Baldur Bjarnason's Notes on the Web
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Essays / personalAI / MLFrontend / CSS / browsersSoftware / engineering practice
- Posts
- 506 from 28 Jun 2010 to 28 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (32 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://feedpress.me/baldurbjarnason
2026 24
- Out of the ‘AI’ Crisis – Premium Newsletter launch and Halloween Sale
- Autumn comfort cat photos
- The 'AI' Software Crisis: Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence
- It’s not our job to fix our employers
- Ravens and churches
- Different modes of thinking
- Old raven photos revisited
- Software developers are not okay
- Old winter photos revisited
- Parasocial media: why influencers really aren't your friend
- Why is social media so humourless?
- Old foggy photos revisited 22 September 2026 – 21 words
- Why are short videos bad for learning?
- Getting out of your own way when making video
- The story of this blog so far: 'AI', the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider
- Creating media with an uncooperative mind
- Experiments with media (or, iterating towards a podcast, maybe?)
- The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
- A massive Easter sale and a preview of my next book (out late 2026)
- The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions
- Objects not data: a photography and illustration print experiment
- Have I hardened against LLMs?
- Books as signifiers, the paradox of tolerance, and Nazi bars
- 'AI' is a dick move, redux 20 January 2026 – 687 words
2025 32
- A foggy respite
- Challenging fate with goodwill (and a holiday sale)
- But, I worry, because I can see the cracks in the wall
- The ‘Everything Bundle’
- Kötturinn og ég, ný íslensk myndasaga
- The dichotomy of print versus the web
- For sale: strong opinions; never published
- Kötturinn og ég
- Notes on strategy and audience as a media business
- You need to use the tools of the job you've chosen to do
- 'The Intelligence Illusion: Why generative models are bad for business' ebook Halloween sale
- Old DVDs (media notes) 28 October 2025 – 1647 words
- The inevitability of anger
- Media Notes (October 2025) 14 October 2025 – 1178 words
- The fashion industry that is tech
- The print edition of The Intelligence Illusion is available for order
- The melancholy of history rhyming
- Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity
- Avoiding generative models is the rational and responsible thing to do – follow-up to “Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI...’”
- Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk
- Foggy feeds: the decline in my feed reader subscriptions 16 May 2025 – 2435 words
- Innovation and adopting innovations requires trusted and functioning institutions. The US and Europe have neither
- An aside on proposed anti-trust remedies against Google 15 April 2025 – 447 words
- I am Uncluttered (Yellow): last excerpt and last chance to get the early adopter discount
- I am Uncluttered (Yellow): doom-prepping web dev through disdain, disrespect, and doing the right thing
- I am Uncluttered (Yellow): an ebook on doom-prepping web dev
- Feedback loops, 'AI', learning, and management
- Hitchcock's Notorious, Defence in Depth, and the weakness of Nazis
- My Mother's Advice on How to be a Great YouTuber
- AI and Esoteric Fascism
- Poisoning for propaganda: rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous
- First outlines of a plan: thinking strategically about a modern tech and media business
2024 128
- 'The Intelligence Illusion (Second Edition): Why generative models are bad for business' – Black Friday launch sale
- A countdown creates suspense and tension: preparing for 2025
- The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment
- The deterioration of Google
- Plan B it is
- Links (29 October 2024)
- Photos (29 October 2024)
- The risks of OpenAI's Whisper audio transcription model
- Non-violence as a societal value
- Links (21 October 2024)
- Photos (21 October 2024)
- Links (16 October 2024)
- Photos (16 October 2024)
- Idle thoughts for October
- Links (8 October 2024)
- Photos (8 October 2024)
- Liskov's Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components
- Links (1 October 2024)
- An interesting analysis of fair use and generative models
- Newish movies
- FormData to Object 26 September 2024 – 471 words
- FormData to compressed buffer and back 26 September 2024 – 180 words
- Notes on writing
- Links and Photos (23 September 2024)
- The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems
- Word Count 20 September 2024 – 66 words
- Links (16 September 2024)
- The gaps in your skill set
- The LLM honeymoon phase is about to end
- Links and photos (9 September 2024)
- A short conversation on individual responsibility
- A note on estimated reading times
- Links (2 September 2024)
- Bad Faith Burnout
- The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus
- Why Halide's Process Zero is an important tool for iPhone photography enthusiasts
- Other photos (26 August 2024)
- Your use of AI is directly harming the environment I live in
- Links (26 August 2024)
- Getting outshone by great writers is a relief, not a failure (so many links)
- Links (12 August 2024)
- Binna's Grove: forests can begin with one person
- Photos (12 August 2024)
- Blogging in the age of 'AI'
- Everything's the same, they say
- Photos (5 August 2024)
- Links (5 August 2024)
- A note on the EU AI Act
- Links (29 July 2024)
- Photos (29 July 2024)
- Very short note on the EU's DMA and DSA regulations
- The other shoe dropping on 'AI' and office work
- Links (22 July 2024)
- Photos (22 July 2024)
- I'd like fewer things to happen. At least for a while. Please and thank you.
