Madeleine.Cool

Latest 3 Posts

  1. the more your typography responds to the viewport, the less it will respond to user preferences

    One action (zooming) changes the size of a pixel, while the other (resizing) changes the size of the browser itself – but both change the number of pixels across the width of the browser. As the window gets smaller, or the pixel gets larger – there are fewer pixels in the viewport.

    That disconnect makes responsive typography unreliable. If your text is set to resize based only on a viewport or container, then the user zoom will have no effect! Similarly, neither 1vw nor 100vw accounts for the user default font-size.

    —Stephan Schwab

    This whole video from Oddbird was worth watching to see Miriam work through the reasoning. In addition to giving me much to think about in terms of writing good css for website visitors to have good experiences, I'm left wondering if it is possible for AI to have this sort of wondering. Can an LLM ask "hmm, I wonder how this approach to font sizing actually impacts with user preferences and zoom?"

  2. Rachel Andrew - Generative AI has broken the subject matter expert/editor relationship

    Generative AI has broken that contract. Increasingly writers receive content that looks polished, yet contains inaccuracies. This can be because the SME, while polishing their content using AI tools, has missed the fact that the tool has also modified some code or changed the meaning of text. It can also be that the drive for productivity with these tools has meant that people are being asked to cover broader subject areas, so are relying on AI tools for research rather than their own knowledge. AI can be very confidently wrong, and if the text seems clear, it’s possible to miss that it’s clearly nonsense.

    —Rachel Andrew

    Whether productivity gains have broadened who we ask to be experts or experts are missing the polishing effect of an AI "edit", the human editors have to do much more to ensure good content is good and true.

  3. Software development is thinking made tangible.

    "Each advancement addressed a real friction[…] Yet the fundamental challenge persists bc it’s not mechanical. It’s intellectual. Software development is thinking made tangible. The artifacts we create[…]are the visible outcome of invisible reasoning about complexity."

    —Stephan Schwab

9 more posts can be found in the archive.