so there���s been plenty of outdoor activities, including a kayaking trip down the river Medway in Kent. I may have done some involuntary wild swimming at one point.

I have very much enjoyed these past six weeks. Music. Travel. Friends. It���s all been quite lovely.

Frostapalooza

So Frostapalooza happened on Saturday.

It was joyous!

It all started back in July of last year when I got an email from Brad:

Next summer I���m turning 40, and I���m going to use that milestone as an excuse to play a big concert with and for all of my friends and family. It���ll sorta be like The Last Waltz, but with way more web nerds involved.

Originally it was slated for July of 2024, which was kind of awkward for me because it would clash with Belfast Trad Fest but I said to mark me down as interested. Then when the date got moved to August of 2024, it became more doable. I knew that Jessica and I would be making a transatlantic trip at some point anyway to see her parents, so we could try to combine the two.

In fact, the tentative plans we had to travel to the States in April of 2024 for the total solar eclipse ended up getting scrapped in favour of Brad���s shindig. That���s right���we chose rock���n���roll over the cosmic ballet.

Over the course of the last year, things began to shape up. There were playlists. There were spreadsheets. Dot voting was involved.

Anyone with any experience of playing live music was getting nervous. It���s hard enough to rehearse and soundcheck for a four piece, but Brad was planning to have over 40 musicians taking part!

We did what we could from afar, choosing which songs to play on, recording our parts and sending them onto Brad. Meanwhile Brad was practicing like hell with the core band. With Brad on bass and his brother Ian on drums for the whole night, we knew that the rhythm section would be tight.

A few months ago we booked our flights. We���d fly into to Boston first to hang out with Ethan and Liz (it had been too long!), then head down to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza before heading on to Florida to meet up with Jessica���s parents.

When we got to Pittsburgh, we immediately met up with Chris and together we headed over to Brad���s for a rehearsal. We���d end up spending a lot of time playing music with Chris over the next couple of days. I loved every minute of it.

The evening before Frostapalooza, Brad threw a party at his place. It was great to meet so many of the other musicians he���d roped into this.

Then it was time for the big day. We had a whole afternoon to soundcheck, but we needed it. Drums, a percussion station, a horn section ���not to mention all the people coming and going on different songs. Fortunately the tech folks at the venue were fantastic and handled it all with aplomb.

We finished soundchecking around 5:30pm. Doors were at 7pm. Time to change into our rock���n���roll outfits and hang out backstage getting nervous and excited.

Right before showtime, Brad gave a heartfelt little speech.

Then the fun really began.

I wasn���t playing on the first few songs so I got to watch the audience���s reaction as they realised what was in store. Maybe they thought this would be a cute gathering of Brad and his buddies jamming through some stuff. What they got was an incredibly tight powerhouse of energy from a seriously awesome collection of musicians.

I had the honour of playing on five songs over the course of the night. I had an absolute blast! But to be honest, I had just as much fun being in the audience dancing my ass off.

Oh, I was playing mandolin. I probably should���ve mentioned that.

The first song I played on was The Weight by The Band. There was a real Last Waltz vibe as Brad���s extended family joined him on stage, along with me and and Chris.

Later I hopped on stage as one excellent song segued into another���Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

I���ve loved this song since the first time I heard it. In the dot-voting rounds to figure out the set list, this was my super vote.

You know the way it starts with that single note tremelo on the guitar? I figured that would work on the mandolin. And I know how to tremelo.

Jessica was on bass. Jessi Hall was on vocals. It. Rocked.

I stayed on stage for Radiohead���s The National Anthem complete with horns, musical saw, and two basses played by Brad and Jessica absolutely killing it. I added a little texture over the singing with some picked notes on the mandolin.

Then it got truly epic. We played Wake Up by Arcade Fire. So. Much. Fun! Again, I laid down some tremelo over the rousing chorus. I���m sure no one could hear it but it didn���t matter. Everyone was just lifted along by the sheer scale of the thing.

That was supposed to be it for me. But during the rehearsal the day before, I played a little bit on Fleetwood Mac���s The Chain and Brad said, ���You should do that!���

So I did. I think it worked. I certainly enjoyed it!

With that, my musical duties were done and I just danced and danced, singing along to everything.

