But on the second day, Sebastiaan spent a fair bit of time investigating a more complex use of service workers with the Push API.
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While I’m very unwilling to grant permission to be interrupted by intrusive notifications, I’d be more than willing to grant permission to allow a website to silently cache timely
content in the background. It would be a more calm technology.
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Then when I’m on a plane, or in the subway, or in any other situation without a network connection, I could still visit these websites and get content that’s fresh to me. It’s kind of
like background sync in reverse.
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Yes, yes, yes.The Push API’s got incredible potential for precaching, or even re-caching existing content. How about if you could always instantly open my web site,
whether you were on or off-line, and know that you’d always be able to read the front page and most-recent articles. You should be able to opt-in to “hot” push notifications if that’s
what you really want, but there should be no requirement to do so.
By the time you’re using the Push API for things like this, why not go a step further? How about PWA feed readers or email clients that use web-pushes to keep your Inbox full? What
about social network clients that always load instantly with the latest content? Or even analytics packages to push your latest stats to your device? Or turn-based online games that
push the latest game state, ready for you to make your next move (which can be cached offline and pushed back when online)?
There are so many potential uses for “quiet” pushing, and now I’m itching for an opportunity to have a play with them.
As she passed through Oxfordshire on Sunday, she spotted the stricken cow.
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Delightful. The “urban mermaid” Lindsey Cole has been swimming along the Thames as a mermaid in
order to raise awareness of plastic pollution. She spotted what she thought was a big white plastic sack and swam on, indicating to her support boat to pick it up… but when they caught
up they realised that it was a drowning cow! Some while later, they arranged for its successful rescue.
How well does the algorithm perform? Setting it up to work in LIME can be a bit of a pain, depending on your environment. The examples on Tulio Ribeiro’s Github repo are in Python and
have been optimised for Jupyter notebooks. I decided to get the code for a basic image analyser running in a Docker container, which involved much head-scratching and the installation
of numerous Python libraries and packages along with a bunch of pre-trained models. As ever, the code needed a bit of massaging to get it to run in my environment, but once that was
done, it worked well.
Below are three output images showing the explanation for the top three classifications of the red car above:
In these images, the green area are positive for the image and the red areas negative. What’s interesting here (and this is just my explanation) is that the plus and minuses for
convertible and sports car are quite different, although to our minds convertible and sports car are probably similar.
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A fascinating look at how an neural-net powered AI picture classifier can be reverse-engineered to explain the features of the pictures it saw and how they influenced its decisions. The
existence of tools that can perform this kind of work has important implications for the explicability of the output of automated decision-making systems,
which becomes ever-more relevant as neural nets are used to drive cars, assess loan applications, and so on.
Remember all the funny examples of neural nets which could identify wolves fine so long as they had snowy backgrounds, because of bias in their training set? The same thing happens with
real-world applications, too, resulting in AIs that take on the worst of the biases of the world around them, making them racist, sexist, etc. We need audibility so we can understand
and retrain AIs.
I love to discover people who are hugely and deeply passionate about things that seem inconsequential to the rest of the world. Especially when they’re especially able to express that
passion and how exciting their special-thing is, to them. This video (and to a lesser extent the others in the Small Thing Big Idea series) really embodies that; man, this woman
really likes pencils.
Inspirational, well thought-out proposal for a flag for unified, “for Earth” projects. The website is terrible, but the artwork’s great, and it’s always nice to see an artist focus on
the idea of “uniting humanity” in spite of our politically-fractured world.
Last week, I attended W3C TPAC as well as the CSS Working Group meeting there. Various changes were made to specifications, and discussions had which I feel are of interest to web
designers and developers. In this article, I’ll explain a little bit about what happens at TPAC, and show some examples and demos of the things we discussed at TPAC for CSS in
particular.
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This article describes proposals for the future of CSS, some of which are really interesting. It includes mention of:
CSS scrollbars – defining the look and feel of scrollbars. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not actually new: Internet Explorer 5.5 (and
contemporaneous version of Opera) supported a proprietary CSS extension that did the same thing back in 2000!
Aspect ratio units – this long-needed feature would make it possible to e.g. state that a box is square
(or 4:3, or whatever), which has huge value for CSS grid layouts: I’m excited by this one.
:where() – although I’ll be steering clear until they decide whether the related :matches() becomes :is(), I can see a million uses for this (and its widespread
existence would dramatically reduce the amount that I feel the need to use a preprocessor!).
When October Books, a small radical bookshop in Southampton, England, was moving to a new location down the street, it faced a problem. How could it move its entire stock to the new
spot, without spending a lot of money or closing down for long?
The shop came up with a clever solution: They put out a call for volunteers to act as a human conveyor belt.
Many parents remember the “Stranger Danger” message given to children during the 1970s and 80s. Government videos warned children not to talk to people they didn’t know. But a new
message is being trialled in the UK, which its creators think is better at keeping children safe.
“I tried to get the [old] Stranger Danger message across to my son a few years ago and it backfired badly,” says Suzie Morgan, a primary school teacher who lives in Fareham,
Hampshire.
He got frightened and confused, couldn’t sleep at night and was worried somebody was breaking into the house.
Like any parent she wanted to keep her child safe.
But she felt the Stranger Danger message she was teaching – which she herself had grown up with – was unhealthy for her six-year-old son, making him too afraid of the world.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says.
So she was hopeful when her son’s school piloted a new safety message. It’s called Clever Never Goes and
was devised by the charity Action Against Abduction.
It aims to make children less afraid of the world, by giving them the confidence to make decisions about their own personal safety.
Morgan says it has given her son more freedom and independence.
Are you a time-traveller? Just arrived in 2018? Want to know what the Web of our day is like? This. This is what it’s like (click through for the full horror).
Do you remember The Expert, that video from 2014 that had engineers around the world laughing and crying in equal
measure? Turns out that, earlier this year, a trio of sequels were made! This is the first of them.
On 14 June 2017, televisions across the country showed a west London tower block burn. For some, this was history repeating itself – as if five similar fires had simply not been
important enough to prevent the deaths of 72 people in Grenfell Tower.
Catherine Hickman was on the phone when she died. It wasn’t a panicked call or an attempt to have some last words with a loved one.
As a BBC Two documentary recounts, she had been speaking to a 999 operator for 40 minutes, remaining
calm and following the advice to “stay put” in her tower block flat.
As smoke surrounded her, she stayed put. As flames came through the floorboards, she stayed put. At 16:30, she told the operator: “It’s orange, it’s orange everywhere” before saying
she was “getting really hot in here”.
Believing to the last that she was in the safest place, she carried on talking to the operator – until she stopped.
“Hello Catherine.
“Hello Catherine. Can you make any noise so I know that you’re listening to me?
“Catherine, can you make any noise?
“Can you bang your phone or anything?
“Catherine, are you there?
“I think that’s the phone gone [CALL ENDS]“
Miss Hickman was not a resident of Grenfell Tower. The fire in which she and five others died happened in July 2009, at 12-storey Lakanal House in Camberwell, south
London. But that same “stay put” advice was given to Grenfell residents eight years later. Many of those who did never made it out alive.
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Excellently-written, chilling article about a series of tower block fires which foreshadow Grenfell: similar mistakes, similar tragedies. This promotes an upcoming BBC television programme broadcasting this evening; might be worth a look.
