Cory Dransfeldt • Links

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans.

Many moons ago, I used to post a lot on Twitter about so-called deceptive design/dark patterns that proliferate consumer UIs.

Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development.

Seasons are changing for technologists, and the industry we work in isn't the same as it was a decade ago.

I went offline.

Having the umpteenth argument with someone about em dashes (as usual, they equated em dashes with A.I.; as usual, I bristled) and reading ploum’s lovely Soyez humains, communiquez !

In a personal blog post, Baldur Bjarnason describes how he worked in various fields and positions: as an author, publisher, consultant, developer, educator, as well as radio and TV producer.

Not many people know that the word 'nice' comes from the Latin 'nescius,' meaning 'unaware.'

A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.

One day last week, I updated Visual Studio Code.

I’ve been doing more front-end coding this year than I have in a while and every time I come back to write markup and CSS, it feels like there are new tricks.

There have been various blog posts and social media posts in the last couple of years about people rejecting streaming services and going back to buying music, listening on handheld devices that - gasp - aren't phones.

I am building a website, for work.

'Alt-text' is short for alternative text, and is used to convey the substance of visual content as text.

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless.

After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could.

I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about.

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content.

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.

LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work.

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.

At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK.

If anyone can build it in a world of generative AI, what, then, are people paying for when they buy software?

Let’s review.

AI is inherently political technology.

Last week, the Safari team formally expressed their opposition to the WebMCP API.