On the poor uptake of new CSS features
At the risk of being labelled a one note pessimist, pretty much everything about the state of CSS—slow uptake of standards, popular reliance on frameworks, the lack of conferences, and the diminishing number of publications—can be explained by the eradication of CSS specialisation from the job market
People who know about all of the new and cool features either don’t have the opportunity to use them or are too overworked to use them.
People who don’t know about them aren’t finding out because the field is effectively being dismantled, leading to fewer outlets writing about CSS and next to no conferences dedicated to it.
Businesses don’t want to pay for CSS so they’re basically getting less of it and fewer people who specialise in it.
This week’s highlight
This post is what you’d call a “problematic fav”. Crass and, in many ways, obnoxious, it nevertheless speaks certain truths about what it feels like to be constantly bombarded with the tech industry’s “AI everything all the time” message.
“I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity”
The market is so distorted that it’s almost as bad as dabbling in the crypto space. It isn’t as bad, meaning that I haven’t yet reached the point where I assume that anyone who has ever typed in import tensorflow is a scumbag, but we’re well on our way there.
And…
This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
Links
- “Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff”. “But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand… LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE.”
- “A Local-first Codebase Opens the Door to More Collaborators - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”. “A local-first model drastically simplifies the experience of building an app, both as an individual and as a team.”
- “Apple delays AI in the EU. Maybe. | Ian Betteridge”. “In other words, companies can engage with the EU before something is released to work out ways to stay within the DMA. The idea that it’s just a crap shoot and WHO KNOWS WHAT THOSE CRAZY EUROS WILL WANT is just silly.”
- “Knowledge of feelings | A Working Library”. It’s basically impossible for me to choose which bit to quote. I want to quote the entire thing. It’s simpler for you to just go read this.
- “Public CDNs Are Useless and Dangerous”. “Host your own dependencies, put a cache directly in front of your application, and make your application resilient to missing resources.” Old but unfortunately still accurate.
- “Five Things: June 20, 2024 — As in guillotine…”
- “Why Passkey Implementation is 100x Harder Than You Think – Misconceptions, Pitfalls and Unknown Unknowns”. I genuinely don’t see how this technology is worth the effort either to implement or use. Much too much work involved on both sides.
- “Evergreen tech is an asset (and dependencies are a liability) | Go Make Things”
- “I don’t want attribution. | Apple Annie’s Microblog”. “I want an opt-out that is enforceable.” Agree completely. It’s always surprising to me how people who associate themselves with terms like “indie” or “micro” can consistently take the side of big businesses over individuals.
- “The overlap between search bots and AI scrapers”. “Then concludes with some of my own experiments that suggest that there’s no way to exclude AI accessing your site without de-indexing yourself from the major search engines.”
- “Fast Crimes at Lambda School”. “A fascinating deep dive into the history of one of the more scammy startups to emerge in recent years.”