- Links (15 July 2024)
- The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public
- Links (8 July 2024)
- Photos (8 July 2024)
- AI and Asbestos: the offset and trade-off models for large-scale risks are inherently harmful
- Links (1 July 2024)
- New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev
- Help me help you: building a library of useful software development writing
- Out of the Software Crisis: membership library
- 'Slop': the rhetorical gambit of framing failure as partial success
- Links (24 June 2024)
- The mainstreaming of 'AI' scepticism
- Links (18 June 2024)
- There's something rotten in the kingdom of Wordpress
- Visual Studio Code extensions are much less secure than browser extensions or even npm packages
- Photos (18 June 2024)
- Notes on Apple TV Plus, streamer business models, and the Foundation series
- Links (10 June 2024)
- The lifecycle of a tech bubble
- Basic, beautiful, and buildless
- Links (4 June 2024)
- Links and photos (27 May 2024)
- The 'AI' chaos
- Social media.
- Why you need to go back to basics if you want to learn HTML or CSS
- Links and photos (20 May 2024)
- The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens
- Trusting VCs with community sites was the style of the time
- Apple seems to think negging is charming
- 'I'm shocked -- shocked! -- that LLMs are being used to generate slop'
- Links and photos (13 May 2024)
- Links and photos (6 May 2024)
- A contemporary Holmes
- React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity
- Links and photos (29 April 2024)
- The unsustainability of the AI Bubble
- Generated images for non-generated text and video
- The self-serving nature of most tech social media
- Links and photos (22 April 2024)
- Exponential predictions, degrading services and other links, notes, and photos (15 April 2024)
- What would you like to learn from me?
- Again, my position on LLMs is that you absolutely shouldn't be using them with very, very few exceptions
- 'They ban products, don't they?'
- 'This shit's so expensive': a note on generative models and software margins
- Notes, Links, and Photos (8 April 2024)
- Links, Notes, and Photos (28 March 2024)
- 'I'm not a cynic, I'm disappointed' – the _Software Crisis_ Easter Sale
- The one about the web developer job market
- Links and Photos (19 March 2024)
- Links and Photos (14 March 2024)
- Bad Writing and Other Essays
- Facing reality, whether it's about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management
- Links and Photos (4 March 2024)
- Software is a medium of setbacks, but a medium's limitations don't define the artist
- Links and Photos (19 February 2024)
- Media needs more than subscriptions and streaming
- Links (5 February 2024)
- Links (2 February 2024)
- Bubbles are exhausting
- Links and photos (22 January 2024)
- An Uncluttered retrospective: Teachable is a mess and I need to pick a lane
- Disillusioned with Deno
- More thoughts about print
- Disasters are Distracting but work has to continue
- Foggy walk photos
- Links (15 January 2024)
- A print project retrospective: the biggest problem with selling print books is the software
- The Intelligence Illusion: stepping into a pile of 'AI'
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: chasing a half-baked idea for much too long
- Out of the Software Crisis: two-year project review
- Two-year review: to plan a strategy you must first have a theory of how the hell things work
- Massive link post to start off the year
- Weeknote, 8 January 2024
2023 91
- Bad AI Business Models, Lazy AI Criticism, Queer Holiday-themed movies, and a bunch of links
- Bad Business AI: Channel 1
- Feeling The Itch
- Don't be a correctness bully
- Code smell, Gall's Law, the rule of least power, and a bunch of links
- From 'Yellow': Gall's Law
- On code smell and gut feeling
- Keep your browser fresh for dev, last day of the bundle offer, and links
- Uncluttered
- Yellow
- Launching a new course with a massively discounted Black Friday bundle
- Did you know that import maps can be rendered client-side? (And links)
- Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless?
- Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (6 November 2023)
- Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (3 November 2023)
- Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (23 October 2023)
- How do you even web dev without node? A quick introduction to test-driven web development using just the browser
- Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (16 October 2023)
- The Elegiac Hindsight of Intelligent Machines
- Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (9 October 2023)
- Weeknote and links: 2 October 2023
- Making or using generative 'AI' is, all else being equal, a dick move
- Pre-order the hard-cover print edition of Out of the Software Crisis
- Weeknote: 25 September 2023
- Weeknote: 18 September 2023
- Weeknote: 11 September 2023
- Fear Of Missing Out is lethal when somebody invents a footgun
- FOMO and links
- Weeknote: 4 September 2023
- That thing where you change your mind (and links)
- Weeknote: 28 August 2023
- My position on AI (for future reference)
- You can't debate bullshit (and some links)
- Authorship
- Free and open source software projects are in transition (and some links)
- Vacation links
- Disinterest.
- The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con
- 'The LLMentalist Effect', and other links
- A prayer wheel for capitalism
- 'A prayer wheel for capitalism', and other links
- What's the game?
- 'What's the game?', and other links
- Language models and software quality and other links
- Modern software quality, or why I think using language models for programming is a bad idea
- 'Generative AI: What You Need To Know' is a free guide to help you spot AI bullshit
- Prompts are unsafe, and that means language models are not fit for purpose
- Prompts are unfit for purpose and other links
- Writing when tech has broken the web's social contract
- Praise for my ebooks 'The Intelligence Illusion' and 'Out of the Software Crisis'
- The truth about the EU AI Act and foundation models, or why you should not rely on ChatGPT summaries for important texts
- Google Bard is a glorious reinvention of black-hat SEO spam and keyword-stuffing
- Google Bard's vulnerabilities and other links
- Additions to my book, The Intelligence Illusion
- ‘What next?’ he asks with trepidation
- The poisoning of ChatGPT
- Poisonings, Corporations, and other links
- The polarisation of AI discourse serves nobody except power
- My writing on AI; the story so far
- AI code copilots are backwards-facing tools in a novelty-seeking industry
- Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley
- Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil
- Studying the pitfalls and potential of generative code (plus links)
- Why I wrote The Intelligence Illusion—a book on the risks of generative AI (available now)
- Three factors of AI anthropomorphism
- AI, Algogen, and Anti-Poetry
- The hard truth about productivity research
- GDPR and American AIs
- The AI is an American
- How to regulate AI
- Regulating AI (plus links & notes)
- AI summaries and AI healthcare (links & notes)
- AI in healthcare
- AI summaries are almost certainly unreliable
- Why you should ignore most AI research you hear about on social media
- Keeping up with and assessing AI research (links & notes)
- When you promise an AI revolution, eventually you will have to deliver
- Waiting for the AI Godot (Links & Notes)
- Copyright, Situating Search, and other links & notes
- Deno, Shakespeare's Emoticon, Return to Office, and other links and notes
- Notetaking, Tagged Templates, and How Deno is a Clear Improvement Over Node
- Book production, AI, Single-Page-Apps, and other links and notes
- Some thoughts on how to make a book, three months after I made one
- AI is a Hail Mary pass and other links & notes
- Generative AI is the tech industry's Hail Mary pass
- EU and copyright protections for AI-generated works and other notes
- On the Layoffs, Narcissists, and Other Links & Notes
- 10x Devs Don't Exist, But 10x Organisations Do
- Madeline, Existential Terror and other links & notes
- Tech Companies Are Irrational Pop Cultures
- Small is Successful
2022 18
- Out of the Software Crisis Available on Kindle
- A lot can happen in a month: on AI art and the fediverse
- The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing
- Programming is a Pop Culture
- WTF is a Framework?
- Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
- Great apps are rare
- (Released!) Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software Projects
- Out of the Software Crisis: the ebook is imminent!
- I wrote a book – now you must suffer with me
- Playacting genius: the performative logic of reasoning from first principles
- I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps
- On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software
- The different kinds of notes
- What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people
- The Colophon Cards User Survey
- How to keep up with web development without falling into despair
- Let's just not talk about 2021 and look forward instead
2021 16
- Making Colophon Cards
- What do I need to read to be a great at CSS?
- The event listening toolkit: five ways to get out of an event handling mess
- FormData and fetch, why is serialising a form such a pain?
- The Single-Page-App Morality Play
- Software Crisis 2.0
- Lessons in Interactivity, 2021 redux
- Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
- Spontant: in praise of grey
- Ways of reading without the influence of community
- The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was
- You are what you do, not what you say or write
- The Curious Case Of The Crashing Conic Gradient And How I Used A Technique I Learned In The 90s To Fix It
- I’m available for projects and other work
- 136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
- Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you?
2020 6
2019 26
- The Web Falls Apart
- Weeknote 19 ─ blog redesign and changes at work
- When life hands you lemonades, sit down and contemplate the meaning of life
- Weeknote 18 - Uncertainty and Discomfort
- Web Dev: The Red Queen Wire Mommy of Modern Tech
- Weeknote 16 – Vacation
- Weeknote 15 - Counting Down the Days
- Weeknote 14 - Shadows and DOMs
- Weeknote 13 - The weight of deadlines
- That Web Dev Thing Where Everybody Says Something Clever Involving Toast
- SwiftUI, Privacy, macOS, and the Web
- Weeknote 12 - The genres of web media
- The Aesthetics of Concentration
- Weeknote 11 - do I have focus?
- Weeknote 10 - A clear view and more reading
- Weeknote 9 - Being contemplative, finishing a photo project
- Weeknote 8 – Moving, Endgame, and more musings on colour
- Weeknote 7 - Story length and that thing about colour
- Weeknote 6 – Star Trek, rest and spring finally arrives
- Weeknote 5 – Stuff, comics, superheroes, and other nonsense
- Weeknote 4 – TV week with The Expanse
- Weeknote 3 — MVPs, fatigue, and emotional crutches
- Web Development: with great power comes the ability to make great mistakes
- Weeknote 2 - Web Development Mistakes, Mary Sues, and Icy Spring
- Weeknote 1
- Hitchcock and the author construct
2018 7
- Seams, Stitches, And The Decline Of The Mac
- Neither Paper Nor Digital Does Active Reading Well
- Hypertext is still the fundamental model of the web
- Leftover Thoughts From 2017
- Remote work is a completely different beast
- The future of Software Development: Just Business Logic
- Focusing on market share blinds you to growth
2017 6
2016 18
- Is JavaScript more fragile?
- Debating Progressive Enhancement
- The downside of believing in Apple
- A short primer on Icelandic politics on the day of the 2016 election
- The Tragedy/Farce of the Open Web according to journalists
- Notes on debating for the web development community
- Addendum on loose coupling and the iOS App Store
- Idle thoughts on modularity and loose coupling in digital media
- When fear is rational
- Once upon a time, I couldn't imagine a better word processor than Word
- A thought to consider
- A few thoughts on standardisation, W3C, and the IDPF
- Filling in the gaps – the dynamics of zero marginal cost
- Which CMS/blog system would you choose?
- A few simplified points on web and document security
- Judge the work
- Why did Paul Graham argue against equality?
- Purpose, Joy, Capability
2015 69
- You can't fix the App Store, so here's how you fix it
- Why I am worried about Twitter and why you should be too
- The crossroads or the wilderness
- You can't solve people problems with software
- The discussion about ad blocking is very dumb (but not in the way you think)
- This is not a book, but it is a podcast
- A week of 'This is not a book'
- Launching "This is not a book" – what it is and why you should be interested
- My kingdom for a new bookstore
- Modern software sucks
- Who benefits the most from Open Source Software?
