I prefer my tools to help me with repetitive tasks (and there are many of those in programming), understanding codebases, and authoring correct programs. I take offense at products that are designed to think for me. To remove the agency of my own understanding of the software I produce, and to cut connections with my coworkers. Even if LLMs lived up to the hype, we would still stand to lose all of that and our craft.
I’ve worked in the tech industry for close to two decades at this point. I’ve seen how difficult it is to build quality products, but I’ve also seen that it can be done. It just feels like no one gives a shit anymore, beyond a handful of independent devs and small shops. It’s wild.
I was messing about with some images on a website recently and while I was happy enough with the arrangement on large screens, I thought it would be better to have the images in a kind of carousel on smaller screens—a swipable gallery.
My old brain immediately thought this would be fairly complicated to do, but actually it’s ludicrously straightforward. Just stick this bit of CSS on the containing element inside a media query (or better yet, a container query):
display: flex;
overflow-x: auto;
That’s it.
Oh, and you can swap out overflow-x for overflow-inline if, like me, you’re a fan of logical properties. But support for that only just landed in Safari so I’d probably wait a little while before removing the old syntax.
Here’s an example using pictures of some of the lovely people who will be speaking at Web Day Out:
While you’re at it, add this:
overscroll-behavior-inline: contain;
Thats prevents the user accidentally triggering a backwards/forwards navigation when they’re swiping.
You could add some more little niceties like this, but you don’t have to:
Apart from that last bit, none of this is particularly new or groundbreaking. But it was a pleasant reminder for me that interactions that used to be complicated to implement are now very straightforward indeed.
You have a section with a p on the left & an img on the right. How do you make the img height always be determined by the p with the tiniest bit of CSS? 😼
No changing the HTML structure in any way, no pseudos, no background declarations, no JS. Just a tiny bit of #CSS.
That’ll work whether the section has its display set to flex or grid.
There’s something very, very satisfying in finding a simple solution to something you thought would be complicated.
Honestly, I feel like web developers are constantly being gaslit into thinking that complex over-engineered solutions are the only option. When the discourse is being dominated by people invested in frameworks and libraries, all our default thinking will involve frameworks and libraries. That’s not good for users, and I don’t think it’s good for us either.
Of course, the trick is knowing that the simpler solution exists. The information probably isn’t going to fall in your lap—especially when the discourse is dominated by overly-complex JavaScript.
I guarantee you’ll hear about some magnificent techniques that will allow you to rip out plenty of complex code in favour of letting the browser do the work.
When I talk about large language models, I make sure to call them large language models, not “AI”. I know it’s a lost battle, but the terminology matters to me.
The term “AI” can encompass everything from a series of if/else statements right up to Skynet and HAL 9000. I’ve written about this naming collision before.
It’s not just that the term “AI” isn’t useful, it’s so broad as to be actively duplicitous. While talking about one thing—like, say, large language models—you can point to a completely different thing—like, say, machine learning or computer vision—and claim that they’re basically the same because they’re both labelled “AI”.
If a news outlet runs a story about machine learning in the context of disease prevention or archeology, the headline will inevitably contain the phrase “AI”. That story will then gleefully be used by slopagandists looking to inflate the usefulness of large language models.
If these machines churn through all media, and then, in their deployment, discover several superconductors and cure all cancers, I’d say, okay … we’re good.
“AI” is mostly a marketing phrase for a bunch of different processes and tools which in a different era would have been called “machine learning” or “neural networks” or something else now horribly unsexy.
But I’ve noticed something recently. More than once I’ve seen genuinely-useful services refer to their technology as “traditional machine learning”.
First off, I find that endearing. Like machine learning is akin to organic farming or hand-crafted furniture.
Secondly, perhaps it points to a severing of the ways between machine learning and large language models.
Up until now it may have been mutually benificial for them to share the same marketing term, but with the bubble about to burst, anything to do with large language models might become toxic by association, including the term “AI”. Hence the desire to shake the large-language model grifters from the coattails of machine learning and computer vision.
Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.
Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar.
We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed.
See, Storm Amy was moving in. We were hoping to get into Cork before the storm hit, but now with the flight delayed, that wasn’t likely. In fact, it was more likely that the flight would just get more and more delayed and possibly even get diverted.
To start with, we settled in at the airport, prepared to spend an hour or two more than we had planned. But, sure enough, the delays kept piling up. It was time to make decision; wait it out in the hopes that we’d eventually make a very bumpy landing in Cork, or cut our losses and run.
I quickly looked up flights for the next couple of weekends and spotted some cheap ones a fortnight away. I booked them and then called my mother to tell her we wouldn’t be showing up that night, but we’d see her in a couple of weeks.
Alright then, time to go home.
Wait a minute …how exactly are we supposed to leave the airport other than on an airplane?
It turns out there’s a process called “decontrolling”. You need to find someone from the airline (or in our case, a third-party contractor operating on the airline’s behalf) who has the security privileges to walk you back out. But you still need to go through passport control …even though you never left the building.
Luckily we didn’t have any checked luggage or it would’ve gotten complicated. As it was, it was just weird. It was all very City And The City.
That flight we abandoned did finally take off …six hours late. By that time we were back home on the sofa eating pizza and listening to the wind gusting outside. I think we made the right choice.
Monday, October 6th, 2025
Reading The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy.
I’m fascinated by eponymous laws, and here’s a whole bunch of them gathered together, including a few I hadn’t heard of (mostly from the world of software).
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
It’s October. Autumn is wrapping itself around us, squeezing the leaves from the trees. Summer has slipped away, though it gave us a parting gift of a few pleasant days this week to sit outside at lunchtime.
I’ve got a bit of a ritual now for the end of September. I go to Spain and soak up the last of the sun. There’s an Irish music festival in the beautiful medieval town of Cáceres.
It’s not easy to get to, but that’s all part of the ritual. Set out for Madrid or Seville and spend a night there. Then get on a train for the long journey through a landscape straight out of a spaghetti western.
Once you get to Cáceres there’s nothing to do but enjoy the sun, the food, and the music. So much music! Open-air concerts in a medieval square that go well past midnight. Non-stop sessions scattered throughout the town’s pedestrianised streets.
For me, it’s the perfect way to see out the summer.
On the train there’s an ad for Adobe Express: “Commercially safe AI. Trusted results”. The ad shows a photo slotting in to a design. Commercially safe for everyone but photographers and designers. I couldn’t get a seat facing forwards, so I head backwards into the future like some half-arsed AI metaphor.
