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14 posts total
 Hey, everyone! “Design for Real Life” is now available online, in full, for free, at https://dfrlbook.com. It’s all the same content Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I wrote in 2016, but now it’s free for everyone. (If you’d like your own paper or electronic copy, there’s a “Buy the book” page on the site.) Read, share, spread the word—thanks! So… O’Reilly sent me email today hyping up how my books (really, just the one, I assume) is going to be AI-translated into Spanish and German, with other languages to follow. This was probably inevitable, but I still have concerns. First: are there no human translators of these languages? Second: who’s going to proof-read all 1,126 pages to make sure nothing got botched, especially given the technical nature of the content? The readers? Which isn’t even crowd-sourcing: it’s customer-sourcing.
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 @Meyerweb We’ve done a lot of work on AI-assisted translation at U.S. Digital Response for the past year. It can make a good first draft for a translator, but it is in no way a replacement for a human translator.  @Meyerweb Amd that's a terrible idea. I've worked on Help documents with a first pass translation done by a specialized deliberately-created-for-the-purpose LLM, and that's not bad, but it's still double checked by humans ⌨️ New post! In which I announce a new service that helps web devs keep up to date on changes to support for web features (CSS, JS, SVG, HTML, and all that sort of thing); you can subscribe to RSS to get weekly reports on BCD changes. Thanks to @igalia for supporting this work! https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2024/09/23/announcing-bcd-watch/ @igalia If you want to jump straight to the service and figure it out without the backstory: https://bcd-watch.igalia.com I just saw someone characterize running a Mastodon instance as being “no harder than running your own mail server” and I thought “oof, that’s a savage takedown” before grasping that they meant it as a positive.
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 @Meyerweb lovely how ~30% of the replies are about how running an email server is actually not that hard, unless you want it to work @Meyerweb Looking at the negative replies I wonder what the big issue is. You shouldn’t be careless while originally setting up a mail server, but once properly configured, receiving and sending email just works. Now if you want to do things that look a lot like spamming, that’s a different question, but for personal or regular business use? No problem at all. I don’t have an opinion on running a Mastodon instance as I don’t do that. OpenAI stealing Scarlett’s voice for their new product after being told “no” is so perfectly on-brand, it’s almost painful. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-voice-that-was-compared-to-scarlett-johansson-in-the-movie-her This is some real good user-interaction #CSS content right here. https://dbushell.com/2024/03/10/css-button-styles-you-might-not-know/  @Meyerweb These are truly the most wonderful feats of engineering, albeit they don't actually do anything useful. I know I have very little ground on which to comment on the beauty of a typeface, but this variable font is *SO GOOD* and I really wish I’d found it before “CSS: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition” published a month back, because it would have been **perfect** for the examples in the Fonts chapter. Try out all the features and variability of Elstob at https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/, which also links to a Github repository where you can get it.
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 @Meyerweb yeah, it is gorgeous. I immediately wanted to switch the headers in my blog to it. @Meyerweb That's a nice font! Always nice to see new work with an open license. No support for Egyptian transliteration, unfortunately. Twitter learned, and Reddit is fast learning, that people are not addicted to the platform, they’re addicted to the community they found there. Ruin the community, and people will leave the platform. It really is that simple.
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  “Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, [NPR CEO John] Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform. 'At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,' he says. 'I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.' ” https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label  I have officially reached the point in book edits where I hate everything I wrote and want to just burn it all and start over. “Once you start down the Dark Mode path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.” —FEDi Master Yoda This is a really, really nice base stylesheet with excellent typography (at least in the serif and monospace families) and markup considerations. https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
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 @Meyerweb Ed Tufte the absolute king. I started reading his work in the very early days of web design and he changed the way I see everything - now he's foundational of course, but for awhile there "actually, unless it's an art site, focus on the content and make the presentation serve that" was a bit revolutionary on the ol interwebs @Meyerweb , while reading the overview document I discovered that their "clever" CSS trick to underline links in a nonstandard way results in invisible underlines when viewed in forced dark mode on all browsers I tested. Forced dark mode (light text on dark background) is an essential accessibility feature for many vision-impaired users, including me. I understand the desire to share an artistic vision through site design. I just wish people would do it without creating a11y barriers. |
Gregory's Server
@Meyerweb Currently in the Introduction.
One small anecdote that might be related to what you're talking about: pretty much the only times my Mom uses the camera on her cellphone is when she's visiting her parents' graves and takes photos of those graves.
As a result, she clearly dislikes Google's occasional attempts to make her watch a slide show of her recent photos.
@Meyerweb Reading the part about the fb "Year in review" feature, launched in 2014. 2014 was, and still is, the worst year of my life (nice try, 2020!), so this chapter hits hard.
@Meyerweb Thanks for reminding me. I already purchased 😃