[SC 2.4.4] The AI shame zone
I had a lot of links stored up from last week. Unfortunately a lot of those were AI-related. So, I brought back the AI shame zone so you can skip reading it if you want to. Or skip the non-AI content. Do what you want, I'm not your boss.
Framework-agnostic design systems: a practical approach to web components
This is the way.
PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident
As one does.
Newborns' cry melody is shaped by their native language
Language is so cool.
Ultimate collection of online DOS games
Delivers what it promises.
The quiet grief of adult friendship
"We are perhaps the first generation to possess uninterrupted access to each other while simultaneously becoming emotionally inaccessible."
User Interfaces and "Blandification"
Pardon the odd scrolling, but I enjoyed the content.
The fake courtesy machine
"…a wooden hand-cranked contraption that types “I hope this email finds you well” over and over again."
GitHub faces a fight for its survival at Microsoft
Not exactly accurate, but also not exactly wrong either.
Help! My boyfriend doesn’t read
what the fuck is wrong with men
Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation
"Detached from the gestures and routines that give it meaning, the cốc risks becoming an object to be displayed, discussed, collected. A commodity rather than a practice."
The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs
"The passive income thing was a fantasy about not having to give a shit. This is a terrible foundation for pretty much anything."
‘Touchy-feely’ dark matter is having a moment
I hope I live long enough to learn what this all is.
In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026
Nice!
Current Rothko
A Rothko painting for your time of day and weather conditions.
LLemdashes
I fuckin' love Mat's writing, and this is no exception.
Counterfactuals
So that's the name of this!
What ‘Special Needs Mommy’ Influencers Get Wrong About Parenting Disabled Kids: Opinion
"Such language serves to recenter the experience of the nondisabled person. In doing so, euphemisms silence and potentially even erase the impact of the condition on the person who actually has it."
Design from the inside
I feel this with every ounce of my being.
The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America
tl;dr: bad things
Wet bias
Have system, will game.
New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
Extract lithium, you say?
Headway Therapy Patients Forced to Scan Their Faces to Keep Getting Care
Just a little reminder that a computer doesn't know what a "face" is, just statistically likely face-shaped things 👼
If an alien landed and asked you: ‘What is music?’ what would you play for them?
Holy Diver, duh.
My thoughts on the "focusgroup" attribute proposal
I had to build a composite widget this week, and man I could have used focusgroup.
Startup Testing Drugs on Freshly Extracted Human Brains That Are Kept On Life Support
Yet again, a lotta scifi are cautionary tales!!!1!
Cynicism is a luxury; hope is a necessity.
"This is why I have come to hold hope as something sterner than optimism. Optimism is a mood, and a mood is a luxury; it comes and goes with the weather of a comfortable life. Hope is a discipline."
Doll Houses, 1983.
"In 1983 Architectural Design Magazine launched a competition to for architects to design a doll house. This book features 135 of them, we have scanned our favourites."
The Dirt That Refused To Die
Hell yeah, you go dirt.
Thinking more about Netscape Time
I'm here for the "cosplayed as a startup" line.
Designing with Mustard
An absolute banger from Anna 🔥
AI feelings shame dump
Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis
Wikis: Good.
Unending scrapers that ignore consent: Bad.
Ad Infinitum
"Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer."
AI Resist List
Sharing because reading the possible futures gave me some hope.
no slop grenade.
I shared no hello with someone once and it… did not go well. Still, I appreciate this sentiment even more than no hello's.
The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People
A gentle reminder here than an accessible interface may not necessarily be a usable one.
Design and engineering solve different problems; AI initiatives are forgetting that
h/t the Future is like pie.
‘Comically bad’ datasets used to train clinical models for stroke and diabetes
oh.
Pluralistic: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (13 May 2026)
"Solipsism is why bosses fetishize IP and ignore process knowledge."
Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis
No shit.
The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI
Witnessing this firsthand.
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Selection bias acknowledged, but I am heartened to see people waking up to the idea that all this tooling isn't really producing anything of significant value, especially now as its true financial cost is beginning to be revealed.
