Tags: dc

Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.

The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.

And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.

The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.

Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.

Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.

The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!

Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.

If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.

The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:

Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.

The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:

• 13 Minutes—the space race, from the perspective of the United States.
• The Bomb—the nuclear arms race, from Los Alamos to Cuba.
• The Santiago Boys—the CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist democracy in Chile.

Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia

Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins

I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

A great interview with Ted Chiang:

Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.

GetRSSFeed: RSS Feed Extractor & Finder for Websites, Blogs & Podcasts

This looks handy: a service to extract the RSS feed of a podcast (y’know—the thing that actually makes a podcast a podcast) from walled gardens that obfuscate the feed’s location: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022).

I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together.

It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mildy. You definitely weren’t going to learn practical techniques to bring back into work on Monday morning. If anything, it was the kind of event that might convince you to quit your job on Monday morning.

The talks were design-informed, but with oodles of philosophy, culture and politics.

As you can imagine, that’s not an easy sell. Hence why we stopped running the event. It’s pretty hard to convince your boss to send you to a conference like that.

Sometimes I really miss it though. With everything going on in the tech world right now (and the world in general), it sure would be nice to get together in a room full of like-minded people to discuss the current situation.

Well, here’s the funny thing. There’s a different Clearleft event happening next week. Research By The Sea. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound much like dConstruct. But damn if Benjamin hasn’t curated a line-up of talks that sound very dConstructy!

• Every minute you are here by Steph.
• What happens when we listen to the birds? by Tamsin.
• Picking up the pieces by Cennydd.
• Considering intersectionality and lived experience in inclusive design by Priyanca.
• In defence of refusal by Michael.

Those all sound like they’d fit perfectly in the dConstruct archive.

Research By The Sea is most definitely not just for UX researchers—this sounds to me like the event to attend if, like me, you’re alarmed by everything happening right now.

Next Thursday, February 27th, this is the place to be if you’ve been missing dConstruct. See you there!