- The cost versus benefits of disorganised programming power
- Sex Apocalypse Later
- Random thoughts on work and that Amazon thing
- Bookmarks – UI flaws and other great capers
- Bookmarks – learnable programming
- Bookmarks – More money for open-source
- Bookmarks – Leaving bosses
- Bookmarks – Promoting other people's work
- Bookmarks – What Would Kamala Khan Do?
- Bookmarks – Trickle down golden geese
- Bookmarks – Hateviews are us
- Bookmarks – Milk it
- Iterating the web away: <br>losing the next generation
- Bookmarks – You haven't been paying attention
- Bookmarks – It's a note card world, we just live in it
- Bookmarks – Just call it Smylfeste
- Bookmarks – That one is shaped like an idiot
- Blogger nostalgia
- Bookmarks – Make it simpler
- Wet streets cause rain and criminal responsibility
- Tweet bookmarks galore
- Random links that catch my fancy, part four of ∞
- Random links that catch my fancy, part three of ∞
- Random links that catch my fancy, part two of ∞
- Mythic visions of sexuality
- Random links that catch my fancy, part one of ∞
- How to read my nonsense
- An exercise for the reader in integration and modularity
- Is it distributed or just a disorganised hierarchy?
- On the vaunted robustness of the web
- The rules of the game have changed for RSS
- The web app developer's lament
- The plural of 'Medium' is clearly 'clusterfuck'
- Other people write about digital media
- Burnout
- The files Steven Pressfield works with
- iOS 9 content blocking extensions are not a mobile advertising armageddon
- Writing the Other: a book that's useful to all writers
- Should I make a WWDC prediction? <br>Yes, let's
- Grim Meathook Present #2
- Other people discuss software quality (spoiler: it sucks)
- Other people talk about startups and entrepreneurship
- A few quick links and thoughts on big web problems
- I really want the Supergirl TV show to be fun
- Our Grim Meathook Present
- The new age of HTML:<br> the web is being torn apart
- Her movie, his name;<br> Mad Max: Fury Road
- We are a violent species
- Toxic environments: <br> inequality in tech is a symptom of something worse
- Facebook and the media: <br>united, they attack the web
- You are here #5: <br>UX, design, and CSS as a parasite
- Speeding up decision cycles with rules and heuristics
- You are here #4: <br>an epic journey through app dev and male bodies
- You are here #3: <br>the glorious wonders of online reading await you
- 2015-05-11-18-39-16
- You are here #2: <br>an artisanal curation of reading material
- You are here #1: <br>a selection of fine links and tweets for your pleasure
- 2015-05-07-00-59-18
2013 7
2012 37
- Tag soup is history
- Schlock
- Using IDs in CSS
- A response, of sorts
- iBooks 3.0
- Is it safe?
- The time work takes
- The stillborn creature
- EPUB javascript security
- I be writing
- Farce
- Bad writing
- A few random points on DRM
- The web and ebooks have little in common
- The end of ebook development
- Aftermath – notes on the Amazon post
- Today is not tomorrow (or, how to beat Amazon)
- Bits, bobs, and anecdata
- Lessons in interactivity
- Hierarchies of ebook design
- It's time to treat ebook developers as developers
- Code doesn't change minds
- Game over, Amazon wins
- On CSS Page Templates
- Javascript in ebooks
- Explanatory windows
- Readium and other good intentions
- ePub windows and widgets – a proposal
- The semantics of ebook widgets
- What do we want from the Kindle platform?
- iBooks widgets – to javascript or not to javascript
- Disruptive crap
- Me, elsewhere
- The pros and cons of the iBooks 2.0 textbook format
- The iBooks 2.0 built-in widgets
- The iBooks 2.0 textbook format
- The publishing animal
2011 16
- A day of innovation on the future of the book
- What a publisher does
- Design pseudoscience
- A tale of three blog posts
- CSS and ebook design
- The loss of ambient intimacy
- Friday links and reading
- Convert or engage
- CSS3 Hyphens
- Just you & Google
- Knowledge is not adoption
- HTML5 history API
- Your friends, in boxes
- Localstorage & messaging in ePub
- Javascript in epub
- An epub experiment