Tag: Links

Some Links on AI-Related Stuff

Every so often, I find that the links I save to read later fall into natural groups or patterns that reveal common threads of interest. The past couple of weeks have produced a lot of thoughts about ChatGPT, an AI-powered interface that responds to requests in a chat-like exchange. Sorta like a “Hey Siri” request, but in a Discord channel.

ChatGPT is just one of several AI-flavored tech, including GitHub’s CoPilot (writing code) and Dall-E (generative images and art).

Is it the end of human development? A new and exciting way to produce art? Just cocktail party conversation fodder? There are lots of opinions…

  • A Conversation With ChatGPT (Matthias Ott) — Matthias has a conversation with ChatGPT about typography that delves into deeply theoretical thoughts on design process. My favorite is in response to whether designers should learn to code: “Ultimately, whether or not designers should learn to code is a decision that each individual designer must make for themselves, based on their own goals and circumstances. Some designers may benefit from learning to code, while others may be better served by focusing on design principles and concepts.”
  • They were supposed to replace the creative jobs last (Dave Rupert)“As interesting a future this creates, I’m a member of an old caste of people that still believes massive gains don’t come without realized costs; or more explicitly, electricity isn’t the only cost. What if the cost we’re paying is our perception of reality itself? It’s increasingly likely that the next thing you read or watch is the product of a content extruder.”
  • I just used ChatGPT to help with a complicated equation. — A reddit user used ChatGPT to write a complex equation in Notion. There were a couple hiccups, but it worked in the end.
  • ChatGPT Creates a Working WordPress Plugin – On the First Try (WP Tavern) — Sarah Gooding reporting on a ChatGPT experiment where Johnathon Williams was able to spit out a fully-functional WordPress plugin with a simple chat command. This is the sort of thing that both terrifies me but also blows my mind-hole.
  • ChatGPT Is a Smart Computer’s Impression of a Know-It-All (Pixel Envy) — Nick Heer points to an article on The Atlantic about ChatGPT that opens with three paragraphs written by ChatGPT. It’s crazy that it comes off as naturally as it does, even if it smells slightly fishy at first.
  • Use of ChatGPT1 generated text for content on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned. (Stack Overflow) — A mild dose of #HotDrama as far as Stack Overflow users posting ChatGPT-produced code as answers.
  • Midjourney vs. human illustrators: has AI already won? (Evil Martians) — I love the experiment in this post because it’s a clear example that AI doesn’t *just* work. In its current state, at best, AI is a junior designer when put to the task of creating an image: “After two and a half hours of back and forth with the AI, I was completely exhausted and decided to just upscale the most promising result.” A bonus is that the post concludes with a list of situations where AI might realistically help the team with future work — and it ain’t an entire person’s job.
  • Quick Thoughts on AI (Collaborative Fund) — Ha! Crazy to see a chart comparing how fast ChatGPT reached one million users to other popular services. It took Facebook 10 months, but only five days for ChatGPT.

Dall-E, I want a photo of a developer sitting at a desk with his head exploding while having a chat conversation on a desktop computer with an artificial intelligence algorithm.

Not bad, not bad.


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Some Links About CSS Gradients

Every once in a while, the blogging zeitgiest seems to coalesce around a certain topic and it’s like the saved articles in my bookmarks folder are having a conversation. The conversation sitting in there now is all about CSS Gradients and I thought I’d link some of the more interesting pieces.


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7 Fresh Links on Performance For March 2022

I have a handful of good links to articles about performance that are burning a hole in my bookmarks folder, and wanna drop them here to share.

Screenshot of the new WebPageTest homepage, a tool for testing performance metrics.
The new WebPageTest website design

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9 New React and JavaScript Links for February 2022

Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Like React and JavaScript! Here’s a list of nine links to other articles about them that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

