Jay Hoffmann

An igalia chats title card that says Web Backstories... Shadow DOM, featuring Jeremy Keith and Jay Hoffmann . In the left corner is a circle with photos of both. Soundwaves are visualized in the background emanating from it.

🎙️ New Episode of Igalia Chats - Web Backstories: Shadow DOM

@meyerweb.com and @bkardell.com chat with @jayhoffmann.bsky.social and @adactio.com about Shadow DOM's backstory and long origins

www.igalia.com/chats/shadow...

Fuck apps - build websites.

Seems like we got ourselves a quorum. What should we tackle first?

Introducing the new responsive-designed BostonGlobe.com | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA Read this page on the Filament Group website

Today in Web development history. The responsive design of The Boston Globe launched in 2012. It was the first major site to use RWD and was a showcase of the techniques @ethanmarcotte.com had written and spoke about. FED by Filament Group + Ethan.

www.filamentgroup.com/lab/introduc...

Hmmm, new podcast idea though? That could be fun to work on.

i do not think ezra klein genuinely grieves for charlie kirk. i think ezra klein thinks it’s professionally advantageous to perform grief.

Year of A List Apart - The History of the Web I’d really recommend reading a thread on Eric Meyer’s blog from early 2007. In it, he poses a pretty simple […]

The History of the Web: Year of A List Apart

thehistoryoftheweb.com/year-list-ap...

Do blogs need to be so lonely? - The History of the Web If the web is participatory, and I really think it is, then how come blogging can feel so lonely?

Is blogging a lonely activity? Does it have to be?

thehistoryoftheweb.com/do-blogs-nee...

What are we gonna call it?

I will probably spend the rest of my life thinking about how, in the first decade of the web, we all spontaneously decided to use it to be our true unmasked honest selves and it was fucking amazing, and then the rest of the world got online and decided to use it as an angry toilet.

The idea that personal ideology is a continuum from right to left and that people who cannot reliably be expected to vote for one party or another must be in the center is the kind of thing you can only believe if you don’t know anyone who didn’t go to grad school

To me, this is when the web began. Not the memo of an idea, asking for permission to work on it. Ideas are everywhere. An idea is not A Real Product. The day something ships is the day it’s in the hands of customers. Which, for the web, was April 30, 1993: yes webmasters, now you can make websites!

Unbreaking — How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us. Unbreaking — How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.

we're doing the thing unbreaking.org

Excited to see how the unforced economic crash is worsened by the (spins wheel) peruvian iguana foot virus in (rolls dice) three months as a result of medical misinformation spread by (pulls lever) robert f kennedy jr’s elle magazine girlfriend at (guides ouija board) gayle king’s bastille day party

Like any true gentleman does

Our Online Homes Need Infastructure - The History of the Web A home online is about as essential as it gets. But we need to make that easier. Where are we heading to build this new web together?

Another great piece by @jayhoffmann.bsky.social : thehistoryoftheweb.com/our-online-h...

"Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms..."

Thanks to AI coding tools and open source software, I'm back at building my own infrastructure to run my homepage, podcast feed, newsletter, courses.

This is the only correct way to cross the street.

My favorite NYers are the ones that still go ahead and cross the street in front of an oncoming ambulance— but they speed up their ambling walk to a slight jog, so everyone sees they’re AWARE and CONSIDERATE

If you haven't had a chance to pick up Ethan's book yet, this lovely new design seems like a perfect excuse.

Refresh. — ethanmarcotte.com In 2023, I wrote a book. Several months later, my publisher closed its doors. And now? We’re back, and better than ever.

🦊

I am downright delighted to announce that my latest book, YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION, has a brand new look. I really love it, and I hope you do too.

Here’s a look at what’s changed and—maybe more importantly—what’s stayed the same:

ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/refres...

#YDATUbook #books #unions #1u

Expanding Access: The History of Ecommerce Part 1 - The History of the Web The earliest work with selling things online was all about reaching a shopping public ready to log on and start. But along the way, they found a whole new audience for shopping, which changed the way ...

I have a couple of angles I want to come at this from, but here's my first post on the history of online shopping and what we now call ecommerce.

thehistoryoftheweb.com/expanding-ac...

For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person — from artificial intelligence labs, from government — has been coming to me saying: It’s really about to happen. We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence. What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer — but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it’s coming in two to three years, during Donald Trump’s second term. They believe it because of the products they’re releasing right now and what they’re seeing inside the places they work. And I think they’re right. If you’ve been telling yourself this isn’t coming, I really think you need to question that. It’s not web3. It’s not vaporware. A lot of what we’re talking about is already here, right now. I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don’t know what this will look like, what it will feel like. We don’t know how labor markets will respond. We don’t know which country is going to get there first. We don’t know what it will mean for war. We don’t know what it will mean for peace.

I recently used Deep Research, which is a new OpenAI product. It’s on their pricier tier. Most people, I think, have not used it. But it can build out something that’s more like a scientific analytical brief in a matter of minutes. I work with producers on the show. I hire incredibly talented people to do very demanding research work. And I asked Deep Research to do this report on the tensions between the Madisonian Constitutional system and the highly polarized nationalized parties we now have. And what it produced in a matter of minutes was at least the median of what any of the teams I’ve worked with on this could produce within days. I’ve talked to a number of people at firms that do high amounts of coding, and they tell me that by the end of this year or next year they expect most code will not be written by human beings. I don’t really see how this cannot have labor market impact. I think that’s right. I’m not a labor market economist, but I think that the systems are extraordinarily capable. In some ways, I’m very fond of the quote: The future is already here — it’s just unevenly distributed. Unless you are engaging with this technology, you probably don’t appreciate how good it is today. And it’s important to recognize that today is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only going to get better.

Ezra Klein may be the single most credulous dope in the world. Deep Research is total crap, and a "former AI expert to the Biden white house" spouting fan fiction about AGI is useless, wasteful and only seeks to help valuations of AI companies. Despicable.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/o...

+ you don’t even need the “large” in LLM to do a pretty solid job here. SLMs have proven pretty effective.

It’s building a sand castle with a bulldozer, except the bulldozer is plowing down rainforests.

your reminder that i'm currently tracking changes to the homepages of 1,373 federal domains since february 4 and if you need any historical data about changes made to a particular domain since that date, i'm happy to provide it.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people:
18f.org

If anyone would like to send multiple in-depth reports about your week to our pals in the federal government, here you go

what the fuck is git switch -c

Text

Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.