This is an unfiltered stream of barely-processed thoughts and experiences committed more for my benefit than yours. If you can pick something of value out of this crap then so much the better.
2022 update: keeping the 10+ year-old crap for a historical perspective. For now, at least. Aiming to layer on fresh crap to form a fertile mix of organic matter. WordPress has faithfully preserved it. I don’t have the hubris to rip it out just yet.
Talk to my bot. I don't want to visit your website to accept cookies, notification, dismiss pop-ups or admire your stock art or transitions. I want to find stuff out or take simple actions. Optimise it for the AI I'll be delegating to, please.
Talk to my bot. I don’t want to visit your website to accept cookies, notification, dismiss pop-ups or admire your stock art or transitions. I want to find stuff out or take simple actions. Optimise it for the AI I’ll be delegating to, please.
AI-Optimisation may be the new SEO (AIO?). LLMs fill in the ontological gap of the Semantic Web ideal. Easily readable and writable by AI + humans, it might look a lot like Web 1.0. Wondering what this means for front-end devs.
This is still deeply in draft mode but published because I promised. It’ll be finished off urgently.
Si
Hearing some talk about how (LLM-based) AI was going to going to impact SEO triggered some thinking, packed into tweets above. I’ll unpack here.
To be clear, I’m talking about websites here rather than webapps (a whole other avenue). Websites can include simple call-to-actions: a purchase, reservation or subscription, say.
That said, I’m happy to wildly speculate that AI may do for the web what the web did for the internet (and the internet did for computers).
Cast your mind way back and you might recall the Web was originally about the sharing of knowledge via documents, with some simple interaction for querying and posting.
When commerce arrived, it picked up an e- and spawned particular strains of sales and marketing. Things got shiny, bouncy, zippy (‘rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’), fast to not give the mark time to reflect, with pop-ups and consent forms, tracking. The finite supply of human attention was something to be attracted, captured and quite likely labelled and sold on to the highest bidder.
Short of an ad-blocker, the pain and distraction cost to the end user was an unavoidable cost to the end user who had no choice but to jump through hoops: consent to cookies, dodge distractions, exit-intents, and all the rest of it like an IKEA store from hell.
Humans are anxious, curious, vain, horny.
There was an idea of a machine-readable Semantic Web but it was a technical challenge and it was much more fun to show clients shiny sites.
Still, there is that pesky requirement to be friendly to Google’s bots and stick to the timeless principles of well-structured, informative websites with static content if you want to be well-regarded by the big G.
Google’s bots were fairly dumb, largely requiring humans to visit to make sense of the raw text snippets if they couldn’t be neatly ingested into Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Search Engine bots pave the way for human visitors until now. I’m suggested they might go in and get the job done entirely. You might be thinking you’d like to visit the site yourself
OpenAI has taken (presumably) similar content and run off it, leaping the ontological chasm of the Semantic Web in the process. Their success in being able to do that, on-demand, offers humans a viable shortcut and avoid the hassle of interacting with your website for mundane tasks: sending their AI agent. I’m founding this entire conjecture on the idea that much web interaction is tedious work and human are generally work-avoidant.
This may come as a shock but I don’t visit your site to admire the template and stock photos you paid good money for. I just want to know if you will clip my dog on Thursday and, if so, your address. If I can get my bot to do the research, book and update my calendar while I rub his belly then I’m sold. If you have to cancel for whatever reason then you can let me know by email or WhatsApp. My bot will be monitoring both while I’m out throwing a ball.
The good news is that you don’t need to learn any new tech, just let go of a few habits, instincts, and the odd framework. When my task terminator enters your mall with a mission clipboard, your buttery-smooth transitions and 200ms response times are a waste of effort.
You’d be better off just clearly labelling everything and getting the hell out of the way. Use plain, descriptive language to make it AI-ready – it’ll probably be summarised anyway, stripping out the puff and boilerplate – and it’ll also have the bonus of being backward-compatible, future-proof and accessible.
History may show this was the crest of front-end web development. Probably akin to the golden era of cars with tailfins, chrome bumpers and all.
Positive feedback loops will push human drivers off the road.
