Tags: os

Hiding elements that require JavaScript without JavaScript :: dade

This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

You won’t be able to unsee this. It’s like the FedEx logo …if the arrow was an anus.

1. Circular shape (often with a gradient)
2. Central opening or focal point
3. Radiating elements from the center
4. Soft, organic curves

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of… well, you know.

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.

Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries - Ars Technica

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.

Go To Hellman: AI bots are destroying Open Access

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.

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.

The Blowtorch Theory: A New Model for Structure Formation in the Universe

Make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle in with Julian Gough’s magnum opus:

How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields

My Web Values: Why I Quit X and Feed the Fediverse Instead | Cybercultural

1. Support open source software
2. Support open web platform technology
3. Distribution on the web should never be throttled
4. External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized

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.

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.

I’ve had my head down for the past six months putting the line-up for UX London together. Following the classic design cliché, the process was first divergent, then convergent.

I spent months casting the net wide, gathering as many possible candidates as I could, as well as accepting talk proposals (of which there were lots). It was fun—this is when the possibility space is wide open.

Then it was crunch time and I had to start zeroing in on the final line-up. It wasn’t easy. There were so many times I agonised over who’d be the right person to deliver the right talk.

But as the line-up came together, I started getting very excited. And now when I step back and look at the line-up, I’m positively vibrating with excitement—roll on June!

I think it was really useful to have a mix of speakers that I reached out to, as well as talk proposals. If I was only relying on my own knowledge and networks, I’m sure I’d miss a lot. But equally, if I was only relying on talk proposals, it would be like searching for my keys under the streetlight.

Putting the line-up on the website wasn’t quite the end of the work. We got over 100 proposals for UX London this year. I made sure to send an email back to each and every one of them once the line-up was complete. And if anyone asked for more details as to why their proposal didn’t make it through, I was happy to provide that feedback.

After they went to the trouble of submitting a proposal, it was the least I could do.

Oh, and don’t forget: early-bird tickets for UX London are only available until Friday. Now’s the time to get yours!

CSS Form Control Styling Level 1

This looks like a really interesting proposal for allowing developers more control over styling inputs. Based on the work being done the customisable select element, it starts with a declaration of appearance: base.

Cold Album Drumming - full-album drum covers by Brad Frost

This is a great new musical project from Brad:

Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?

I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.

Research By The Sea was last Thursday. I’m still digesting it all.

In short, it was excellent. The venue, how smoothly every thing was organised, the talks …oh boy, the talks!

Benjamin did a truly superb job curating this line-up. Everyone really brought their A-game.

As predicted, this wasn’t a day of talks just for researchers. It was far more like a dConstruct. This was big, big picture stuff. Themes of hope, community, nature, technology, inclusion and resilience.

I overheard more than one person in the breaks saying “this was not what I was expecting!” They were saying it in a very positive way, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a silent minority in the audience who were miffed that they weren’t getting a day of practical research techniques devoid of politics.

As host, I had the easiest job of the day. All I had to do was say a few words of introduction for each speaker, then sit back down and enjoy every minute of every talk.

The one time when I had to really work was the panel discussion at the end of the day. I really enjoy moderating panels. I’ve seen enough bad panels to know what does and doesn’t work. But this one was tough. The panelists were all great, but because the themes were soooo big, I was worried about it all getting a bit too high-falutin’. People seemed to enjoy it though.

All in all, it was a superb day. If you came along, thank you!

Gotta be honest, #ResearchByTheSea is one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected.

Loved it. Thank you, @clearleft.com!

— @visitmy.website

Anchor position tool

This is a great little helper in understanding anchor positioning in CSS.

Chrome-only for now.

google webfonts helper

Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.

Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.

The web on mobile (a response) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

trot

Working on this project is great but ten minutes into it and I already miss the resilience of the web. I miss how you have to really fuck things up to make a browser yell at you or implode.