Firehose

The doors of the vault have been blown wide open now, and everyone with pocket shrapnel is shoving it in the direction of their language model of choice in pursuit of glory. Somewhere in the past few months, emulation, decompilation, static recompilation, ports, and mods of games have exploded in numbers.

Decompilations – where compiled is returned to source code – have always been extremely complex, time-consuming efforts. There is a reason that only early games had seen decompilations until recently. Static recompilation – where compiled executables are transformed – is a slightly simpler effort, though still very difficult. Porting games between systems and modding them are further complex undertakings, varying in difficulty depending on target and scope.

Emulators, decompilations and recompilations specifically are huge feats. Some of the most impressive development feats I can think of. At least, they are under human effort. In recent months, however, the barrier has dropped substantially. In particular, there have perhaps been more recompilations in recent months than in recent years combined. It is hard to fathom the speed of development.

Other than the typical AI woes, one thing that is worrying with decompilations particularly is that there is undoubtedly leaked code in LLM training sets. What does this mean for the legality of these decompilations? They can’t reasonably be considered ‘clean room’.

As fantastic as this all is, I do worry about the repercussions. With the barrier lowered so much, how will game companies react? Will they fast-track a move to streaming-only distribution to stop binaries from being used for reverse engineering work and from people quickly running games on their own terms? I worry this will speed up the death of personal computing as companies turn it into a service.

I fear this threat outside of gaming, too. ArtCraft is an AI-generated suite cloning Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Lots of other software is seeing similar AI-generated clones or decompilations, too. This is effecting software by huge organisations with a lot of sway in a very poorly regulated climate. How are they going to act, and will users outside of the informed, technical few push back? I doubt it.

The amount of comments on recent videos by Kevin Powell saying ‘CSS is dead’, or ‘Surely Claude can just do it’, or ‘Opus could one-shot it’, or other permutations of the same thing is so disappointing.

What weirds me out most about these pro-AI comments are the people seemingly celebrating skill erosion. It seems forced, and I’m not sure what would compel someone to do so. Are they being paid by AI companies? Are they just trolls? Is this astroturfing?

There are two colour models: additive, and subtractive. Screens use additive colour, where red, green, and blue (RGB) are added to each other to create new colours. Print uses subtractive colour, where cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY) subtract from white light.

Additive relies on light being emitted from a surface, while subtractive relies on light reflecting off a light surface (like paper), which results in it having a much smaller gamut due to limits on how much light can be reflected. Because it can’t reproduce every colour, spot colours (pre-mixed single-colour inks) such as those from Pantone are commonly used.

Note that the combinations of two colours in RGB provide CMY, and vice versa. Looking at subtractive, one can observe that:

• Cyan absorbs red light (reflects green + blue).
• Magenta absorbs green light (reflects red + blue).
• Yellow absorbs blue light (reflects red + green).

Print actually uses CMYK, the K representing ‘Key’. Though a CMY alone can create dark colours, it isn’t optimal. The colour is often more of a dark brown than a full black, and printing with cyan, magenta, and yellow usually leads to less fine detail, leaving text fuzzy. For this reason, when printing black, there are three primary different methods used. Standard black (also called flat black or single-colour black) is just straight black ink, which is good for detail such as for text, but doesn’t quite reach pitch darkness. Rich black uses CMYK, meaning it uses those CMY colours paired with black (or ‘key’) ink to achieve a darker, more saturated black. Due to multiple layers of ink, some detail is lost, though.

Even darker is registration black, which is 100% of each cyan, magenta, yellow, and key for the darkest black possible. This does mean a lot of ink (400%) is used, however, which often leads to ink bleeding and smudging, longer drying, and warping of oversaturated paper stock. It is worth keeping in mind Total Ink Coverage (TIC) / Total Area Coverage (TAC), which is typically capped at ~240% for uncoated and ~300% for coated. For this reason, it is usually reserved for crop marks, trim lines, and such.

I attended DDD Perth for the second time today. This time, not just as an attendee, but also as a first-time speaker!

