Firehose

When reflecting on the past, I, like many others, cringe. However, I’ve come to consider this not as a source of regret but as a positive signal of growth.

I once heard the perspective that cringing about the past indicates growth from that time. You’re identifying that there are things you did at that point which were regrettable and which you would endeavour to avoid now. It is representative of the difference between your current self (your updated models, values, and social calibration) and the past self who performed the offending action.

Much of the time, things we look back and cringe about now we did not find cringe-worthy at the time, indicating a change has occurred.

Thus, cringe works somewhat as a measurement of growth. If you do not cringe at all looking back at past actions, then it implies one of two things:

1. Your past self was remarkably optimal and well-calibrated.
2. You haven’t significantly updated your models/values or changed since then, and you are unable to identify your past flaws.

I consider cringing as valuable data evidencing that self-correction and learning mechanisms are functioning.

Just updated my dev rig. Pretty sweet!

If anyone knows how to install Emmet and LSPs on this bad boy, let me know.

I’ve been jamming small wood chocks and rolled up bits of paper under this <div> for hours in an attempt to get it level, but I still can’t get it aligned quite right.

SEO is not a game of absolutes, and anyone who acts to the contrary is dubious at best.

Search engine optimisation is extremely complex. By design, nobody has a completely full and comprehensive understanding of search engine ranking – not even the people working at those search engines. This is intentional and done to prevent exploiting the system.

The same is true for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Artificial Intelligence Optimisation (AIO), but to an ever greater extent. LLMs are so complex and trained on so much data that they regularly do things unprompted and act in ways uninstructed. As it stands, even someone who knew all about the functionality of the models would be unable to speak in absolutes.

I’m not saying that SEO folk are scammers or conspicuous (though some are), but SEO/GEO/AIO experts who speak with complete certainty and in absolutes are doing so from a place of sales, not truth.

For as silly as I think it is, I think we should support people embracing accessibility technologies for the sake of AI agents by pointing them to the correct resources rather than pushing them away wholesale.

This is a chance to make a more accessible web, even if motivations are misguided.

By developing good, performant apps close to the web platform you save yourself a lot of time you’d otherwise waste on implementing skeletons and loading screens.

At the lights. We lock eyes. Him in orange car of yesteryear and me on unicycle. He revs. We turn attention to the road. Drag race.

The lights change. We go.

I gun it. He takes off slow. Gives me a brief chance.

He throws a hand out the window to wave farewell and speeds into the darkness.

I don’t trust the validity of academic papers not written in serifed type, and I certainly don’t trust certifications lacking blackletter.

Next time I write display: absolute, just kill me.

I always listen to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music when coding so I can hear how computers think.

I saw this place when I was in Malaysia.

All I could think of were weblogs. It overwhelmed my thoughts and consumed my mind each time I saw it. I’m too far gone.

Cool blog, dude.

I’d like to thank my superannuation fund for sending me an email full of images which all have the alt text ‘alt_text’.

Fun fact: If you write proper semantic code and don’t abstract everything with bloated frameworks, you don’t have to spend as much time faffing around with ARIA.

Me quickly cycling through all the CSS display properties: ‘Surely one of these bails me out…’

Hey guys. I need a few billion dollars in funding to make a diamagnetism-based human levitation machine. Anyone interested in investing?

True horror is having to start a writing session with this incantation:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

Revolt rebranded to Stoat today. Should be an interesting future for the platform. Lots of work to update stuff and move it all over.

https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat

If you’re wondering the implications for AutoMod: https://automod.vale.rocks/blog/revolt-is-stoat-now

Just marked a margin as !impotent. Sorry margin.

If your screed on AI doesn’t include the word ‘emergent’, what are you even doing?

I don’t think nearly enough people are aware of William Shatner’s music career.

Some highlights for your consideration:

• Elton John’s Rocket Man
• Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody
• Pulp’s Common People - I genuinely don’t mind Shatner’s rendition of this one.
• The Beetle’s Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - Paul McCartney said of it, ‘That was good – I think he was on drugs when he did that – but it was good. I’d say still one of my favourite versions of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’

Something I’d like to try my hand at is giving a proper conference talk. I’m brimming with ideas, and speaking arrangements seem like the natural next thing for me to do.

Certainly difficult as someone who lives in Western Australia, but something that I’d like to pursue nonetheless.

At this point I’m starting to think I might need to begin performing Voight-Kampff tests on ‘people’ I meet online.

It is amazing that Google+ had absolutely no lasting impact on culture whatsoever. I only ever hear it brought up occasionally in passing as that thing that Google aggressively pushed everywhere.

I find a significant observational correlation between people who post about AI and people who post without alt text.

Just absolutely massacred an email I was trying to write with unintentional Vim key binds. Complete bloodbath.