Firehose

Last night I crept into your house under the cover of darkness and made almost imperceivable modifications to your browser’s user-agent stylesheet.

Changes just impactful enough that you will be mildly inconvenienced. I chucked a few !importants in there as well.

My evil knows no bounds.

“Your website should be a home/garden/portfolio/blog/etc.”

No. It should be a grimoire, dammit.

You use * + * because it is a useful CSS snippet. I use * + * because I think it looks funny, and I like saying ‘lobotomised owl’.

We are not the same.

A word of advice: don’t have a default username system if you’re running an online service which you’ll need to moderate.

Automated accounts will use these default names, which allows them to blend in with genuine users using default names and makes it harder to spot patterns.

Sometimes I push to prod simply because I’ve grown to hate my creation and wish to watch it suffer and toil in this cruel world at the twisted hands of deranged users.

Other times I feel sorry and have sympathy, so my pushes to prod are because I can’t bear to watch my own creation flounder alone within the confines of my machine with me as its sole tormentor any longer.

Part of becoming better at a craft is to reflect on shortcomings and to see what can be improved and iterated upon. I feel like a lot of people forget to do that bit when “moving fast and breaking things”.

Words, laid bare. Branded with the mark of shame: ‘[sic]’. The textual equivalent of a public flogging. Execution in bracketed form.

Carousels are a web staple. Websites use them, and thus people do in turn. They’ve garnered a lot of hate over the years, primarily due to being largely inaccessible and poor ways of presenting information, yet still they persist. So, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The Chrome team put together Carousels with CSS which Sara Soueidan has examined in extreme depth. My main takeaway from the main article and Sara’s analysis is that while this is a vague step in the correct direction, it doesn’t address any of the core issues like accessibility and introduces new ones. I was disappointed to see the approach taken in regard to addressing those issues and think Eric Eggert hit the nail on the head.

It completely fails with regard to separation of concerns by using CSS for structure, rather than HTML. I don’t know how to address that other than asking why? I’ve noticed a lot of new CSS features, especially ones with the Chrome team’s influence, are getting a little too markup-y for my liking. David Bushell has covered this and the overreliance of pseudo-elements with touchings on the carousel kerfuffle.

HTML is for structure, CSS is for styling, JS is for anything that can’t be achieved with HTML/CSS, and accessibility isn’t omittable. We should be striving to build a web that is both functional and inclusive. Respect the web; respect users.

I wanted to see how the times Bluesky posts are published affect the popularity of those posts, so I put together a super quick and dirty little tool to do that.

https://tools.vale.rocks/bluesky-posting-analyser

My findings lined up with my hypothesis that posts around American mornings and evenings merit the most activity.

I was surprised to see that weekends are popular within technical communities, as I expected engagement to drop off when people aren’t ‘working’.

HTML. CSS. JavaScript.

Long ago, the three nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when The Frameworks attacked.

If you’re on Twitter/X, I think less of you.
If you’re on Substack, I think less of you.
If you’re on Facebook/Instagram, I think less of you.

To remain on them knowing the damage they are doing and facilitating is to comply with and endorse their actions. There isn’t an excuse for staying.

A local developer has been found dead. Upon interviewing their family, we discovered they’ve repeatedly been found typing alone in an empty IRC chat at odd hours of the morning regarding creating a “revolutionary new technology”. Police believe they were attempting to reinvent the literal wheel.

I always feel dirty talking about type. Serifs with lovely ball terminals. Soft shoulders. Attractive curves. Deep inktrap crotches. Beautiful eyes. Broad arms. Long, slender legs. Tittles.

(I mean, good typography is sexy – even ignoring the trade diction.)

If you ask for help, and someone decides to help you, and they ask you clarifying questions so they can provide that help, don’t fight them!

Don’t question their questions and push back; they’re asking for a reason.

As developers, our goal is to build something to be used. Part of this is ensuring it can be used by anyone and caters to everyone.

Accessibility isn’t a separate concept or goal. Making something more accessible for some people makes it better for all people, and that is our greater intent.

Remember when we used to talk about new technologies and say, “This is the worst it’ll ever be”?

I miss those days.

To avoid leaving heat stains on my wooden desk, I’ve been using my 3D printer as a coaster for my cups of tea.

An unplanned benefit is that the heated bed also works to keep them warm if I’m so inclined.

A lot of people fork my projects on GitHub and then do nothing with them. I was curious as to why so many do this, so I’ve asked some of them, and they all say it is for the sake of archival.

