The SFWA have put up a survey asking everyone, writers and readers of Science and Speculative Fiction for their views on Large Language Models usage by writers. Along with the multiple choice questions it has two spots for longer form replies. Here is what I put in them: > Which of the following most closely resembles your position on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the writing process? > (Required) > > There is no ethical use-case for writers, because this technology was developed through piracy and/or continues to negatively impact environmental systems and marginalized human beings. The use of LLMs as writing props has been shown to actively undermine writing skills, research skills and the primary point of writing anything in the first place - to communicate your thoughts to others that you cannot reach with speech. Ted Chiang's metaphor of using a forklift to hit your weightlifting goals > As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way. is partly apposite, but it gives the LLMs too much credit for writing ability. My essay from 2010 If Google predicts your future, will it be a cliché? cited Micheal Frayn's 1965 The Tin Men as a warning against collating statistically plausible phrases with choice points as a substitute for journalism, and George Orwell's 1944 essay Politics and the English Language warning against: > gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think”. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. Automating clumsy clichéd writing isn't progress. > [Continued] What forms of guidance do you think would most benefit writers trying to navigate the growing presence of LLMs in our industry? Please read Robert Kingett's The Colonization of Confidence, which expresses this dreadful trap in the form of a story of how to overcome it. Run, do not walk, away from this attack on your own mind and the pressure to replace it with a statistical average of other peoples' previous writings, bowdlerised by the most illiterate executive class we have ever seen, buoyed up by an epistemic closure as bad as we have seen in the 20th century. The obscenity of the co-option of works that used automata as metaphors for human slavery being used to justify this systematic assault on every way we have worked to preserve previous human knowledge and writing in favour of a statistical mush of digitised texts should be opposed by all who believe in writing as human communication, with the living and the dead, as the SFWA have historically done.

As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways.

Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.

Attached: 1 image Microsoft Recall can still nab credit cards, passwords, info The Reg’s testing shows that it still fails to protect sensitive info in many cases, creating a potential treasure trove for thieves. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/01/microsoft_recall_captures_credit_card_info/

HTML Day is on August 2nd, 2025!