When I learnt to drive, a key principle was to behave in a predictable way and clearly signal my intentions. An AI does this to the nth degree and that’s before you even start speculating about ad-hoc proximal communication that doesn’t rely of flashing light. Reducing the uncertainty boosts the efficiency enabling faster traffic, and better flow. The gain will be such that lanes and then entire roads will be designated for self-driving vehicles. These will expand.
Insurance is where safe drivers subsidise risky drivers. Age, gender are already known factors which determine you insurance premium. As automated road systems stabilise, the contrast between the risk of self-driving swarms and that testosterone-fuelled guy who just loves to drive will become ever more stark. Unlike age, gender or other sensitive factors, insurance companies will have no problem aligning the risk with the premiums.
Shared vehicles, whether they look like a songthaew or dolmuş, will be faster, cheaper. If you want a private vehicle, that’ll be a private Uber – cheaper by not having a driver. All these vehicles will follow a protocol. A TCP/IP of the road.
I don’t pretend to understand this stuff (hence the total lack of a seven-figure bonus this year) but I do know that the Bank of England cannot simply ‘print money’. It’s all done electronically these days.
I’m imagining Sir Mervyn King sitting in front of a leather-bound keyboard, surrounded by advisors, and taking immense care to tap out the right number of zeros for 75000000000 pounds. Maybe he’d also have to enter a PIN, conscientiously obscuring it as his advisors take a momentary interest in the chandelier.
This done, they’d all head to the pub for a well-deserved pint. No-one would would be surprised if Merv doesn’t offer to get the first round in.
Finding myself with a bit of time before work this morning, I got stuck into decluttering a box of old notebooks, print-outs and the like. In doing so, I inadvertently roused the ghost of sixball past (even before he became sixball).
He was an engaging chap, creative but chaotic. What he lacked in self-awareness he made up for in curiosity. Much of what he came out with was crap but embedded in that were shiny nuggets. His secret was to not let the crap get in the way of the nuggets. There can be none of the latter without the former.
Thus admonished, I promise to post much more crap here and hope for the best.
I love the Tube. I love the fact that it’s always warm, dry and, if there’s not one waiting to leave right now, another will be along in just a couple of minutes. It’s both futuristic in its automation and quirkily old-fashioned in decor. Teleportation implemented by victorians.
But… I’ve been a cycle-commuter all my life, from the relentless hills of Brighton to the flatness of Cambridge. I’ve relied on my bike as much as I’ve abused it – although the relationship has been improving the last couple of years. It’s probably my only consistent form of exercise (I tried running but the scenery changes too slowly and is horribly jerky in any case). Boris bikes are great for smoothly slicing minutes off a hop across central London but I have to go at least 3km north before I could pick one up in the morning and they favour comfort and stability over speed and agility.
So, having brought my bike down, I did feel I ought to try it sometime and yesterday morning — on a whim — I did. Egging me on was the cycle superhighway CS7 and the hardcore CycleStreets app which claimed I could beat the less whimsical sliding doors version of me in the parallel universe who was minding the gap and trying not to stare.
For bonus geek points, I recorded the routes with the excellent My Tracks app, uploaded to Google Maps so you can check out out my derisory stats. In my defense, I did get caught up with various landmarks on the way in and a torrential downpour on the way back. I’m still looking for a reliable mobile weather app.
Google Maps is awesome but it’s not always the most detailed source and it’s not always possible to fix errors. That’s why I sometimes turn to Open Street Map. It can be described as the Wikipedia of Maps: it’s not guaranteed to give you what you need but is totally open to being fixed. Last time I tried it I found it horribly clunky. Since then, a few things have improved:
Google’s My Tracks app can generate GPS traces just by walking around.
Google Mapmaker would like users to fill in the blanks on their maps but they don’t cover the UK and — to be honest — I’m not going to get that warm, wiki, fizzy feeling spending time improving proprietorial data.
That’s why I headed out today with the geeky intention of fixing OSM’s woeful representation of the village I grew up in. I anticipated getting a leg stretch whilst I attempted to not look like I was casing the entire village. Very quickly, to my surprise, my Hamiltonian wander was dosing me on novelty and nostalgia instead. I ambled up lanes I’d never had a reason to see before for some reason. Other corners recalled fun times when exploration was the name of the game and we would adopt the spaces where adults hardly ventured.
Tragically, hiding in the trees down the brook with my swiss army knife and walkman, doesn’t seem appropriate anymore. I should probably get into video games.
sixball 