Links and listens #1

One of the things I wanted to start doing regularly this year was publishing a weekly "Links and listens" note. The purpose is to capture some of the really interesting content I've read or heard during the week, so that I can hopefully find it again in the future if I need to. This is the first of those notes. Perhaps a weekly cadence might be too ambitious, let's see how it goes.

This post by Hannah Smith, my colleague at the Green Web Foundation, captures our sentiments about this week's drama in the Kingdom of WordPress Matt Mullenweg. The WordPress sustainability group was suddenly dissolved by Matt Mullenweg, apparently shortly after he learnt WordPress even had a group of volunteers working on sustainability in the WordPress community.

In the last few weeks, I've read a lot of year in review posts. I even wrote on myself. This one by Simon Willison is pretty much a must read for anyone who wants to be updated on what's happening in the realm of AI and LLMs. He covers a lot of ground, including making several points throughout about the nuance with which we should be thinking about AI, LLMs, and their environmental impacts.

I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here, but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.

Simon Willison

This article about the history behind the concept of progressive enhancement on the web has really stuck with me. I've been thinking about progressive enhancement a fair bit in the context of making this website grid aware, and our overall Grid-aware Websites project. At the moment, I "degrade" functionality on the site by removing certain bits of code whenever a user is visiting from a region where the electricity generated is coming from mostly fossil-fuels. But this post, and some of the feedback I've received about this site has got me thinking *how might I go about "progressively enhancing" the site instead for visitors who are on cleaner power grids and so can afford to take on the additional compute of some features?"

I'm still working out an easy way to collect the interesting things I've listened to from Snipd, the podcast app I use. They don't have an API, or a web interface.

Alex Russell with a banger of a conference talk in which he explores the advantages of the web, and the challenges it has faced from other platforms, especially mobile, and how we can/should be taking action to create a future where the free and open web wins.