Tags: if

Anti-work | Go Make Things

But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.

I concur.

It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!

Expansion artifacts || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.

The End : Focal Curve

I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.

Craig’s criteria on his job search:

• One: fuck offices
• Two: fuck AI
• Three: fuck React

And his conclusion:

Fuck work

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

Performance-Optimized Video Embeds with Zero JavaScript – Frontend Masters Blog

This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.

Backseat Software – Mike Swanson’s Blog

People use “enshittification” to describe platform decay. What I’m describing here is one of the mechanisms that makes that decay feel personal. It’s the constant conversion of your attention into a KPI.

Lowering the specificity of multiple rules at once - Manuel Matuzovic

This is clever, and seems obvious in hindsight: use an anonymous @layer for your CSS reset rules!

Toward the end of 2021, I wrote about working a four-day week. It really suited me. So much so that I’ve gone one further. For the past year or so I’ve been working a three-day week.

I work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. From Friday to Monday, my days are my own.

This really changes the dynamic of the week. It no longer feels like an extended weekend. What I mean is that usually we think about the working week as the default and the weekend as the exception. That’s been flipped on its head for me. The three days I spend working feel like the exception.

Once again, this decision meant earning less money. But I’ve decided that I value time more than money. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. Many people have to expend all their time in order to make just enough money.

I’ve made some choices along the way that certainly help. I don’t have children. I don’t have a car. I live in a modest flat and I’ve paid off the mortgage. I live in a country where healthcare is free.

So I don’t have too many expenses. My biggest expenses are travel-related; getting to the States to see family, or travelling to Irish music festivals wherever they may be.

But still, working a three-day week means I can make enough to cover my expenses and still put some money aside for the future.

Now, this wouldn’t work for everyone. My work tends to be the kind that doesn’t require much direct collaboration (which is also why I mostly work from home). I imagine it could get frustrating being on a team of people working different numbers of days.

I’m also really lucky to have the choice to do this. I know that many workplaces wouldn’t allow this kind of lifestyle. Clearleft is different.

In my last conference talk, I touched on this:

I think you could you could divide management into two categories like you can do with programming languages. There is a very imperative school of management where it’s all about measurements, it’s all about those performance reports, it’s all about metrics, time tracking. Maybe they install software on your machine to track how long you’ve been working. It’s all about measuring those outputs.

That’s one approach to management. Then there’s a more declarative approach, where you just care about the work getting done and you don’t care how people do it. So if they want to work from home, let them work from home. If they want to work strange hours, let them work strange hours. What do you care as long as the work gets done? This is more about giving people autonomy and trust.

I’m very happy that Clearleft takes the declarative approach.

And I can reiterate what I said when I stopped working on Fridays:

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

Now that I don’t work on Mondays, bank holiday weekends don’t mean much to me anymore. Or to put it another way, every weekend is like a bank holiday weekend. If I want to travel somewhere on a Friday and come back on a Monday, I don’t need to book any time off. That’s really nice.

I’ve got four days in a row to do with as I wish. I had to fight the urge to immediately launch into some new project or side-hustle to fill the time. I’m savouring it instead.

I’ve got time to take care of The Session. I’ve got time to read. I’ve got time to cook. I’ve got time to spend learning Irish. Mostly I’ve got time to just be.

A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

So Many Websites

But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Default Isn’t Design

Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, more interoperable ecosystem. Psychologists call this reflex System Justification.

The explains a lot about React-driven front-end development!

When a single toolset becomes the default, we don’t just prefer it, we build narratives that justify it. And that’s when a tool quietly becomes a gate or even a destructive force.

Why doesn’t anything work anymore? | Jason Rodriguez

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.

22 – 26 September 2025 – Walknotes

God, I love the way that Denise writes:

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.

gilest.org: A chat with 19-year-old me

I love this conversation.

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.