React and JavaScript code snippets with colorful hand-marked scribbles of notes.
Source: “Good advice on JSX conditionals” by Vladimir Klepov
  • Seed Funding for Remix
    Remix went open source after taking funding which seems like a solid move. It’s a for-now-React-only framework, so I think it’s fair that everyone asks how does it compare to Next.js. Which they answered. Probably worth noting again for us CSS folks, Kent mentioned: “Because Remix allows me to easily control which of my CSS files is on the page at any given time, I don’t have all the problems that triggered the JavaScript community to invent workarounds like CSS-in-JS.”
  • React Router v6
    Speaking of that gang, they released React Router v6, which looks like a positive move — all hooks based, 50% smaller than v5 — but is yet another major version with API changes. React Router has a history of API changes like this and they trigger plenty of grumbling in the community. There is plenty of that again.
  • React Aria
    “A library of React Hooks that provides accessible UI primitives for your design system” from… Adobe. Interesting. Looks like some pretty hard problems being solved here, like FocusScope (“When the contain prop is set, focus is contained within the scope.”) and interesting color inputs, like useColorField, useColorSlider, and useColorWheel. There are 59 hooks in all, ranging from interactions and forms to overlays and internationalization, with plenty of others in between.
  • Front End Tables: Sorting, Filtering, and Pagination
    Tania Rascia: “One thing I’ve had to do at every job I’ve had is implement a table on the front end of an application that has sorting, filtering, and pagination.” No shame in reaching for a big library with all these features, but sometimes it’s best to DIY.
  • Good advice on JSX conditionals
    Vladimir Klepov covers the (weirdly) many ways fairly simple conditionals can go wrong, like the number 0 leaking into your markup, and how to manage update versus remount in conditionals.
  • useProseMirror
    I’ve found ProseMirror to be a pretty nice rich text editor in the past. The library itself isn’t actually in React, so I think it’s a smart call here to make a modern React wrapper for it.
  • Spead up sluggish inputs with useDeferredValue
    You can introduce gnarly input delay the more work that an onChange function has to do on a text input. useDeferredValue gives us a way to separate high priority updates from low priority updates for cases like this.”
  • 🎥 A Cartoon Intro to WebAssembly
    If you don’t have a good understanding of what WebAssembly is, then Lin Clark will get you there in this video from JSConf EU 2017. So, no, not a new link or anything, but it’s new to me!
  • 🎥 Turborepo Demo and Walkthrough
    Vercel bought Turborepo. Turborepo is specifically focused on making monorepos better. As someone who’s main codebase is a monorepo with Lerna and Yarn Workspaces such that we can have multiple different sites all share things like a design system, this is right up our alley. This video is with the Turborepo creator Jared Palmer and Lee Robinson, head of developer relations at Vercel. In this video, you get to see it all work.

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8 Helpful Accessibility Links for January 2022

Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Accessibility is one of those things! Here’s a list of related links to other articles that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

Screenshot of the Accessibility Maze homepage.

8 Helpful Accessibility Links for January 2022 originally published on CSS-Tricks. You should get the newsletter and become a supporter.

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8 Interesting Typography Links for January 2022

Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Typography is one of those things! Here’s a list of typography links to other articles that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

A specimen of the Retail typeface, once of the typography links in the list.
An awesome new font from OH no Type Company

Do you have any interesting typography links from the past month worth sharing? Drop ’em in the comments!


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Links on Performance V

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Links on WordPress I

I try to keep up with WordPress news because I’m a big WordPress user and have many production sites that run on it. WordPress has been good to me as a site builder for literally my entire career. So, like we do with typography (example), accessibility (example), and JavaScript (example), I’m hoping to occasionally drop packs of links things I find particularly interesting in that ecosystem.


The #1 tool I use to save links to review later is Notion Web Clipper. I kick links over to one big table in Notion then I read them and tag them when I have time. My flow is essentially RSS (Firehose) → Notion (Good finds) → WordPress (Best of).

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Buttons vs. Links

There are thousands of articles out there about buttons and links on the web; the differences and how to use them properly. Hey, I don’t mind. I wrote my own as well¹.

It’s such a common mistake on the web that it’s always worth repeating:

  • Is the intention to send someone to another URL? It’s a link in the form of <a href="">.
  • Is it to trigger some on-page interactivity? It’s a button in the form of <button>.
  • Any devition from from those and you better smurfing know what you are doing.

Eric Eggert wrote a pretty good piece recently with a nice line about why it matters:

If you had a keyboard and your “e” key would only work 90% of the time, it would be infuriating. Reliability and trust in user interfaces is important to allow users to navigate content and application with ease. If you use the right elements, you support users.

Manuel Matuzović has a Button Cheat Sheet that is a lol-inducing ride about why literally everything other than a <button> isn’t as good as a button. Manuel links up Marcy Sutton’s epic The Links vs. Buttons Showdown (video), pitting the two against each other in a mock battle — “We’ll pit two HTML elements against each other in a crusade of better and worse, right and possible wrong. One element is triggered with the space bar, the other with the enter key. Who will win?” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at how far we have to go to spread this information.

  1. I think our article A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons is a pretty good example of beginner-oriented content, which is my favorite style of content to write and publish! But because there is so much beginner-oriented content on the web, the bar is pretty high if you want to make and impact and get enough SEO for anyone to even ever find it. So, in this case, the idea was to go big and write nearly as much as there is to write about the technical foundation of links and buttons. If you’ve got a knack for this kind of writing, reach out for sure.


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Some Typography Links VIII


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