Firehose

Vale.Rocks appears to be almost entirely functional in Ladybird now. Few tiny little hiccups, but I’d say ~95% of it works. Performance still has a bit to go, but Ladybird has come a long way since my last test.

Servo still has a bit further to go but has made some significant progress recently.

I truly do find it extremely difficult to type ‘http’ without automatically suffixing an s.

I love that the same brands which once carefully curated their identity and adhered to stringent brand guidelines are now slopping out brand resources with random image generators that smush their wordmark and butcher their logo.

Junior designers used to be crucified for lesser failings.

So, the web has better responsive images now. That’s great.

But, when will the web be getting responsible images? I’m sick of all the delinquents roaming the web like they own the place.

International Search Engine Landscape

For most of the world, Google Search is the search engine. So much so that it has become a verb in conversation – to ‘Google’ something. Even if you use another option, you still likely think of Google Search first.

However, there are many countries where Google has fierce competition and is even sometimes surpassed. In China, Baidu Search is the standard, with Bing holding a fairly significant market share as well. In Russia, Yandex dominates the search market. Popular in South Korea is Naver.

There are also some countries where non-Google search engines have a significant hold, but not quite as substantial. Yandex is popular in Russia’s neighbouring countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. Yahoo! and Bing are both rather popular in Japan. Seznam remains rather popular in the Czech Republic, and Cốc Cốc does reasonably in Vietnam.

A common reason for these engines being popular is their handling of local languages using non-Latin scripts. Censorship and compliance with government regulations also influence their success.

These search engines are worth keeping front of mind if you’re targeting an aforementioned country or localising for them.

I’m looking for a device I can use for WebKit/Safari testing. However, I can’t justify splashing too much cash on a Mac that I’ll scarcely use.

I’m looking at something with Apple Silicon so that it won’t be dropped by the next software update. Currently considering a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with a broken screen, which I can use headless. Maybe a Mac Mini, but they’re pretty scarce on the second-hand market. People seem to hang onto iMacs long-term, so they aren’t really around.

Thinking the Neo down the line, perhaps.

Any thoughts?

Communism works on paper but fails in practice. Wikipedia fails on paper but works in practice. All my ideas fail on paper and then are proven failures in practice.

Sometimes you find yourself deep in the decaying bowels of the archived Safari HTML Reference and you’ve just got to look at yourself and ask ‘Where did I go wrong?’

Vague posting is going to make the work of future historians so very difficult indeed.

Avoid GoDaddy

I always caution people against using GoDaddy. It may be the largest domain registrar, but it is also the worst I know of.

There are a great deal of reasons why. So many, in fact, that there exists an entire Wikipedia page: Controversies surrounding GoDaddy. However, even that multi-thousand-word page only covers the tip of the iceberg. It misses out so many more issues.

GoDaddy does a lot of domain squatting – more than I’ve seen from any other ‘legitimate’ registrar. GoDaddy keeps giving away people’s domains, even when they’ve been registered for decades. They’re spineless and willing to twist to corrupt agendas and are notorious for terrible support. It seems all the money they make goes to paying big-name actors to star in advertisements so they can ensnare new victims, rather than improving their actual product.

Their domain prices are also consistently higher than other services when I’ve compared them. I can’t think of a single benefit to choosing GoDaddy.

Scraping Isn't A Reason Not To Write Alt Text

As a general rule, I don’t follow accounts or share content that neglect alt text. If someone seems open to growth, I usually try to contact them politely to explain the importance of alt text for accessibility.

I get varied responses. Some people thank me for cluing them in and make a change, and some people say they want to provide alt text but don’t know how (a good approach is to write like you’re describing something over the phone). Other people make the argument that people with disabilities don’t view their work, which is a common, lazy, ableist, and flawed claim made by people who don’t care about accessibility.

One argument that I adamantly dislike is: ‘I don’t put alt text on photos because it helps companies train AI’. At the core of this argument is prioritising inconveniencing AI companies over helping fellow humans – an ineffective attempt at sabotaging AI training by harming real people while doing virtually nothing to hinder AI corporations.