I’m not quite sure how effective of a strategy that is…

There is a tendency for the last 1% to take the longest time.

I wonder if that long last 1% will be before AGI, or ASI, or both.

It scares me how many people reply to no-reply email addresses. So many responses to sign-up confirmations and password resets with messages like ‘OK’ or ‘thank you’.

Do they think there is a human responding? Or do they just think it prudent to thank the automated machines? I’m perplexed.

YOLO (You Only Live Once) is just as much justification not to do something as it is to do something, yet it is rarely treated as such.

Tangentially, you don’t hear YOLO as a phrase very often anymore. Maybe those YOLOers with gung-ho inclinations wiped themselves out and took the phrase with them?

A good plot doesn’t thicken – it coagulates.

Google Search Console giveth, and Google Search Console taketh away.

For a fleeting 12 minutes I had it all.

Note to self:
Never have testing and prod open on the same machine. You will get confused no matter how good of an idea it seems at the time.

One of the most impactful moments of my life occurred while I was whistling. My friend, unintentionally packing his words with the psychological impact of a sawn-off shotgun at point-blank range, said, “You know you’re supposed to change notes, yeah?”

Years later I’m still not sure I’ve recovered.

I found a website on the ground and completely inaccessible. Next to it? A bottle of ARIA. It must have taken too much and overdosed.

Kids, always use ARIA in moderation, and never ARIA on an empty semantic.

I’ve been thinking about loanwords in language. How long have we got these words on loan for? Will they be taken back? What is the fee to buy them outright? Who should I talk to about this?

I just wanted to let everyone know that . is the root of all TLDs.

This means that, for example, vale.rocks. is a valid domain. vale is a child of rocks, which is itself a child of ..

You are now burdened with this knowledge.

Nice to see Figma are building tools for web divelopment now. They’re really spanning that gap.

I’d like to thank the HTTP ‘referer’ header field for permanently ruining my ability to correctly spell the word ‘referrer’.

Elle just added a blog feed to her website and included me in it, along with a little pixel me!

I love the entire feed reader! Her attention to detail with having all the buttons work and adding the ability to save drawings is fantastic! Her site is a treasure trove of little interactive gadgets and gizmos that is well worth checking out!

I had the pleasure of ‘beta testing’ this visual essay a little while ago. It is a right and proper banger, as all of Sam Rose’s work is.

Make sure to click on anything and everything!

https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/

I am evidently powerless to resist the alluring temptation of chocolate-coated coffee beans.

I often have issues with sharing cross-origin resources, which results in me throwing my computer out a window.

This is referred to as CORS and effect.

I hate the argument, “Humans are bad at X, so LLMs must be really bad at X.”

There are flaws with LLMs, but this is a poor argument. They are fundamentally different to humans, and just because we fumble at something doesn’t mean LLMs do (and vice versa).

Video footage of me making my way through the swarms of people trying to hand me a ‘how to vote’ card at the Australian federal election today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtPBNvhnim4

Cloudflare, its interface a mess.
It’s breaking my site and causing duress.

These settings confuse me, I must declare;
Working this out is quite the affair.

I hate it so much, but I don’t care.
Actually, I do, and I’m pulling out hair.

Well now look what you’ve gone and done! You’ve spilt JavaScript all over my lovely semantic HTML. Dammit! It leaked onto my CSS as well.

Go grab a cloth and clean up this mess.

As it is getting rather close to publication, it seems prudent to advertise that I’m writing a novel!

Tad unusual for me, but it’s a proper, comprehensive work of fiction.

I’ll have more details to share in time, but it is pretty much Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets the corporate shittery of Silicon Valley venture capital.

“The web is my canvas,” I confess as the people watching over my shoulder observe me open a text editor and tile a browser window. “CSS is my brush; MDN, my muse.”

CSS has taken me places I wouldn’t go with a gun.

I’ve been testing the new Qwen3 today. I don’t have the compute for the higher parameter models, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with 0.6b.

It is such a derpy little model.

Here is a thinking extract I found rather humorous:

Okay, the user said, “Hi Qwen. Nice shoes.” Let me think about how to respond.

First, the user greeted me with a friendly “Hi” and complimented my shoes. I need to acknowledge their compliment politely.

Since I’m an AI, I don’t have shoes, so I should explain that. Maybe say something like, “Hi there! I don’t have shoes.”