This week's best things

Why Japanese Websites Look So Different

I’m always fascinated by very different approaches to the shared medium of the internet.

This long read from Mirijam Missbichler is a great deep dive into the various historic, cultural, and technical reasons why Japanese websites often look very different to the design approach we’ve come to expect from European and North American sites.

“To create a font from scratch in English you’ll be looking at around 230 glyphs — a glyph being a single representation of a given letter (A a a counting as 3 glyphs) — or 840 glyphs if you want to cover all languages based on the Latin alphabet. For Japanese, as a result of the three different writing systems and countless Kanji, you will be easily looking at 7,000–16,000 glyphs or even more. So, creating a new font in Japanese requires both an organized team effort and a lot more time than its Latin counterparts. […]

And with less designers rising to this particular challenge, there are less fonts to choose from when building a website. Add this to the lack of capitalization and Japanese fonts being accompanied by longer loading times due to referencing larger libraries, and you end up with having to use different means in order to create visual hierarchy.”

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

A piece in the New Yorker looking at the ChatGPT-driven explosion into the mainstream of AI tools

“A little more than a year ago, the world seemed to wake up to the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence when OpenAI released ChatGPT, an application that enables users to converse with a computer in a singularly human way. Within five days, the chatbot had a million users. Within two months, it was logging a hundred million monthly users—a number that has now nearly doubled. Call this the year many of us learned to communicate, create, cheat, and collaborate with robots.”

On a related note is this research from Carnegie Mellon and AI startup, Hugging Face that quantifies the energy usage of these AI tools. The tl;dr is that they use a load of energy, and - the research highlights - that “most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use”.

It includes some staggering illustrations, such as ChatGPT requiring c500ml of water for every 20-50 questions answered, and that generating an image with an AI tool uses as much energy as charging your smartphone.

Matt Edgar’s weeknotes

I’ve long followed Matt Edgar’s work, he’s a UK-based digital designer, strategist, and leader - he currently works for the National Health Service (NHS).

His approach to weeknotes (a weekly summary of what he’s been up to and learned) is a really ‘steal-able’ set of questions that I suspect everyone would benefit from asking themselves on a regular basis.

These questions include reflections on:

• What did you enjoy?
• What do you wish you could have changed?
• What did you learn?
• What would you have liked to do more of?
• Who did you talk to outside of your organisation?
• What are you looking forward to next week?

Weeknote-ing (can you verb the noun?!) can be a useful habit to get into and the questions Matt regularly answers provides a good starting point if you’re trying to start a habit of regular reflection.

The quiet plan to make the internet feel faster

An article in The Verge about a new internet standard, L4S, that is being introduced that should make the internet feel faster.

“I’m sure many of you have also had the experience of cursing a slow-loading website and growing even more confused when a “speed test” says that your internet should be able to play dozens of 4K Netflix streams at once. So what gives?

Like any issue, there are many factors at play. But a major one is latency, or the amount of time it takes for your device to send data to a server and get data back — it doesn’t matter how much bandwidth you have if your packets (the little bundles of data that travel over the network) are getting stuck somewhere.

The good news is that there’s a plan to almost eliminate latency, and big companies like Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, and more have shown an interest. It’s a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren’t possible with the current realities of the internet.”

This viral game in China reinvents hide-and-seek for the digital age

A fascinating look by MIT Technology Review at a viral smartphone-enabled ‘cat and mouse’ game that has taken off in China this year:

“The “cat-and-mouse game,” as it’s usually referred to locally, has gone viral in China this year, drawing thousands of people across the country to events every week. It’s a fun combination of a childhood game, in-person networking, the latest location-sharing technology, and meme-worthy experience. When the game first emerged in February, videos of hide-and-seek players who went wild—climbing up trees, hiding in the sewers—got millions of views on social media.”

Low - Just Like Christmas

A favourite of mine.

If you’ve seen something interesting, stick it in the comments! The algorithms are invading our lives, but the best stuff is still discovered and shared through word of mouth.

Here’s last week’s round-up