Technology in focus
🤖 This piece by Benji Portwin on how LLMs are transforming e-commerce and websites looks at how chatbots are closing the gap between ‘low intent’, exploratory searches, and ‘high intent’ purchase-focused searches, and how your brand can stay relevant.
💡Fabulously insightful (and sweary) read from Thomas Ptacek on why AI sceptics are wrong about programming. Among its many wisdoms: “Developers all love to preen about code. They worry LLMs lower the “ceiling” for quality. Maybe. But they also raise the “floor”.” At the same time, Martin Fowler sees AI as a new kind of abstraction: one that introduces non-determinism into programming.
😱 For a healthy dose of AI scepticism: LLMs are extremely good at seeming plausible, which is why users may not notice, as writer Amanda Guinzburg did, how easily and frequently they lie to you. Perhaps it's no wonder the new pope - whose name is a nod to his stance on the tech revolution - sees AI as a threat to humanity.
🧰 Tim O’Reilly on what ‘AI first’ really means. TL;DR, it doesn’t mean ‘AI only’. It’s about re-envisioning how things are done with the use of AI: “asking ourselves how we might do it…. if we were coming fresh to the problem with this new toolkit”. As the many companies misunderstanding 'AI first’ will discover, “those that use AI simply to reduce costs and replace workers will be outcompeted by those that use it to expand their capabilities.” It’s a sentiment echoed by ethical AI expert Margaret Mitchell.
📱 Is Apple sacrificing its accessibility principles with iOS 26? An analysis of Apple’s new design element, Liquid Glass, and its implications for user-centredness: “More than anything, iOS 26 seems like a change that’s driven by the need to appear innovative, not by real user needs.” As the history of tap design also teaches us, the drive for ingenuity can seriously get in the way of meeting user needs.
🏞️ Finally, a potted history of the JPEG, and why the thirty-year-old file format isn’t going anywhere. |
