Links, notes, & sundries — Ethan Marcotte’s website

I thought this was a really moving meditation from Klim Type’s founder on growing up as a designer: the traditions and works that shape us, and how we can, in time, shape them right back.

I know very little of Taylor Swift’s music, but Kelsey McKinney’s review of her latest album is just, well, really solid criticism: opinionated, in-depth, and working to move art (and the artist) toward something better.

Mandy on the revolutionary act of rereading: rediscovering old thoughts, to better uncover new ones.

Love this: some open source licenses for projects that want to tell “artificial intelligence” platforms to get in the bin.

Oh my goodness, I love everything about this: a Jason Santa Maria-designed website for Megazoid, a fun, blocky type family from David Jonathan Ross.

I haven’t read the Ezra Klein / Ta-Nehisi Coats interview that’s the subject of this essay, and don’t think I will.

Frank employs a really smart lens here, looking at the modern (and broken) internet economy as “a market for lemons”: This reflects a business culture obsessed with outcomes while treating outputs as speed bumps.

Communication Workers of America just released the results of a research study into the lives of the US-based data workers behind modern “artificial intelligence” platforms.

There are precious few times in our lives when we say something and it becomes true simply because we’ve acknowledged it.

Yes: I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through.

A gentle game set in a luscious, tranquil little world — and it all plays right in your browser.

I really Scott’s perspective on the “artificial intelligence” hype cycle, and how technology tends to get a lot more boring — a lot more useful — after the bubble bursts: Early factories were tied to rivers to harness water power, but the dynamo freed them

It’s good to see Design Observer covering the abject failure of the “National Design Studio”.

Jillian’s created something really special here: a short browser-based game with a very simple mechanic.

There’s a lot of “AI” schadenfreude flying around about this article, and rightfully so.

Well, here’s a story I’d never heard before.

This is a rather persuasive argument that laws, and labor law in particular, has an “expressive function” — that it communicates a set of social values, which become reinforced through societal norms.

My old friend Rob just launched his redesigned website, and it’s a real beauty.

A gallery of beautiful vintage how-to manuals.

From West Virginia Watch: The proposed development — called the Adams Fork Energy project — comes from TransGas and would create the largest natural gas-fueled ammonia plant in the world.

An in-depth look at how Samurai Jack, one of my very favorite animated shows, developed its painterly visual direction.

I’m kinda in awe of the level of polish Adam Argyle’s brought to this CSS gradient generator.

Ever since I first read it back in February, I’ve revisited Miriam’s essay a few times each month.

Gosh, this is good.

A downright delightful little set, and beautifully produced.

Kieran Healy, on becoming an American citizen in this moment: I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that companies are still desperately searching for a real-world use case for “artificial intelligence” platforms.

Frank is back, dear ones: The AI said nothing about love, loyalty, or enthusiasm.

I did not expect I’d ever see the phrase “monospace blackletter,” but here we both are.

I’d seen a number of these before, but never this many.

Want to source free, lovely, and human-made imagery for your blog?

This is a tremendous resource from the UC Berkeley Labor Center: a searchable database of union-negotiated contract provisions, each of them governing, controlling, or curtailing the usage of technology in the workplace.

Ben Werdmuller’s essay on evaluating “artificial intelligence” — the technology, the vendors selling it, and the, uh, fraught power dynamics wrapped up in both — was just as good as everyone said it was.

I write the content on this website for people, not robots.

Here’s Molly White with a delightful love letter to RSS: what it is, why it matters, and — most importantly!

This was a very helpful framing for me.

It’s obvious that the spending around “artificial intelligence” is abhorrently high.

Sculptor Thomas Doyle imagines what future monuments to our society might look like.

Adrian Holovaty’s Soundslice added a new feature because, well, a popular “artificial intelligence” chatbot lied to users about its existence.

Stunning work from Evelin Kasikov, mimicking the colors and visual textures of offset printing with careful planning and cotton thread.

Tim Bray says it better than I ever could’ve: At this point someone will point out that previous technology waves have generated as much employment as they’ve eliminated.

Against inevitabilism in the age of “artificial intelligence”: These are some big names in the tech world, all framing the conversation in a very specific way.

A harrowing, heartbreaking, and (at times) hopeful account from Rümeysa Öztürk, who was kidnapped by the United States government and held in an ICE concentration camp for six weeks.

First of all, this is an attack: If anything, AI uses me as often as any kind of sentence-obsessive who’s ever stared at a line like it owed them rent.

Yet another reminder that when you read “artificial intelligence,” mentally replace it with “automation”: Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year.

Almost without fail, you’ll get something.

Katherine made this single-serving website for cars she likes, and can I just say how perfect it is?

Ron wrote one of those essays that I reread immediately after finishing it, and he wrote the hell out of it.

Once we have accepted that hope is not the only emotion we can work with – we start to remember that an emotion is an experience, not an action.

I’ve been using email for [redacted] years, and I’ve never set up filters based on email headers.