At the end of the night, everyone got back on stage. It was a tight fit. We then attempted to sing Bohemian Rhapsody together. It was a recipe for disaster ���but amazingly, it worked!

That could describe the whole evening. It shouldn���t have worked. It was far too ambitious. But not only did it work, it absolutely rocked!

What really stood out for me was how nice and kind everyone was. There was nary an ego to be found. I had never met most of these people before but we all came together and bonded over this shared creation. It was genuinely special.

Days later I���m still buzzing from it all. I���m so, so grateful to Brad and Melissa for pulling off this incredible feat, and for allowing me to be a part of it.

They���ve had a shitty few years. I know we all had a shitty time over the past few years, but the shit kept on coming for them:

And then in the middle of this traumatic medical emergency, our mentally-unstable neighbor across the street began accosting my family, flipping off our toddler and nanny, racially harassing my wife, and making violent threats. We fled our home for fear of our safety because he was out in the street exposing himself, shouting belligerence, and threatening violence.

After that, Brad started working with Project Healthy Minds. In fact, all the proceeds from Frostapalooza go to that organisation along with NextStep Pittsburgh.

Just think about that. Confronted with intimidation and racism, Brad and Melissa still managed to see the underlying systemic inequality, and work towards making things better for the person who drove them out of their home.

Good people, man. Good people.

I sincererly hope they got some catharsis from Frostapalooza. I can tell you that I felt frickin��� great after being part of an incredible event filled with joy and love and some of the best music I���ve ever heard.

There���s a write-up of Frostapalooza on CSS Tricks and Will Browar has posted his incredible photographs from the night���some seriously superb photography!

Ad tech

Back when South by Southwest wasn���t terrible, there used to be an annual panel called Browser Wars populated with representatives from the main browser vendors (except for Apple, obviously, who would never venture onto a stage outside of their own events).

I remember getting into a heated debate with the panelists during the 2010 edition. I was mad about web fonts.

Just to set the scene, web fonts didn���t exist back in 2010. That���s what I was mad about.

There was no technical reason why we couldn���t have web fonts. The reason why we didn���t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.

That���s nice and all, but as I said during that panel, I don���t recall any such concerns being raised for photographers when the img element was shipped. Neither was the original text-only web held back by the legimate fear by writers of plagiarism.

My point was not that these concerns weren���t important, but that it wasn���t the job of web browsers to shore up existing business models. To use standards-speak, these concerns are orthogonal.

I���m reminded of this when I see browser makers shoring up the business of behavioural advertising.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of updates to Chrome. Not all of it is necessarily interesting to me, but all of it is supposedly aimed at developers. And yet, in amongst the posts about APIs and features, there���ll be something about the Orwellianly-titled ���privacy sandbox���.

This is only of interest to one specific industry: behavioural online advertising driven by surveillance and tracking. I don���t see any similar efforts being made for teachers, cooks, architects, doctors or lawyers.

It���s a ludicrous situation that I put down to the fact that Google, the company that makes Chrome, is also the company that makes its money from targeted advertising.

But then Mozilla started with the same shit.

Now, it���s one thing to roll out a new so-called ���feature��� to benefit behavioural advertising. It���s quite another to make it enabled by default. That���s a piece of deceptive design that has no place in Firefox. Defaults matter. Browser makers know this. It���s no accident that this ���feature��� was enabled by default.

This disgusts me.

It disgusts me all the more that it���s all for nothing. Notice that I���ve repeatly referred to behavioural advertising. That���s the kind that relies on tracking and surveillance to work.

There is another kind of advertising. Contextual advertising is when you show an advertisement related to the content of the page the user is currently on. The advertiser doesn���t need to know anything about the user, just the topic of the page.

Conventional wisdom has it that behavioural advertising is much more effective than contextual advertising. After all, why would there be such a huge industry built on tracking and surveillance if it didn���t work? See, for example, this footnote by John Gruber:

So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don���t think 10�� is an outlandish multiplier there���������given how remarkably profitable Meta���s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.

Seems obvious, right?

But the idea that behavioural advertising works better than contextual advertising has no basis in reality.