I caught a few talks, but there were two standouts of those I saw:

• Matthew Pierce presented Rethinking Web: Can we do more with less? about web platform features that can be embraced in place of frameworks, abstractions, and libraries,
• Sierra McDowell presented The pursuit of spending $0 - building a zero-cost cloud data platform which was a fun, free-tier-exploiting-tale.

One of the issues with a multi-track conference is that there are too many brilliant talks going on simultaneously, and one can’t be in five places at once!

I made a point to be very outgoing and talked to so many people. A few people recognised me from my work and name, which remains an extremely surreal experience, and I got to have interesting hallway chats with such a variety of folks with different skills.

My talk was titled ‘Newly Acquired Powers of the Web Platform’, and I ran through a handful of fantastic new features of the web platform. HTML and CSS have seen so many new additions in recent years, so I ran through text-wrap: balance, flex-wrap: balance, corner-shape, text-box, sibling functions, color-mix(), contrast-color(), invoker commands, scroll-driven and scroll-triggered animations, and view transitions, while cramming mentions of a few more additions in too. Jam-packed! I’d have included more if I wasn’t already on the edge of my time limit.

I had some nerves, though they were mostly pertaining to if my laptop and custom web-based slide deck system would work fine on the AV system of the venue. Rather than replicate the output of the code I was talking about in PowerPoint or similar, it felt proper to use the web directly. Thankfully, everything ran smoothly, and I managed through the presentation without issue. I was late out at the speaker’s dinner at the venue-adjacent pub last night and early rising to get prepared and to the conference, so I only got three and a half hours in the early hours of this morning. Perhaps not optimal, but I managed.

The industry is in a shaky state at the moment, so to have a brilliant community conference with 1000-odd attendees like DDD Perth is a welcome sight. I’m feeling very inspired. My talk is recorded and will be published online at a later date.

All my many thanks go to the volunteers, organisers, other speakers, sponsors, and everyone else that made the event possible.

Whenever I use a semicolon I feel like a pretentious twat.

Looking across the Swan River to the venue I’ll be speaking at feels like the scene in a video game where the title card comes up introducing the boss battle.

On Saturday I’ll be on stage giving my first conference talk across the Matagarup Bridge at Optus Stadium.

Welp, development industry is fucked. What is everyone’s plan B?

There’s nothing more we can do. It’s in the CI’s hands now.

A ‘pixel’ in CSS is not a true pixel as makes up a display.

A pixel in CSS is quite a complex unit, as is explained in CSS Values and Units Module Level 3. A CSS pixel is relative to the reference pixel:

The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a device pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm’s length. For a nominal arm’s length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm’s length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch).

As far as is needed for development in most cases, a CSS pixel can just be understood to vary a bit between displays. As printed output, of course, doesn’t have pixels, a CSS pixel in print represents 1⁄96^th of an inch.

Using ECMAScript’s devicePixelRatio, the size of a pixel on your display relative to a CSS pixel is unknown. Note that this figure may be unreliable if zoomed in Safari.

Using actual pixels has many issues. One of the most blatant is that many websites would slowly shrink as display technology improves and pixels themselves become steadily smaller. It’d also work oddly with zooming (do you scale a pixel, or leave as is?). Another is that it’d make sites much harder to author and would make responsive design much harder.

My hammer went rogue and started smashing people’s heads in! There was nothing I could do. I tried to stop it, but my arm kept swinging it at people. It isn’t my fault! It is the hammer’s. This is very dangerous. Someone should regulate hammers.

(This is a post about AI safety and liability.)

Over a decade ago I listed myself in my father’s phone as ‘Supreme Overlord’. To this day he hasn’t changed it, and will still say ‘Hey Siri, call Supreme Overlord’ to reach me. Gold.

Unless Halo under Activision reviews extraordinarily well and is free of predatory monetisation strategies, I probably won’t play any future games in the series.

Despite my love for the games, this is likely the killing blow for any excitement I had for future entries. Dreadful.

If ever you search for a song or musical artist on Bluesky, you’re likely to find the results flooded with automated accounts which post whenever a song is played by a specific radio station.

