#stateoftheweb — Public Fediverse posts

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

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“We … find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity.”

https://ai-on-the-internet.github.io/ #AI #StateOfTheWeb

Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #FickleFutures

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

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Read the Rest → https://www.https://the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/network-web-design-the-events-that-shaped-the-web-in-1998-1044950.html

#StateOfTheWeb #WebDesignHistory #1998WebTrends #BrowserWars #WebStandards #Masto #CranfordTeague

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“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-c... #architecture #StateOfTheWeb

Why we're rethinking cache for...

“Long term, we expect that a separate cache layer for AI traffic will be the best way forward. Imagine a cache architecture that routes human and AI traffic to distinct tiers deployed at different layers of the network.” – Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/rethinking-cache-ai-humans/ #architecture #StateOfTheWeb #caching #AI #Cloudflare

What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?

The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium. What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?

Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take of words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @[email protected] pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.1

So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!

There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture (already skewered by Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, 14.2-8). But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.

PS. Some people call attacking the source of the information an argumentum ad fontem. If you use that, and you want to be clear to young people without Latin who might confuse fons “source of information” and fons “fountain of lies”, you could all the appeal to chatbot an argumentum ad automaton. Greek words were popular in working Latin although pagan writers avoided them in literature. But I think it important that every language have spicy words for the bad and malevolent technology which is American-style generative AI.

(scheduled 23 March 2026)

1. I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎

What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?

The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium. What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?

Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take of words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @[email protected] pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.1

So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!

There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture. But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.

(scheduled 23 March 2026)

1. I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎

What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?

The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium. What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?

Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take of words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @[email protected] pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.1

So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!

There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture. But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.

(scheduled 23 March 2026)

1. I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎

What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?

The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium. What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?

Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take of words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @[email protected] pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.1

So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!

There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture. But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.

(scheduled 23 March 2026)

1. I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎

I am No Longer on Academia.edu

academia.edu has introduced new terms of service allowing them to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name , voice, signature (!), photograph, and likeness, for any purpose forever. That is clearly a proposal to let them generate fake podcasts or videos of you talking about your work, powered by bullshit generators. To delete your account next time you log in, click “privacy policy,” then put your mouse over your username in the upper right, then click “account settings” and look for the option to delete.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.

https://www.academia.edu/terms

Academia was popular with scholars in ancient world studies and Assyriology, so I used it by default but never uploaded any papers after my MA.

James Bailie recommends Knowledge Commons at hcommons.org as a place to host your papers which is run by scholars not shareholders and respects your rights.

If you are comfortable with programming gems, Ryan Baumann has a tool to download from the site without logging in and agreeing to the new terms of service. https://github.com/ryanfb/academia-dl

academia.edu is well known for spamming you and for making aggressive claims to anything you upload to it. Sarah Emily Bond already warned about it in 2017. And remember the last pre-war Dutch census!

(scheduled 18 September 2025)

#modern #stateOfTheWeb

What a weird snippet of a Wikipedia page!
Is that from Wikipedia or yet some more unadvised AI malarkey, I wonder?

#wikipedia #ai #stateOfTheWeb #duckduckgo

Understand trends and projections in the #type industry.

With insights from 4,777 participants across more than 13 countries, the 2024 Global Font Use & Forecasting Survey by Monotype and Censuswide  investigates what #design industry members are looking for and why they choose certain #fonts. 

https://www.monotype.com/resources/ebook/global-font-use-forecasting-survey-2024?zeldielocks

#fonts #typefaces #surveys #design #monotype #StateoftheWeb #StateofDesign

“As cool as any technology may be, we need to be sure we’re not rapidly generating inequality at scale.” @davatron5000

https://daverupert.com/2023/10/accessiblity-shamed/ #a11y #StateoftheWeb #DevelopersReflect

Auto-playing video on websites is the same energy as playing your music on speaker on the subway.
#web #stateoftheweb #firstworldproblems

…put another pot on the stove, it's a long one…

☕️🍵🫖🧉

#Fallout #rewild #rewilding #infrastructure #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet #WalledGarden

Another, even better, piece about the state of the web:

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

via the powerful Manual Moreale:
https://manuelmoreale.com

#rewild #rewilding #blog #resilience #sotw #StateOfTheWeb #search #internet

What’s in a job title? @elly explains why good old “web design” is the best way to understand what she does—and maybe what you do, too.

#webdesign #frontend #webstandards #design #stateoftheweb

https://zeldman.com/2024/04/03/the-more-things-change-or-whats-in-a-job-title/

In A List Apart, for people who make websites: @stegrainer reviews the history of the web, analyzes where we are now, and shares how we can shape a better web future.

https://alistapart.com/article/the-wax-and-the-wane-of-the-web/ Illustration: Dougal MacPherson

#StateoftheWeb #WebStrategy #webdesign #webdevelopment #ux

☞ “I built an Ultra-Lean, Web Components enhanced, no-build, no-dependencies boilerplate for PWAs, using only the Modern Web.”

https://medium.com/@neerventure/purepwa-a-radical-u-turn-in-web-development-a386c0dc092e

Hat tip: @Aaron #webstandards #StateoftheWeb #webdesign #development #webdevelopment #PWAs #W3C

I feel like a lot of the web nowadays is bloated, suffering from a chronic inability to "get to the point".

Most times, an article will tease you with a small piece of information and then run around in circles for three pages before revealing it.

While I understand why this happens (SEO, Google optimization, Ads), it's frustrating to say the least.

That's why I'm excited about LLMs and their capability to cut the fat out of an article when asked nicely.

#stateoftheweb #bingchat #llm

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Not how any of this works…

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#stateOfTheWeb