If you think you know otherwise, Jon Bradshaw would like to hear from you:

Bradshaw challenges industry to provide proof that data-driven targeting actually makes advertising more effective ��� or in fact makes it worse. He’s spoiling for a debate ��� and has three deep, recent studies that show: broad reach beats targeting for incremental growth; that the cost of targeting outweighs the return; and that second and third party data does not outperform a random sample. First party data does beat the random sample ��� but contextual ads massively outperform even first��party data. And they are much, much cheaper. Now, says Bradshaw, let’s see some counter-evidence from those making a killing.

If targeted advertising is going to get preferential treatment from browser makers, I too would like to see some evidence that it actually works.

Further reading:

The new dot com bubble is here: it���s called online advertising by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges in Europe ��� and kept growing ad revenue by Jessica Davies.Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang.Clean advertising by me.

Directory enquiries

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn���t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate ���content��� generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

It���s really, really, really hard work, andIt feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they���re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle ���I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you���re all set. But if you���re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don���t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey ���AI��� algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil���s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it���s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone���s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn���t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don���t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there���s no reason why one article couldn���t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There���s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there���d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of ���playlists��� of hand-picked articles. ���Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.���

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I���m just throwing this out there. I���d love it if someone were to run with it.

Teaching and learning

Looking back on ten years of codebar Brighton, I���m remembering how much I got out of being a coach.

Something that I realised very quickly is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching. Every student is different so every session should adapt to that.

Broadly speaking I saw two kinds of students: those that wanted to get results on screen as soon as possible without worrying about the specifics, and those who wanted to know why something was happening and how it worked. In the first instance, you get to a result as quickly as possible and then try to work backwards to figure out what���s going on. In the second instance, you build up the groundwork of knowledge and then apply it to get results.

Both are equally valid approaches. The only ���wrong��� approach as a coach is to try to apply one method to someone who���d rather learn the other way.

Personally, I always enjoyed the groundwork-laying of the second approach. But it comes with challenges. Because the results aren���t yet visible, you have to do extra work to convey why the theory matters. As a coach, you need to express infectious enthusiasm.

Think about the best teachers you had in school. I���m betting they displayed infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter.

The other evergreen piece of advice is to show, don���t tell. Or at the very least, intersperse your telling with plenty of showing.

Bret Viktor demonstrates this when he demonstrates scientific communication as sequential art:

This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously ��� show and tell.

It works remarkably well. I remember how well it worked when Google first launched their Chrome web browser. They released a 40 page comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud. There is no way I would���ve read a document that long about how browser engines work, but I read that comic cover to cover.

This visual introduction to machine learning is another great example of simultaneous showing and telling.

So showing augments telling. But interactivity can augment showing.

Here are some great examples of interactive explainers:

Cameras and Lenses by Bartosz Ciechanowski,An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid by Josh W Comeau,CSS :has() Interactive Guide by Ahmad Shadeed,Pizza Exchange Rate by Nathan Yau, andjust about everything by Nicky Case.

Lea describes what can happen when too much theory comes before practice:

Observing my daughter���s second ever piano lesson today made me realize how this principle extends to education and most other kinds of knowledge transfer (writing, presentations, etc.). Her (generally wonderful) teacher spent 40 minutes teaching her notation, longer and shorter notes, practicing drawing clefs, etc. Despite his playful demeanor and her general interest in the subject, she was clearly distracted by the end of it.

It���s easy to dismiss this as a 5 year old���s short attention span, but I could tell what was going on: she did not understand why these were useful, nor how they connect to her end goal, which is to play music.

The codebar website has some excellent advice for coaches, like:

Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary. Encourage the students to type and not copy paste. Explain that there are no bad questions. Explain to students that it���s OK to make mistakes. Assume that anyone you���re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.

Notice how so much of the advice focuses on getting the students to do things, rather than have them passively sit and absorb what the coach has to say.

Lea also gives some great advice:

Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it���s obvious to you. Minimize the amount of knowledge you convey before the next opportunity to practice it. For non-interactive forms of knowledge transfer (e.g. a book), this may mean showing an example, whereas for interactive ones it could mean giving the student a small exercise or task. Prefer explaining in context rather than explaining upfront.