I find this noise rather annoying, so have compiled this moderation list for easily muting them:

https://bsky.app/profile/vale.rocks/lists/3mvyoavalic2m

Rather than the sound of water trickling, which indicates a typical leak, software memory leaks can be identified by the hiss of a fan.

I love the CSS spec’s take on supporting text-decoration: blink.

It may as well say,’Support it, don’t support it, nobody here gives a shit. Probably don’t make stuff blink though. We all know what a mess <blink> was.’

(Even before deprecation, none of the major browsers supported the value.)

The relevant bit of CSS Text Decoration Module Level 4: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-decoration-line-property

I’ve had quite a number of people tell me to stop bringing up ‘politics’ in my writing. For example, when I’ve decried Elon Musk and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) when mentioning X (formerly Twitter) and Omarchy, respectively.

Plainly, no. I will continue to mention injustices and wrongs. Tech is political – especially now.

The only people that are helped by staying quiet about bigotry, racism, fascism, xenophobia, etc, are the bigots, racists, fascists, and xenophobes.

I’ll call it out where I see it, and I urge everyone else to do the same.

I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022, and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023, when DigitalOcean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before DigitalOcean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June of 2024, who got the ship sailing again.

Now, CSS-Tricks sits inactive again. Its future is unclear, because there hasn’t been any communication. DigitalOcean largely just went silent. DigitalOcean is a big company, and it can be expected that things get missed, especially with staff turnover. However, management is a small part of a larger picture.

Only a few days ago, DigitalOcean pledged a $3,000,000 USD donation to Omarchy – a set of scripts and configurations atop Arch Linux and a range of other open-source software (much of which struggles greatly for funding). A set of scripts and configurations which are led by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), previously of Ruby on Rails fame, but now of Omarchy notoriety and far-right, racist infamy.

CSS-Tricks being ignored isn’t a matter of effort or time; it is a matter of care. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote announcing DigitalOcean’s funding:

But the part of this patronage that really made me smile was how quickly it all came together. I reached out to Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean’s CEO, on X on Wednesday. We had a call that same night. I sent a proposal on Saturday. By Sunday, we’d finalized everything.

I know Geoff has been trying to raise CSS-Tricks’ predicament for months, to no avail.

Atop of this, DigitalOcean has ceased the monthly $50 payments they previously gave to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure. Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon or to pay the writers and editors of their own publication.

Yes, I’ve got skin in the game as someone who has written for the publication, but I’ve got more skin in the game as someone who wishes for a thriving ecosystem and who wants to read the exemplary work CSS-Tricks is known for publishing. There are very few quality publications about the web left, and it would be a major blow to lose another.

I struggle tremendously to read ‘Yahoo!’ without hearing the epitomous yodel echo forth from the crevices of my fracturing mind.

I’m not sure if I spent the last week testing Internet Explorer, or if Internet Explorer spent the last week testing me.

Trying to surf the web while the spider who spun it injects digestive fluids into me and I become a slurry.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

From Fear & Loathing in America by Hunter S Thompson. Published September 12, 2001.

Sometimes you just need Internet Explorer 11. I won’t question why you need it, but here is how you can open it natively in Windows 11. If you try to execute iexplore.exe from C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer or via Run, Windows will instead open Microsoft Edge. There used to be various links around Windows’ interface which hadn’t been updated to Edge and thus could be used as a gateway. Unfortunately they’re almost all removed now so some slightly more complex methods are required.

The easiest method is to use this short PowerShell command: $ie = New-Object -ComObject InternetExplorer.Application; $ie.Visible = $true. Run it in PowerShell and Internet Explorer will open.

Another good approach is to create a Visual Basic Script (a file with the extension .vbs) with the below contents. When the script is run, Internet Explorer will open.

CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application").Visible = True

In most cases you’re best to use Microsoft Edge’s Internet Explorer mode.

Accurate as of Windows 11 version 25H2.

They’re trying to pry me away from the keyboard. They’re saying something about the browser going supercritical. They’re saying that the rendering engine is melting down. They’re yelling ‘Please! Please stop. Stop aligning so many divs!’. They’re watching as my computer begins to glow a hot red.