If training is your worry, consider that by omitting alt text, or worse, providing garbage, you are teaching AI systems and other people that alt text isn’t necessary and can be abused. Surely, at the end of the day, making things better for fellow humans is more important than making things insignificantly worse for AI systems?

Also, why risk publishing anything on the web if it is vulnerable to scraping? And why, specifically, draw the line at assistive technologies?

It is my true and honest opinion that every logo design process should involve a step of presenting the concept to a 14-year-old boy so they can identify anything phallic.

All my love to Adobe Illustrator, which has today decided I don’t need to use the shortcut Ctrl + Z. Wonderful stuff. Much appreciated.

My undo privileges have been undone.

I’m reducing my LinkedIn presence.

I’ve come to realise I don’t really benefit from a presence on LinkedIn. It attracts spam, scams, and unwanted messages. It also doesn’t help me find work – I’ve gotten more work from Bluesky than LinkedIn!

The content on LinkedIn is not useful to me. The people I care about are more present on other platforms, and I get more AI prose and images in my feed than I do genuine content. The relevant information I do get is often false, with there being a lot of accessibility slop in particular.

LinkedIn is run by Microsoft and cosy with the United States’ regime. It has removed protections for transgender individuals and fails to properly moderate misinformation. The platform actively penalises certain content, such that I don’t feel free to say what I want or to link freely.

LinkedIn also absolutely chugs whenever I try to use it. Perhaps that is related to scanning everyone’s computers for installed browser extensions. The site is very poorly optimised for mobile and consistently pushes me to use the app.

I’m not leaving entirely, as having an account makes it easier to combat accounts that steal my work, and having no presence on the platform can prove a red flag for some. I have cleared out my profile, though. If you wish to contact me or want to keep up with what I’m doing, my site has all you need.

Reaction to Reactions

I’ve been trying in relative vain to figure out how I feel about people reacting to my content. I’ve had enough success that YouTubers and streamers alike have published reactions to my content.

These reactions don’t fall under fair use or fair dealing in most cases, so legally they’re pretty grey. I’ve seen some reaction channels which I think could reasonably class their content as transformative, not only reacting to one piece of content but also cross-referencing it with other relevant bits of information and sometimes anecdotes to present a wider degree of information.

However, I’ve also seen some channels which fail to build on the source material. I’ve seen videos of streamers leaving a video playing while taking a break from the stream or sitting in silence for minutes while letting content play. I’ve had people read my content verbatim without any input of their own. I’ve also seen people butcher my work by failing to fully read or comprehend it, such that they critique my work in front of their followers without having done due diligence.

I’ve never seen any evidence of significant traffic to my site from video hosting sites, indicating that the people who watch reaction content don’t generally follow the links to view the source content themselves. Why would they? What have they to gain from visiting the source when they’ve just been exposed to the content in full via another medium?

I think that, in the majority of cases, the original creator should be consulted before their content is reacted to. If you do try to have the content taken down for infringement, influencer culture means that it can backfire by stirring up quite the drama, even if you’re in the right.

I like to think I know a lot, but given how much there is to know I’m certain I actually know very little. I’m so privileged that the front-end community is such an open place willing to share and distribute knowledge freely.

I look forward to learning so much more.

One of my ‘rules’ is to not make notes in design files. It forces me to make fresh judgements every time, which helps me re-evaluate my work more objectively.

Living in a Commonwealth country, I get a lot of exposure to the British royal family. I despise the fact that a royal family has any power in the modern age. I entirely fail to see how a monarchy is any less authoritarian than a dictatorship. Leaders should be democratically elected based on their virtues, not because of arbitrary factors such as being born into a specific family.

I feel sometimes we collectively fail to appreciate how underpowered computers of the past were. Especially when it comes to game consoles.

This level of performance was in pursuit of a lower price point, and games only managed to be as impressive as they were because they could target fixed hardware. Optimisations could be made for specific resolutions, processors, GPUs, and provided system-specific APIs, which isn’t possible with the wide array of configurations seen in general-purpose computers, even if many personal computers had rivalling hardware.