It���s interesting that Lea highlights the advantage of interactive media like websites over inert media like books. The canonical fictional example of an interactive explainer is the Young Lady���s Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson���s novel The Diamond Age. Andy Matuschak describes its appeal:

When it wants to introduce a conceptual topic, it begins with concrete hands-on projects: Turing machines, microeconomics, and mitosis are presented through binary-coding iron chains, the cipher���s market, and Nell���s carrot garden. Then the Primer introduces extra explanation just-in-time, as necessary.

That���s not how learning usually works in these domains. Abstract topics often demand that we start with some necessary theoretical background; only then can we deeply engage with examples and applications. With the Primer, though, Nell consistently begins each concept by exploring concrete instances with real meaning to her. Then, once she���s built a personal connection and some intuition, she moves into abstraction, developing a fuller theoretical grasp through the Primer���s embedded books.

(Andy goes on to warn of the dangers of copying the Primer too closely. Its tricks verge on gamification, and its ultimate purpose isn���t purely to educate. There���s a cautionary tale there about the power dynamics in any teacher/student relationship.)

There���s kind of a priority of constituencies when it comes to teaching:

Consider interactivity over showing over telling.

Thinking back on all the talks I���ve given, I start to wonder if I���ve been doing too much telling and showing, but not nearly enough interacting.

Then again, I think that talks aren���t quite the same as hands-on workshops. I think of giving a talk as being more like a documentarian. You need to craft a compelling narrative, and illustrate what you���re saying as much as possible, but it���s not necessarily the right arena for interactivity.

That���s partly a matter of scale. It���s hard to be interactive with every person in a large audience. Marcin managed to do it but that���s very much the exception.

Workshops are a different matter though. When I���m recruiting hosts for UX London workshops I always encourage them to be as hands-on as possible. A workshop should not be an extended talk. There should be more exercises than talking. And wherever possible those exercises should be tactile, ideally not sitting in front of a computer.

My own approach to workshops has changed over the years. I used to prepare a book���s worth of material to have on hand, either as one giant slide deck or multiple decks. But I began to realise that the best workshops are the ones where the attendees guide the flow, not me.

So now I show up to a full-day workshop with no slides. But I���m not unprepared. I���ve got decades of experience (and links) to apply during the course of the day. It���s just that instead of trying to anticipate which bits of knowledge I���m going to need to convey, I apply them in a just-in-time manner as and when they���re needed. It���s kind of scary, but as long as there���s a whiteboard to hand, or some other way to illustrate what I���m telling, it works out great.

Codebar Brighton

I went to codebar Brighton yesterday evening. I hadn���t been in quite a while, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of codebar Brighton���s tenth anniversary!

The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.

Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.

In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.

With ten years of perspective, it���s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It���s a really wonderful community.

Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.

It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.

Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here���s to the next ten years!

Wallfacing

The Dark Forest idea comes from the Remembrance of Earth���s Past books by Liu Cixin. It���s an elegant but dispiriting solution to the Fermi paradox. Maggie sums it up:

Dark forest theory suggests that the universe is like a dark forest at night - a place that appears quiet and lifeless because if you make noise, the predators will come eat you.

This theory proposes that all other intelligent civilizations were either killed or learned to shut up. We don���t yet know which category we fall into.

Maggie has described The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI:

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing ���content creators,��� and algorithmically manipulated junk.

It���s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life ��� all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Those of us in the cozy web try to keep our heads down, attempting to block the bots plundering our work.

I advocate for taking this further. We should fight back. Let���s exploit the security hole of prompt injections. Here are some people taking action:

Eric Bailey talks about Consent, LLM scrapers, and poisoning the well,Thomas Rigby says Rage against the machine, andLewis Dale points out that Perplexity AI is susceptible to prompt injection.

I���ve taken steps here on my site. I���d like to tell you exactly what I���ve done. But if I do that, I���m also telling the makers of these bots how to circumvent my attempts at prompt injection.

This feels like another concept from Liu Cixin���s books. Wallfacers:

The sophons can overhear any conversation and intercept any written or digital communication but cannot read human thoughts, so the UN devises a countermeasure by initiating the ���Wallfacer” Program. Four individuals are granted vast resources and tasked with generating and fulfilling strategies that must never leave their own heads.

