Firehose

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.

Shout-out to the client who just sent me a mockup titled ‘temporary final’.

I was watching a video with almost 2 million views of a man playing a video game I enjoy. To my surprise and horror, I appeared on screen.

He laughs about my kill to death ratio and kills me several times. At one point after killing me, he just laughs for a solid thirty seconds.

Brutal.

I really did find early LLMs more interesting. They were deeply flawed in interesting ways, but as time has gone on, they have become less and less so.

They have become less experimental and more productised. I still enjoy learning about LLMs but wish we’d stayed in an exploratory stage for longer.

Helping a client in their late 80s today, I replaced their old proprietary crapware with a free, open-source equivalent.

Explaining to him that it’s developed for the public benefit by volunteers all over the world sharing his same interest, he just kept repeating, ‘Wow!’

The power of FOSS.

Perhaps the real buttons are the divs we made along the way.

Doing some work for a company which has me writing some legacy CSS. Proper 2009-era stylesheets with a bit of SASS thrown in and a clear brief to work off.

Having a blast!

(As an aside, I know that everyone is talking about this upcoming flexbox malarkey, but I think I’ll stick with floats, thank you very much.)

Sticking close to the web platform has never come back to bite me. Do you know what has come back to bite me with gnarled fangs?

I feel uniquely cool when I see people’s posts in my feed reader before they announce them on their socials. Even cooler when they don’t even appear in the index of articles on their site yet.

I’m not irresponsible. I’m very responsible.

Very responsible for the deaths of at least 18 people.

Inflammable means combustible. It doesn’t mean non-flammable.

Infamous means famous for something bad, not famous.

Invisible means not visible. It does not mean visible, nor visible for something bad.

I swear, English is a linguistic mutt raised by wolves.

I know we’re all just on a big rock hurtling through space discussing how we’re making the sand we’re electrocuting do the things we want, but I’m glad I’m doing it with you lot.

I get rather hateful emails quite often. Usually due to my writing.

One of these emails referred to me as an ‘AI-loving, hypergraphia-addled, graphomaniacal, logorrheic schizophrenic’.

Hateful intent aside, that is genuinely the best insult I’ve ever received. I can picture someone sprawled over a thesaurus cackling to themselves while pursuing the perfect selection of words – refining their diction with obsessive glee and hitting send with a maniacal laugh.

Today I launched a new blog for my Revolt bot AutoMod! Given the many thousands of users that rely on the bot, I decided that a central location for news, updates, technical details, and general information was necessary.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out visually, though I’m sure I’ll be tweaking and refining it for the rest of eternity. The rainbow mesh gradient behind the header came out particularly nicely, in my opinion.

https://automod.vale.rocks/blog/introducing-the-automod-blog

Spot the typo in this line I wrote today.

‘…or these media queries we’ll be breasted to graceful degradation.’

Many people agree that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term that is vague and has existing connotations. People use it to refer to a whole range of different technologies.

However, I struggle to come up with any better terminology. If not ‘artificial intelligence’, what term would be ideal for describing the capabilities of multi-modal tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT?

I’m convinced that newsletters are just blogs for people who think they’re too cool to have a blog.

Born to type script.

Forced to TypeScript.

Just because ‘a picture means a thousand words’ doesn’t mean your alt text needs to be a thousand words long.

‘It has taken a huge amount of effort, but we’ve fought against the existing web platform and our website is all the worse for it.’
— [Company Name Here], 2025

Just wanted to say that everything is going really well with development of new features for my Revolt bot AutoMod.

To the many thousands of users that rely on it, you didn’t see anything, and everything is fine.

Much like how some known elements aren’t shown on the periodic table, some HTML elements aren’t recognised due to their synthetic, extremely unstable, or fleeting existence.

We talk and think a lot about echo chambers with social media. People view what they’re aligned with, which snowballs as algorithms feed them more content of that type, which pushes their views to the extreme.

I wonder how tailor-made AI-generated content will feed into that. It’s my thinking and worry that AI systems can produce content perfectly aligned with a user in all ways, creating a flawless self-feeding ideological silo.