Firehose

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.

A story in two parts:

• Finally push changes to prod
• Influx of notifications

Local man forgets to put content: "" on his pseudo-element for fifth time this week, spurring community concern.

Saw some great talks at DDD Perth yesterday. There was lots of AI stuff, so I focussed my attendance on some of the talks and discussion away from that.

Ja-Jet Loh presented a fantastic talk on the history of open-source. A fun little refresher as someone who writes open-source code.

Matthew McGillivray talked about programmatic video with a slide deck made entirely in the technologies he was talking about. Really sleek presentation and great live demos.

Kristy Sachse blitzed through a talk about designing multi-modal systems away from the standard screen dynamic.

Eumir Gaspar took the crowd down the rabbit hole (that quickly became a bottomless pit) of custom keyboards. Some proper interesting stuff there and fascinating history I wasn’t privy to.

Rendle talked about some positive applications of technology in this rotting climate we find ourselves in.

Throughout the day I managed to have some great convos with various folks and at the assorted booths (also managed to pick up plenty of swag while doing so).

Thanks to all the organisers, volunteers, and sponsors who made it happen!

I really dislike conducting hiring interviews.

I’ve had to vet applications and proceed through the interview process with applicants several times, and I always despise it. Not because of the people (they’re usually lovely) or any specific issue with the processes, but merely because of the overarching interview system.

I just feel like a bit of a douche when doing hiring interviews – like I’m dangling power in front of someone in some ego play.

When holding a leadership position, I’m usually careful to avoid whatever power I hold having this impact, but it seems unavoidable in interviews.

We both speak in tip-toeing generalistics steeped in corporate sludge, never quite getting to our point or conveying it concisely. If I try to cut through the jargon and corporate speak, then it seems insincere and like a façade hidden behind ulterior motives and a sneer, even if intended genuinely. The same applies to any casual remark or small talk, even if well-intentioned.

Interviews are a necessary part of the applicant vetting process, but years of layered advice and abstracted intentions have warped them into little more than a performative tango that neither partner wishes to dance.

It is only Tuesday, but I already feel like I’ve been punted down a flight of stairs and then locked in a sensory deprivation room that someone periodically throws stun grenades into.

They’re trashing our rights, man.

They’re trashing the flow of data.

They’re trashing! Trashing! Trashing!

Hack the planet! Hack the planet! Hack the planet!

A lazy Sunday. Rain cascades down the window. A cup of tea rests by my side. Jazz plays. I’m exploring personal websites.

Oooooh yeah!

Some words from yours truly, quoted by the ever-wonderful Internet Archive – whom I love for all it does and fights for – on the occasion of their upcoming milestone of one trillion pages saved.

Landing page, LAMP stack: everything functional.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.
We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s most convoluted web app.
This will be that site:
Heavier than it was before.
Heavier, slower, dependency-ridden.

The Six Million Framework Website.

Trans Rights are Human Rights.

That is a fact and not something that is up for debate. Yet, LinkedIn, through omission, has deemed it acceptable to degrade transgender individuals on the platform.

They have updated their community guidelines to remove ‘Misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals’ as an example of hateful and derogatory content.

They also removed ‘like race or gender identity’ from ‘Content that negatively targets others on the basis of inherent traits, like race or gender identity, is enforced under our Hateful and Derogatory Content policies.’

This is not something that occurs as a mistake – they have made the deliberate and intentional decision to remove this language from their policies.

And no, to head it off at the pass, trying to appease a corrupt government is not valid justification for loosening protections.

Open Terms Archive, who diligently observe and record changes made to platform policies and report on them, have explained the changes in further detail: https://opentermsarchive.org/en/memos/linkedin-removes-transgender-hate-speech-protections/

To those of you who don’t know how old I am, how many years old do you think I am?

(19 people voted)

A CSS reset, but every value is suffixed with !important.

I stumbled across my website listed in a collection of ‘beige’ sites.

While you’re there, check out the rest of David Newcomb Morales’s arbourtrary site. Absolutely gorgeous.

https://arbourtrary.com/writings/beige

Just got these Digg Dark Mode-inator Sunglasses in the mail. What year is it?

Prompted by David Bushell testing how his website fared when run through automated translators, I did the same.

It isn’t perfect, but Vale.Rocks now adapts nicely for people reading in languages that read right-to-left. It feels a tad bizarre seeing the UI flipped, given how intricately familiar I am with it.

You can give it a whirl with a right-to-left language like Arabic in Kagi Translate.

https://translate.kagi.com/ar/vale.rocks/posts/lorem-ipsum

(Also, I’d quite appreciate a logical version of CSS’ translate.)

The dire moment in communications when you hit someone with a ‘Cheers, big ears’ and aren’t responded to with a ‘Same goes, big nose’.

Today I have retired GitHub-based comments via Giscus on my websites. GitHub has taken a sharp turn, and I wish to reduce my reliance on and affiliation with the platform.

Most recently GitHub has (against the will of many of its employees and community members) introduced Grok to Copilot. You can read a summary of why this decision is poor and some additional information here: https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-08-27T15:41Z/

For anyone wondering, my magnet implant is going well.

Heading down to the DOM to pick up some divs. Need anything?

(You won’t believe this. I went to grab a <kbd> for Tobias Fedder, and while I was doing so I found an old <blink> on the back shelf. The box was a bit damaged, and the register wouldn’t scan it, so they let me have it for free!)

I was once emailing someone, and I hit them with a decent screed, to which they responded, ‘By the way, that whole email looked like you had written it for one of your blog posts.’

Thinking about that evaluation, it’ll work well if I die famous and someone publishes a collection of my letters.