Month: May 2024

Taller buildings let us design better towns

I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.

Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.

I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.

Continue reading “Taller buildings let us design better towns”

Don’t design in customer traps on your systems

You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?

The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.

Continue reading “Don’t design in customer traps on your systems”

A new manifesto for the web

This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?

Web Dogma 24. By me.

Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.

Continue reading “A new manifesto for the web”

AI is predictive, not intelligent

I hope you haven’t missed the big AI revolution going on right now? No? Yes? YES? You have no idea about it? Where do you live? On Mars? Ah OK, you were kidding. AI is being talked about everywhere, new devices like the Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 are very much about it, and everyone involved is scrabbling around like mad for venture capital to fund their incredible ideas.

Having access to these language models is immense, right? We can sit down, whip out our AI, and enjoy a better than life experience. We can ask it questions and often it can come up with remarkably lucid explains. It seems intelligent. Here’s a conversation I’ve just had with ChatGPT’s latest model, after I asked it to settle into a British conversational style:

Continue reading “AI is predictive, not intelligent”

Design Dilemmas: When bathrooms become battlegrounds

In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.

Continue reading “Design Dilemmas: When bathrooms become battlegrounds”

A little change on this website

In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.

Continue reading “A little change on this website”