Andy Bell: > I had a brief job as a guest lecturere teaching Dreamweaver in 2018, so this is bring back memories > > The path to become a truly great CSS developer is how you approach feedback, communication and planning. The way to write good CSS is core skills - aka soft skills > > The path to become a truly great CSS developer is how you approach feedback, communication and planning. The way to write good CSS is core skills - aka soft skills > > Unfortunately thanks to the nature of social media we get a lot of content taht is designed to get a reaction > > There is too much KPI chasing and focus on matching the Figma compared to making things work. It's not all doom and gloom, but we do need to work with design handoff > > Async communication is critical, even if you are in the same timezone or office, you clients and stakeholders will still be spread out in time and space > > keep communications short, and don't ask for too much - if you need a lot of infromation, structure it by importance and be patient with responses. If a request blocks you, you're asking too late > > Don't assume prior knowledge - be prepeared to explin things more than one way to get it across > > Don't just say "Hi" - give a neutral opening that explains scope and when you expect a response, and make a thread for the conversation > > Email is one of my favourite ways to communicate, but it does tend to attract a verbose way of writing. Be a good colleague and be concise > > Move slowly and methodically to go fast - don't chase the latest thing. I'm thinking of large corporations like Google chasing AI down like a dog chasing a butcher's vadn > > Story time. In 2019 I worked on a design system for a large cruise liner. Instead of doing the research, we went full steam ahead with an existing framework Olu Niyi-Awosusi: > I'm here to talk about Building Better Webs. I'm a front-end developer and I cant get enough of the web. The web is amazing. We can send messages to people on the other sides of the world, and there is no paywall > > You know what else is amazing? Infrastructure - this talk is inspired by Deb Chachra's book How Infrastructure Works > > the w3c web principles say "There is one web" - this is true, but there are may webs on the web, with different characteristics > > The big daddy is the corporate web, which is where all the anger goes > > The next is the #IndieWeb - a netwprk of small sites with an ethos of independence and the personal > > The poetic web - the focus is on artistic impressions and what you love > > We care about the web because it is a network, and it connects us to more people. Once everyone is on a network it stops being a luxury and becomes a utility > > Deb Chachra says that a utility is not just a valuable service, but everyone has access - Infrastructure increases the agency of everyone who uses it > > Infrastructure can be a way of transferring power - the one web so far has increased the power of the wealthy and already privileged > > 9 out of 10 sites visited in teh world are American, and written in English. Even Wikipedia has editors about 80% men for the last 6 years. there are 400,00 bios of women, men have 4 times that > > a michrorhizome network is an alternative model - where signals and nutrients flow in all directions. Our network should benefit us all, rather than the usual handful > > The hidden problem is Gen AI is that it s wholly handing control over to the algorithm, and that is in the control of a tiny number of people > > sites I like: low tech magazine - solar powered website that is nto there at night; davidsocial - you email david and he adds you > > I am also a fan of mastodon and bluesky as much less centralised networks > > To make the network better we can't build one big thing, but lots of tint things get lost. We need to join things together to improve - make links! > > we need to work togetehr, and "we" includes the non-technical users too - focus on what is important to you, and what motivates you. find a group to work with and extend their work > > IndieWeb works hard to work togetehr and have meet-ups. We need to have more experiments, and not focus on the tech impulse of building everything ourselves > > Building new webs will be messy and political. The mess is the work - working with people can be hard, but it is the most important thing > > We can do amazing things together Nils Binder: > I'm Niles from Germany, my website is https://ichimnetz.com/ > > I want to talk about the wrapper element on a website - it sets the maximum width, gives eom padding and some margin > > now you likely use width: min(100%-3rem, 75rem) rather than just setting max-width:75rem > > I have a 3840 pixel wide screen - why are we having 2/3 of it blank with the wrapper now? > > Some time ago we were using photoshop to design websites. Now people use Figma. Compare the drop shadow in PS and Figma, and Figma matches CSS > > "which of the two websites are you designing?" was in 2016 - that's when Figma came out. More recently we have tailwind and now LLMs - the holy triangle of boring > > Kevin Pohl gave a talk about building the wrapper out of the grid, which is the more flexible way, and can do dynamic things, like a non-symmetric bounding > > for dasruhrgebiet.de we built a grid with 3 1fr to the left of the main column and 2 1fr to the right, which means we can nudge elements left and right a bit to look nicer > > You can do the slightly asymmetric grid with flexbox too by using flex-grow to expand the top and bottom differently > > I want you to treat layout the same way you choose colours and fonts - shift some frame s and grids and unwrap the web Amy Rogers: > I'm Amy, a design engineer, but I like crochet too as it is a practical thing. I feel like we are tired of cramming things in > > I joined Vouchsafe, which is identity for people without photo ID. This is the opposite of the Brit Card kind of idea > > ID poverty is the inability to prove eho you are - the cost and complexity of getting ID documents is prohibitive, not just for the people but the companies too > > One person we spoke to was Louise, a mother of 4 who lives in a 1-bedroom flat, and couldn't visit her son in prison, but was shut out for not having a UK Passport or drivers licence > > Rowan was born and raised in the UK. When she got married, she changed her name to do this officially she needed her birth certificate > > To get a passport you need a middle class person who has known you for more than 3 years > > Vouchsafe has built a tool to connect people who may not have the long term knowledge that their friends and family have > > we're wondering if we can use people's online footprints to join them up by tracing their email login through websites > > what we envisage is that we can build a rough idea of who someone is from a loose connection of these identifier signifiers > > we're now using LLMs to reduce the number of training images we need for a given kind of identity, and for name matching [so many scary false positives here -km] Dave Letorey: > I'm the Loud Man in the Afternoon - I went to uni here - I completed my degree in 1999 - so long ago that I didn't have a loan at the end Salma Alam-Naylor: > An Inroduction to the World Wide Web for Very Senior Programmers - December 15th 1995 - the much-anticipated release of HTML 2.0 > > Why are we still writing HTML documents using text n 1995? Amy Hupe: > I'm a content designer, tech writer and design systems consultant, in the UK for about 8 years so far, working for the government, and a lot of other big companies > > when we talk about design systems we talk about efficiencey, consistency and scale. But we rarely if ever say that none of this is inherently valuable > > efficiency is only valuable if we move to a goodout come for our user; scale if we can speed up, we can speed up bad outcomes too > > if components are inacessible,, patterns discriminatory or content is exclusionary, we are scaling up systems that cause harm > > we can't think about all decisons, we make most of them by impulse based on our history. this means that a lack of diversity will make excluding choices Craig Abbott: > It's very easy to make assumptions about what people can and cannot do - as Amy was saying, if you don't build with the people, you will get it wrong > > A medical view of disability centres the impairment; the social view centres the designed environment. People are not disabled by their impairment by by failed accommodations > > sometimes we try to make things better, and end up making them worse instead. This is an example from my career in government with an elderly gentleman trying to use the DWP site > > the elderly man tried to put 'september' into a field expecting a numeric month and didn't understand the 'invalid' message. So I hacked the field to accept text as well > > next we tried with a user who used speech technology, and it interpreted them saying 'nine' as the word 'nine' instead of putting the d9 > > WCAG is excellent, but it's a starting point, not the end goal - here's an example. > > none of the AAA criteria in WCAG is mandated, so people only ever look at A and AA - the suppport for neurodivergent people is in the AAA critereia and gets ignored > > WCAG is not a UX standard - it doesn't care if the experience is awful if it's awful for everyone > > WCAG says that you can't only use colour to distinguish an element - eg you should underline links too. However if you make links look identical to plaintext, thn you pass as it is bad for everyone > > WCAG has no minimum font-size, it just wants you to be able to double the size. > > Remember: compliant and accessible are not the same thing. Accessibility is a user need, not a technical specification. If you don't have people in your org with disabilities, you will get support wrong > > If you haven't talked to any of your users your product probably isn't accessible even if it is compliant Joe Hart: > I'm going to remake Final Fantasy IX in the browser. I quite like making things that nobody asked me to do. I did a github/papers please mashup called Changes Please > > I mashed up Katamari Damarcy with NPM called Katamari node_modules > > Final Fantasy XII was released 25 years ago this week, and did a lot of tricks to make it work - dynamic lighting, water effect etc and they didn't have a GPU > > Good ways of building FF9 - use a game engine; use the hi-res assets from the remaster; use C# because it works with Unity > > instead I am starting from scratch, using the PSX assets and just javascript, CSS and HTML

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of eve...