Firehose

This is everything, all in one place, coming ’atcha!

This firehose contains a record of all my micro posts, articles, photography, and other web doings. If you’d like to subscribe to feeds to stay up-to-date with things, then you can do so via my syndication page.

Design Considerations for Moderation Tooling

Ensuring protection of the protectors.

Overview of thoughful and protective design of tooling for moderating user-generated content, placing emphasis on minimising the psychological effects of exposure to heinous content, while balancing efficiency, accuracy, and the long-term wellbeing of trust and safety teams. Covering techniques for the mitigation of impact where applicable.

https://vale.rocks/posts/moderation-tooling-design

I’m used to mean people on the net, but I have never faced spiteful vitriol on the level of anti-AI folk.

I think I’m fairly reasonable in my assessments of generative AI, yet I’ve still received a number of death threats, rape threats, and doxx attempts. Really vicious and hostile to extents I’ve never before been exposed to.

Adobe published valid product keys for a range of Macromedia products on Windows and Macintosh when they disabled the activation servers on December 15th, 2012.

They are all accessible in an archive of Adobe’s site here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210314181449/https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/macromedia-legacy-activation-error.html

It has product keys for Captivate 1.0, Contribute 2.0, Contribute 3.0, FlashPaper 2.0, Director MX 2004, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, Flash MX 2004, Freehand MX, and Macromedia Studio MX 2004. Setting Windows’s Compatibility Mode to ‘Windows XP (Service Pack 2)’ seems to be the sweet spot if using a contemporary version of Windows.

Nothing like opening Bluesky to see NSFW furry artwork featuring the new Stoat icon/mascot I designed.

Lovely to see that rule 34 of the internet is alive and well…

It really irks me when people call themselves ‘refugees’ when switching digital platforms.

Have some tact. You didn’t flee a war zone; you switched apps.

Day was going pretty well until Rod Serling came through the door and began monologuing a blow-by-blow of the horrors about to befall me.

I’ve been smashing out 12+ hour days to handle the new user influx at Stoat over the past week. I’m absolutely knackered. Gonna take a bit of a break.

To everyone who has tried to contact me about something, I’m sorry for my tardiness. I’m not trying to ignore you; I’m merely lacking the mental bandwidth to respond right now.

Launching new branding is always a tad stressful. Will people like it? Will they reject the new in favour of the old?

However, the launch of the new Stoat icon I designed has been a resounding success. People love the new icon!

They love it so much, in fact, that since launching yesterday it has already been named ‘Toast’ by the community. 🍞

Thousands of people have liked the announcements of the new icon across social media, and many more have reached out to me personally to express their fondness.

Already I’ve seen fan art of the new logo across a few platforms, and it really is wonderful to see everyone embrace it so openly.

I’ve got over 1000 followers now on Bluesky. I’m not sure what you’re all doing here, but I’m glad to have you.

In our moderation panel over at Stoat, we have a button to deploy bees.

We don’t want to have to deploy bees, but sometimes that is the only viable option. Releasing bees as a moderation action is always a difficult call to make, but sometimes bees are the only tool for the job.

Vale's user inspected in the internal Stoat admin panel. There are actions including 'Suspend', 'Ban', 'Wipe Messages', and 'Bees'.

We have strict policies in place regarding bee usage. As it is, of course, a destructive action, we do also have a confirmation modal to avoid accidental bee deployments.

Modal reading 'Release the bees. Are you sure you want to send the bees?'. The two options are 'Cancel' and 'Deploy'.

Solemnly staring at my computer screen in silence, trying to regain my composure after realising I’ve just been editing the SASS output, not the source files.

Carefully cutting down my JavaScript, optimising my CSS, minimising my HTML, configuring preloads, tweaking caching, and manually shrinking images to hit a good balance of size and compression, then opening a new tab to be hit by a megacorp’s 40MB hero video.

To all fleeing from Firefox due to their tone-deaf AI fumblings, please don’t move to a Chromium-based browser.

Diversity in browser engines is critical for an open web. We must avoid a monopoly at all costs.

Nobody ask Ford, Coke, or IBM what they were doing in the 1940s, and nobody ask Apple, Google, or Microsoft what they are doing in the 2020s.

People watch me start designing APIs with the same abject look of horror one might exhibit when they see their uncle meandering his way across the room to the karaoke mic after several beers.

I love when websites with completely static content crash.

Congrats! Instead of making a static site, you made a static dynamic site. None of the benefits of a static site but all of the downsides of a dynamic site. What’s the point?

I really just can’t understand the mindset.

Someone commented on how snappy TechConf.Directory is. That’s due to the site just being HTML/CSS/JS/JSON generated at build time. No client-side third-party dependencies.

Even on the development side, the only dependency is Web Origami, which is just used for populating templates and manipulating data

Once again, the winning formula is to bet on the web platform and not needlessly overcomplicate things.