The Register: Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare.

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First I’ve heard of this. Look forward to scanning the report. So many folks are relying on older systems, hardware … valuable or sensitive information left to disappear due to inertia. Big lessons here.

I value paper more, as a result!

Smashing Mag: Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, And It May Be Our Fault.

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Worth the read! Much of my work these days is using and training people in Wordpress drag-and-drop themes! The stacks - and really useful CMSs - are too complex, unless you’re making dead-tree sites (at my clients’ price point).

Personal observation about sharing techniques, information.

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I have this philosophy about how I work. I do a lot of research to keep my production streamlined; I will purchase the best tools to keep my hourly costs down, and amortize those software costs.

I make NO attempt to hide these systems. Why?

Because I can tell you from experience, if I’m still using that same workflow, those same techniques by the time competition catches up with me, I would have lost my advantages anyway.

One thing in this life. You keep moving, changing. Always.

Online, you are only as good as your posting's title.

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Well now, here’s a really good one: AI Search Engines and the Quest for Ignorance.

“In 2021, Twitter introduced a feature prompting users to consider reading news articles before retweeting them. Through their link tracking, they’d found that an overwhelming number of users would repost articles without having even visited the url.”

For all my pious blogger recommendations about triangulating sources, folks are no longer reading anything other than the titles of posts. Upworthy and their methods of testing/sensationalizing titles to attract clicks has become the be-all and end-all of reinforcing belief systems of online seekers of information. Many news services cycle through multiple titles now to grab eyeballs, with increasingly misleading ledes.

Read the whole thing. ChatGPT - as it exists right now - poses some alarming scenarios for our collective futures. Google and others are racing to compete.

The internet and AI had such rosy futures predicted. Instead, the quest for greenbacks is giving us another hammer to whack ourselves in the forehead with. Education is more important than ever in our history, and it’s under lethal attack in America.

Seatbelts. If you don’t have yours on, clip it now. I’m trying not to despair, but the more I read the news, the more depressed I get. Give some of our more idiotic politicians access to a Fox News directed $500,000 ChatGPT instance (you can purchase the software, and aim it at a specific pool of info), and just wait for brain-melting revelations.

Mastodon, in my initial forays, has been a joy, by the way. Can’t get any traction, but I’m enjoying the people I’m finding to read. A different feel/vibe than Twitter. I feel infinitely more informed about things I’m actually interested in. Curate your follows carefully, you may also have a good experience. I’m on mstdn.social, at the ‘usual’ username.

Tailwind CDN.

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Oh, I love meta-frameworks. Except when they disappear. And after writing online for over 20 years now, and seeing many good things immolate, I'm very careful before I imbibe.

'Course we live in a world now where if you're not redesigning your website frequently, you're relegated ... so it's not the crisis it was 10, 15 years ago.

I'm just reminded of the time I dropped Adobe products for open-source. I thought, "Yeah, save money. Same functionality, if a little more time-consuming to accomplish things. No big deal."

What I didn't realize was I abandoned a decade or more of keystroke memory, that I had to re-learn when I returned to Adobe in utter frustration at the open-source equivs. I wasted tons of time restoring keystroke reflexes to my satisfaction, and felt the complete and utter fool for increasing my postproduction time.

So - in usual long-winded fashion - meta-frameworks are cool. But don't let them overwrite your core knowledge.

And I can't wait to play with this one.