1. The f*** off contact page

…when I see a button that says ‘talk to our sales team’, I treat the entire region of the page with the same trepidation as nuclear waste. The page is now a no-go zone, and I try to exit as quickly as possible

2. The Order of the Occult Hand

A friend pointed me in the direction of this journalist inside joke. This really feels like a great use of the web – please send more examples in this vein.

3. The Jeopardy Phenomenon

I think AI has the Jeopardy Phenomenon too.

If you use it to generate code that is outside your expertise, you are likely to think it’s all well and good, especially if it seems to work at first pop. But if you’re intimately familiar with the technology or the code around the code it’s generating, there is a good chance you’ll be like hey! that’s not quite right!

4. AI scraping & “publicly available web data”

Gener­a­tive AI compa­nies don’t seem to notice that their extrac­tive strategy will only work once. We’re at an unusual moment in human history where we have this thing—the internet—that contains the biggest set of human-created works ever.A lot of dreck, too. But for now, the good largely outweighs the bad.

That will soon stop being true, however, as gener­a­tive AI floods the internet with toxic AI sludge.

5. tldraw SDK 4.0

I’ve been hearing a lot about tldraw recently (it’s a React-based infinite canvas) and I’ve been considering something like this for a recent client project. I was pleasantly surprised to discover their SDK 4.0 release contains a big accessibility push, reaching WCAG 2.2 compliance. All too rare to see.

What am I up to?

• My next available Unoffice Hour slot is 21 January
• I have space for three design consultations each week – a great way to get design feedback without the commitment of a large project
• I have limited availability for new projects from January.

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Until next time,

Dave

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