Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

The "AI will make programming obsolete" bullshit has a surprisingly long history.

Here's an ad from 30 years ago promising code-free software development.

You can see the ad here: https://archive.org/details/BYTE199301/page/n263/mode/2up?view=theater

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.

A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids.

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush.

Or, at least, that's what I thought.

Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge.

The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.

But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection.

The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that’s with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car.

The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser.

My old car had a built-in crappy web browser.

Both are painful to use - but they work!

If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render?

What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?

I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked."

I think that's all we can strive for.

Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK

Matt Hobbs (@TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io)

@TheRealNooshu

Replying to @TheRealNooshuInterestingly we have 3,574 users visiting GOV.UK on games consoles:
• Xbox - 2,062
• Playstation 4 - 1,457
• Playstation Vita - 25
• Nintendo WiiU - 14
• Nintendo 3DS - 16

20/22

❤️ 29💬 1♻️ 010:45 - Mon 01 February 2021

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

#HTML5 #web #WeekNotes #work

You'll likely be depressingly unsurprised by the indication that decisions by the DWP on benefits sanctions looked to be shaped by institutional racism.

Once again, while we may claim (often rightly) to be a multicultural society, our governing institutions seem unable to address issues without some from of ethnic bias...

I wonder why that is?

Could it be, a history of racism that goes back centuries is well embedded & needs more work to root out!?

#racism #benefits
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/16/benefit-sanctions-more-likely-for-minority-ethnic-claimants-uk-data-shows

I've seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards.

Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech.

She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead inthe eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit.

She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable".

She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees.

And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire willfall. And I wil help it along."

#writer #LeGuin

Totay in the Orange Slopbucket, "you can be jailed in the UK for posting mean stuff!", apparently. (Not since 2013, really, but crack on.)

Except they think "mean stuff" includes "inciting racial hatred with a side of murder" which is quite the tell on your internal beliefs, dude. Probably not one you want to be putting out into the open, either, I'd say.

I have had a number of sessions lately where I'm having to spell out "Listen, you are stressed and sick because your capitalistic employer is choosing to pay the CEO X times your salary, squeezing you literally to death, instead of having adequate staffing. This is not about 'time management' or 'coping techniques.' "

Spotted in Times Square, New York City

The FT is reporting that the Darzi report will identify a nearly £40bn shortfall in NHS capital expenditure since 2010 (against comparable countries' rate of capital spending in their health sectors).

While workforce planning is more often in the news (as it very immediately impacts waiting lists & NHS capacity) behind that is the problem of crumbling, inadequate infrastructure (as well as a lack of new responsive developments).

The fruits of austerity are fatal!

#health #infrastructure

A reminder that the richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity.

Eliminating capitalism and billionaires it produces is the only way to start meaningfully addressing the #climatecrisis.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-planet-heating-pollution-two-thirds-humanity