There are some fantastic edits of films by dedicated fans which take the same source media in different aspect ratios from different releases (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, widescreen, open mattes, scans, etc) and combine them to present the most comprehensive picture. Unfortunately because they don’t overlap perfectly, corners can be left lacking visual content, as represented by the orange below:

This has traditionally been addressed with ambient lighting fills, which are gradients based on the available image, but this can look jarring – it is just a blurry approximation after all.

I think filling these voids with generative outpainting is a good application of generative AI. It doesn’t detract from the art due to being confined to the very corners, and it allows the art to be more fully appreciated by reducing distraction. This is in contrast to AI conversions from 4:3 to 16:9, which I feel introduce significant alterations to the framing and context surrounding the content.

The Deal With Japanese Loanwords

Japanese is full of 外gai来rai語go (loanwords), especially from English. A lot of these words end up sounding like English terms with a Japanese accent.

For example, ‘table’ translates to テtēーーブbuルru. The reason for the pronunciation change is that Japanese has a strict moraic structure where most consonants must be followed by a vowel, which here introduces a ‘u’ (though in most dialects it is a devocalised vowel). Additionally, Japanese has a single liquid phoneme, rather than distinct /r/ and /l/ sounds, so the English /l/ sound becomes a Japanese /r/ sound. Thus, テtēーーブbuルru.

Some people misinterpret adoption of a Japanese accent for pronunciation as insensitive, but the language’s phonetic structure necessitates use of Japanese phonology. Words adopted into Japanese are transcribed into Katakana – the original versions are incorrect in Japanese. Using the native Japanese rhythm ensures the word is recognisable and flows naturally within the sentence.

I don’t think enough people really talk about the fact that our prime minister here in Australia went swimming one day and then just disappeared. Genuinely just vanished then got replaced.

Nobody really knows what happened to him, though we did later name a swimming pool after him and there are many theories.

‘Look Tony, what are the odds of a prime minister being drowned or taken by a shark?’

— Harold Holt, prime minister of Australia, who presumably drowned.

I’m unsure what I did to piss them off, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to the delinquent who sent me ‘Fuck You’ without further elaboration via every single public communication channel of mine they could find.

> Post about how bad accessibility overlays are on LinkedIn
> Get message notification
> ‘I saw your recent post, but our overlay is different. Check it out!’

🫥

Also, pro tip, if you’re trying to shill your overlay and prove that you’re different, don’t use the term ‘handicapped’.

Even pro-er tip: Just stop with the accessibility overlays. There is something seriously wrong with you if you think exploiting or jeopardising people with disabilities is an opportunity to make a quick buck.

Chinese Pronunciation Cheat Sheet

Chinese pronunciations are not intuitive for English speakers. The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, also known as Hanyu Pinyin or just pīnyīn, is a romanised version of Chinese that uses Latin letters in ways that don’t match typical English usage.

This cheat sheet is not comprehensive but does cover the basics and many common pitfalls.

Consonants

The primary hurdle is the distinction between the J, Q, X sounds (tongue forward/down) and the Zh, Ch, Sh sounds (tongue curled back).

Vowels & Combinations

Pinyin vowels often change their sound based on the consonants they follow.

Common Pitfalls

• The Hidden ‘ü’: When the ü sound follows J, Q, X, or Y, the umlaut is dropped. Even if written as Ju, it is pronounced like Jü.
• The ‘ui’ Shortcut: Pinyin -ui is shorthand for -uei. Therefore, Hui sounds more like ‘Hway’ than ‘Hoo-ee’.
• Unvoiced Consonants: In Pinyin, B, D, and G are ‘unvoiced’. This means B sounds closer to a soft English P, and D sounds closer to a soft English T.

The Four Tones

1. First (mā): High and level (like a sustained singing note).
2. Second (má): Rising (like a question: ‘What?’).
3. Third (mǎ): Low and dipping (like a slow, hesitant ‘Well…’).
4. Fourth (mà): Sharp and falling (like a firm command: ‘Stop!’).