Firehose

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.

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!