Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.
Signed!
We, the undersigned, call on the record labels and members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)—including UMG, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI Recorded Music Assets, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music—to drop your lawsuit against the Internet Archive.
It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.
I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.
Here’s a fun account of the early days of the ARPANET.
We believe the World Wide Web should be inclusive and respectful of all participants: a Web that supports facts over falsehoods, people over profits, humanity over hate.
Everything you ever wanted to know about text-wrap: pretty in CSS.
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.
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.
Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.
Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the
nofollowprotocol.
We trained people to care deeply and then funnelled them into environments that reward detachment. And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
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.
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
- Support open source software
- Support open web platform technology
- Distribution on the web should never be throttled
- External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized
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.
This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this article open in a tab, I had to go deal with a tsunami of large language model bots. It’s really fucking depressing.
Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?
There’s a new proposal for giving developers more control over styling form controls. I like it.
It’s clearly based on the fantastic work being done by the Open UI group on the select element. The proposal suggests that authors can opt-in to the new styling possibilities by declaring:
appearance: base;
So basically the developer is saying “I know what I’m doing—I’m taking the controls.” But browsers can continue to ship their default form styles. No existing content will break.
The idea is that once the developer has opted in, they can then style a number of pseudo-elements.
This proposal would apply to pretty much all the form controls you can think of: all the input types, along with select, progress, meter, buttons and more.
But there’s one element more that I wish were on the list:
legend
I know, technically it’s not a form control but legend and fieldset are only ever used within forms.
The legend element is notoriously annoying to style. So a lot of people just don’t bother using it, which is a real shame. It’s like we’re punishing people for doing the right thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if you, as a developer, had the option of saying “I know what I’m doing—I’m taking the controls”:
legend {
appearance: base;
}
Imagine if that nuked the browser’s weird default styles, effectively turning the element into a span or div as far as styling is concerned. Then you could style it however you wanted. But crucially, if browsers shipped this, no existing content would break.
The shitty styling situation for legend (and its parent fieldset) is one of those long-standing annoyances that seems to have fallen down the back of the sofa of browser vendors. No one’s going to spend time working on it when there are more important newer features to ship. That’s why I’d love to see it sneak in to this new proposal for styling form controls.
I was in Amsterdam last week. Just like last year I was there to help out Vasilis’s students with a form-based assignment:
They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.
Yes, all the excitement of taxes combined with the thrilling world of web forms.
(Side note: this time they were told to style it using the design system from the Dutch railway because the tax office was getting worried that they were making phishing sites.)
I saw a lot of the same challenges again. I saw how students wished they could specify a past date or a future date in a date picker without using JavaScript. And I saw them lamenting the time they spent styling legends that worked across all browsers.
Right now, Mason Freed has an open issue on the new proposal with his suggestion to add some more elements to consider. Both legend and fieldset are included. That gets a thumbs-up from me.
Dan wrote an interesting post with a somewhat clickbaity title; This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design:
I watched two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-designer using AI.
If you can ignore the title (and the fact that Dan still actively posts on Twitter; something I find very hard to ignore), then there’s a really thoughtful analysis in there.
It’s less about one platform or tool vs. another more than it is a commentary on how design happens, and whether or not that’s changing in a significant way.
In particular, there’s a very revealing graph that shows the pros and cons of both approaches.
There’s no doubt about it, using a generative large language model helped a non-designer to get past the blank page. But it was less useful in subsequent iterations that rely on decision-making:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: design is deciding. The best designers are the best deciders.
Dan finishes by saying that what he’d really like to see is an experienced designer/decider using these tools to turbo-boost their process:
AI raises the floor for non-designers. But can it raise the ceiling for designers?
Meanwhile, Matt has been writing about Vibe-designing. Matt is an experienced designer, but he’s not experienced with Figma. He’s found that he can work around that using a large language model:
Where in the past 30 years I might have had to cajole a more technically adept colleague into making something through sketches, gesticulating and making sound effects – I open up a Claude window and start what-iffing.
The “vibe” part of the equation often defaults to the mean, which is not a surprise when you think about what you’re asking to help is a staggeringly-massive machine for producing generally-unsurprising satisfactory answers quickly. So, you look at the output as a basis for the next sketch, and the next sketch and quickly, together, you move to something more novel as a result.
Interesting! Just as Dan insisted, the important work is making the decision and moving on to the next stage. If the actual outputs at each stage are mediocre, that seems to be okay, as long as they’re just good enough to inform a go/no-go decision.
This certainly seems more centaur-like than the usual boring uses of large language models to simply do what people are already doing.
Rich gets at something similar when he talks about using large language models for prototyping, where it’s okay if the code is kind of shitty:
If all you need is crappy code to try out a concept or a solution, then an LLM might well enable you (the designer) to do that.
Mind you, even if you do end up finding useful and appropriate ways to use these tools, you’re still using a tool built on exploitation and unfairness:
It’s hard (and reckless) to ignore the heartfelt and cogent perspective laid out by Miriam on the role of AI companies in the current geopolitical crisis:
When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.
So, let’s start with a simple premise: how can we make design less opaque and encourage teams to make small changes more efficiently? Not every product decision needs to be a big, complicated design process.
This checklist, in four parts, is meant to be a simple, lightweight way for the team to get the ‘gist’ of the issue and make a shared decision quickly. It’s a starting point, a way to get the critical information in once place so the entire team can understand and discuss. The four parts are:
- Gather: Bring the right info together into a single place
- Impact: List the size of the problem and possible risks
- Sketch: Create a preliminary sketch of a solution
- Team Huddle: Get the product team to discuss and agree on a solution.
