Do you hear that? That’s the simultaneous exasperated sighs of thousands of users.
Saturday night activities.
Shout out to the guy who lives near me and leaves his bong on a small niche outside his bedroom window where he thinks nobody can see it.
When I go around dropping tabs from different dealers to compare, people say I’ve got a problem, but browsers used to go around doing so-called ‘Acid Tests’ with impunity. Times have changed, I suppose. Either that or double standards.
Am I correct in my understanding that it still used in Opera Mini for extreme data saving mode? It seems it is. Is it updated at all for use in such cases?
Here is my site rendered with extreme data saving mode in the latest version of Opera Mini. I’m pretty sure this is Presto in 2026, which feels an odd thing to say.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me.
Sticks and stones may break my bo…
We were somewhere around line 23,494 on the edge of the framework when the caffeine began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should code…’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the screen was full of compilation errors.
Happy AusAlert test warning to all who celebrate.
Even though I knew it was a test during the alert that ran today, I wasn’t checking the time, and it did genuinely surprise me. The alert sound sounds severe, and the follow-up narration of the warning, even as it said it was a warning, felt dire.
When I was new to VR and still getting my ‘VR legs’, I just full sent it into a port of Quake. Let me tell you, running, gunning, and jumping about with reckless abandon in virtual reality Quake makes your body adapt real quick.
Fashion peaked with Haysi Fantayzee in the early ’80s and has been going downhill since.
Hacker News In Uncompromised Detail
Beyond the front page of the orange site.
Everything I personally know about the forum and news aggregator Hacker News spanning the site's history, the people behind it, the software that runs it, the site's culture, and its features. Generally undocumented or underdocumented details and features are also included.
I’m afraid that one day someone will discover I don’t actually know how to write HTML or CSS and that I’ve been using Microsoft FrontPage 97 this whole time.
There is a common idea that our devices are using their microphones to spy upon us. I’m certain that some devices do, but most don’t.
Under wiretapping and recording consent laws in many jurisdictions, such listening is forbidden. Many platforms, devices, and operating systems also indicate to the user when the camera or microphone is in use. Instead of listening in via a microphone, tracking is handled by more subtle means.
Thinking about travelling to France? While on your phone, you might stop for a moment longer on adverts or posts about travel or about French cuisine. You might linger on a post by a French speaker. Perhaps you research travel plans online on a site that has a partnership with an advertising network or which has social widgets tied to social media. Eventually, you’ll see more and more posts about France and travelling there.
Every little interaction you have across the web – no matter how seemingly inconsequential – can be collated to build a profile on you and target content towards you. It is the entire strategy and purpose of many billion-dollar companies.
Whenever people attempt to test microphone listening, they often end up scrolling around trying to find the thing they were testing for anyway, thus tailoring what they’re served and playing into confirmation bias.
Thinking a microphone is listening to what you say is simple and easy to comprehend. The idea that everything you do is being tracked and analysed by systems so complex you can barely conceptualise them is much more abstract.
I personally find this sort of ever-present and inescapable tracking much more insidious than any microphone listening in.
Personally extremely disappointed to see Mozilla proudly and cheerfully announcing that Firefox is active again on X (formerly Twitter).
Always confused by people/organisations who measure productivity or effort with Git commits.
There are so many different approaches to committing that it seems a completely meaningless metric. Certainly nothing to brag about.
Those tormented screams? Believe it or not, from the damned.
I’ve been asked what framework I used to make the dashboard for my Stoat bot AutoMod so fast and snappy.
It is genuinely just slick HTML/CSS/JS that communicates with an API layer I developed. The dashboard itself doesn’t depend on even a single external library.
The framework-addled mind simply can’t comprehend not reaching for a bloated framework and a handful of libraries for everything.
Squeezing code and prose out of myself like a toothpaste tube on its last legs.
I find the period where television was transitioning from 4:3 to 16:9 an interesting one. When broadcasting began in 16:9, but people were still actively using 4:3 televisions, broadcasters would commonly either letterbox the content or expect the left and right edges to be cropped. This led to a period where television series direction avoided putting anything too important at the horizontal edges of the frame. Cinema faced similar challenges, and either embraced pan-and-scan, letterboxing, or careful reframing from a wider image.
Content made exclusively for television broadcast, such as news shows, often had all interface elements centred in the image with nothing of substance in the 16:9 exclusive portions:
Example 16:9 news broadcast with the 4:3 safe area indicated with a dashed border.
To mitigate the complexities of working with two aspect ratios, broadcasters (mainly in Europe) opted for an aspect ratio of 14:9 as a compromise. It wasn’t optimal on 16:9 displays or 4:3 displays and was pillarboxed or letterboxed, respectively.
The cropping of a wider image reminds me of open mattes, which is where film is captured at a larger size and then matted down to a specific aspect ratio, such as by applying bars on the tops (letterboxing) or sides (pillarboxing). Take the 35mm open matte of Spider-Man (2002). Extra content is there; it is just hidden by the aspect ratio. It is by this method that more full frames can be achieved by merging various source mediums.
The embrace of 16:9 from 4:3 is also tied up in the switch from standard definition to high definition and analogue to digital, meaning that content is large on the screen – especially text, which can be blurred by low-resolution displays and fuzzy CRTs. It is an interesting period of transition, and as a front-end developer I can’t help but think of it in terms of progressive enhancement.
For people without widescreen displays, content functioned and continued as normal without interruption. For people with capable television sets, however, they got an improved experience. As time progressed and 4:3 became less common, it switched from progressive enhancement to graceful degradation on displays still using the old aspect ratio, as we often see as newer technology reaches wider adoption.
Currently voting on conference talks based entirely on which talk is less about AI.
I know that the conference I’m voting for had guidelines when submitting papers, so I’m also voting against the talks which blatantly ignored these guidelines and are full of AI tells.
Colon split title, verbose, too long, tricolons, not X but Y, and an unreasonable number of em dashes.
Why submit a talk if you can’t be bothered to even think up or describe the premise of it yourself?
The use of ‘he/she’ really annoys me.
‘They’ is much more inclusive than ‘he/she’ and is also quicker to both say and write. Anyone using ‘he/she’ today is either forced to by some obtuse requirements, or is purposefully being bigoted.
‘(s)he’ is no better and is just as needlessly difficult. Also, it is always ‘he/she’, never ‘she/he’. ‘(s)he’ literally demotes the feminine pronoun with parenthesis.
Don’t get me started on cases where an entire document is written with masculine pronouns as ‘default’.
Establishing a freelancer collective / distributed agency.
I just saw a marketing page refer to a product as the ‘final solution’.
I didn’t think it needed saying, but don’t go around advertising the ‘final solution’. There are some connotations there…
Information architecture? More like, ‘Blimey, I’m 90% through organising this crap, and now I’ve just found a stupid edge case that means I’ve got to reorganise the entire hierarchy and structure.’
The sudden sinking feeling when you’re given a codebase to work on, then you notice the HTML tags are all written in uppercase, that there is no document declaration, and that there are conditional comments for Internet Explorer.
‘Hi. Yeah, it’s me. I couldn’t help but notice when I opened the folder you sent me that boss music started playing, and in the distance I heard what I think might be the eternal screams of the damned. Can you just confirm this is expected behaviour?’