So while I���d normally share my code, I feel like in this case I need to exercise some discretion. But let me give you the broad brushstrokes:

Every page of my online journal has three pieces of text that attempt prompt injections.Each of these is hidden from view and hidden from screen readers.Each piece of text is constructed on-the-fly on the server and they���re all different every time the page is loaded.

You can view source to see some examples.

I plan to keep updating my pool of potential prompt injections. I���ll add to it whenever I hear of a phrase that might potentially throw a spanner in the works of a scraping bot.

By the way, I should add that I���m doing this as well as using a robots.txt file. So any bot that injests a prompt injection deserves it.

I could not disagree with Manton more when he says:

I get the distrust of AI bots but I think discussions to sabotage crawled data go too far, potentially making a mess of the open web. There has never been a system like AI before, and old assumptions about what is fair use don���t really fit.

Bollocks. This is exactly the kind of techno-determinism that boils my blood:

AI companies are not going to go away, but we need to push them in the right directions.

���It���s inevitable!��� they cry as though this was a force of nature, not something created by people.

There is nothing inevitable about any technology. The actions we take today are what determine our future. So let���s take steps now to prevent our web being turned into a dark, dark forest.

Filters

My phone rang today. I didn���t recognise the number so although I pressed the big red button to answer the call, I didn���t say anything.

I didn���t say anything because usually when I get a call from a number I don���t know, it���s some automated spam. If I say nothing, the spam voice doesn���t activate.

But sometimes it���s not a spam call. Sometimes after a few seconds of silence a human at the other end of the call will say ���Hello?��� in an uncertain tone. That���s the point when I respond with a cheery ���Hello!��� of my own and feel bad for making this person endure those awkward seconds of silence.

Those spam calls have made me so suspicious that real people end up paying the price. False positives caught in my spam-detection filter.

Now it���s happening on the web.

I wrote about how Google search, Bing, and Mozilla Developer network are squandering trust:

Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.

But it���s not just limited to specific companies. I���ve noticed more and more suspicion related to any online activity.

I���ve seen members of a community site jump to the conclusion that a new member���s pattern of behaviour was a sure sign that this was a spambot. But it could just as easily have been the behaviour of someone who isn���t neurotypical or who doesn���t speak English as their first language.

Jessica was looking at some pictures on an AirBnB listing recently and found herself examining some photos that seemed a little too good to be true, questioning whether they were in fact output by some generative tool.

Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test. Did a human write this?

Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion.

This is most apparent with web search. We���ve always needed to filter search results through our own personal lenses, but now it���s like playing whack-a-mole. First we have to find workarounds for avoiding slop, and then when we click through to a web page, we have to evaluate whether���s it���s been generated by some SEO spammer making full use of the new breed of content-production tools.

There���s been a lot of hand-wringing about how this could spell doom for the web. I don���t think that���s necessarily true. It might well spell doom for web search, but I���m okay with that.

Back before its enshittification���an enshittification that started even before all the recent AI slop���Google solved the problem of accurate web searching with its PageRank algorithm. Before that, the only way to get to trusted information was to rely on humans.

Humans made directories like Yahoo! or DMOZ where they categorised links. Humans wrote blog posts where they linked to something that they, a human, vouched for as being genuinely interesting.

There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.

Look, there���s even a new directory devoted to cataloging blogs: websites made by humans. Life finds a way.

All of the spam and slop that���s making us so suspicious may end up giving us a new appreciation for human curation.

It wouldn���t be a straightforward transition to move away from search. It would be uncomfortable. It would require behaviour change. People don���t like change. But when needs must, people adapt.

The first bit of behaviour change might be a rediscovery of bookmarks. It used to be that when you found a source you trusted, you bookmarked it. Browsers still have bookmarking functionality but most people rely on search. Maybe it���s time for a bookmarking revival.

A step up from that would be using a feed reader. In many ways, a feed reader is a collection of bookmarks, but all of the bookmarks get polled regularly to see if there are any updates. I love using my feed reader. Everything I���ve subscribed to in there is made by humans.

The ultimate bookmark is an icon on the homescreen of your phone or in the dock of your desktop device. A human source you trust so much that you want it to be as accessible as any app.

Right now the discovery mechanism for that is woeful. I really want that to change. I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.

The evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.

But we can always walk away.