Firehose

A lot of developers mistakenly think that the code is the product. In reality, for most businesses the product is the product, and the code is merely means to an end.

I think this explains why so many developers’ efforts are so horribly misguided by modern technologies. They’re building the code, not the product.

I’m trying to reduce my reliance on the increasingly unstable United States of America and move to more ethically run services. As part of that, I’m moving from GitHub. I’ve been steadily moving off GitHub for months. I’ve moved lots of site hosting off of GitHub Pages, removed GitHub-based comments from this site, and have been rearchitecting systems to avoid being GitHub-specific.

Unfortunately moving to another Git forge is a big effort – in part due to choice. Though I am comfortable and capable of self-hosting, I don’t want to have to self-host my Git forge. That isn’t a maintenance burden I want, and unless federated, it adds unwanted friction for contributors.

1. GitLab: I’ve been on GitLab for ages. It is pretty fully featured but has an identical vibe to GitHub. If they had the chance, I think they’d make the exact same mistakes.

2. SourceHut: So complicated yet so lacking of comfort features. The interface is too finicky and email workflows are clunky.

3. Gitea: A tad shady for my liking.

4. Forgejo: Fantastic, but I don’t want to self-host.

5. Codeberg: Pretty good hosted version of Forgejo, and I’d probably be happy with it.

I’ve ended up with Tangled. Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, which is nice given my adoption of the ecosystem. However, it also introduces my biggest gripe, which is the lack of private repositories, meaning I won’t be able to leave GitHub entirely. I very much do like that you can self-host Git repositories with ‘knots’ and CI runners with ‘spindles’, allowing better data portability in future. Simple repo migration is also on the roadmap.

Tangled also unfortunately isn’t supported by a lot of build tools and systems I use, which is a shame from the perspective of ease-of-use. I won’t be able to make a full migration until Tangled adds support for releases and private repositories and until other services get support for Tangled, but I’ve already moved over what I can. Most notably, I’ve moved my Stoat bots.

Popular short-form video creator Zack D Films uploaded a video in 2024 titled ‘Biohacking With A Magnetic Implant 😳’. It has been seen by a lot of people. Currently it sits at almost 29 million views and 1.4 million likes on YouTube alone, having also been posted on many other platforms, including TikTok and Facebook. It has also spread via reuploads by other accounts.

I have a magnet implanted in my hand. I’ve written about it at length and published my own short-form videos. Unfortunately, people cite this video at me all the time, blindly believing the claims it makes and even trusting it over me. Here are some debunks:

1. ‘The magnet vibrates slightly, allowing you to detect hidden electronics or wires.’ Kinda. You’re certainly not feeling anything from a cable under a piece of fabric charging a phone as depicted. The vibration you feel is alternating current (AC), so you’d never feel it from a length of phone cable, which will always be direct current (DC). You can legitimately feel a flutter from, for example, a computer power supply, however.

2. ‘Connecting it to an infrared device would let you feel the distance of objects.’ What? How are you ‘connecting’ a magnet to an infrared device? How are you feeling the distance of objects? The animation shows a mobile phone, but modern phones don’t have IR capabilities (the phone depicted appears to be an iPhone, which doesn’t). If you’re making a separate device for detecting distance via IR, why not just make the device alert you another way? How does a magnet come into this? None of this makes any sense.

3. ‘Eventually though, the magnet will lose its strength’. There are a few conditions under which magnets lose their strength. Heat, trauma, and corrosion can demagnetise a magnet. However, if your implant is reaching the Curie temp or encountering other such significant damage, your fleshy human form has much bigger problems. Proper implants are always coated, usually with glass, resin, titanium or gold, and while tactile nerve displacement can lessen the effectiveness of a magnet implant, it won’t demagnetise it.

Publishing pixel art on the web? Don’t let it get blurred and smushed.

Apply image-rendering: crisp-edges to the image with CSS. Alternatively, export your pixel art at a higher resolution, so each visual pixel is made of many pixels, minimising impact from scaling and compression.

Remember to also use a good file format. Formats like JPEG are optimised for photos, not pixel art, and can introduce artefacts. PNG and GIF are good choices.

Vale.Rocks appears to be almost entirely functional in Ladybird now. Few tiny little hiccups, but I’d say ~95% of it works. Performance still has a bit to go, but Ladybird has come a long way since my last test.

Servo still has a bit further to go but has made some significant progress recently.

I truly do find it extremely difficult to type ‘http’ without automatically suffixing an s.

I love that the same brands which once carefully curated their identity and adhered to stringent brand guidelines are now slopping out brand resources with random image generators that smush their wordmark and butcher their logo.

Junior designers used to be crucified for lesser failings.

So, the web has better responsive images now. That’s great.

But, when will the web be getting responsible images? I’m sick of all the delinquents roaming the web like they own the place.

For most of the world, Google Search is the search engine. So much so that it has become a verb in conversation – to ‘Google’ something. Even if you use another option, you still likely think of Google Search first.

However, there are many countries where Google has fierce competition and is even sometimes surpassed. In China, Baidu Search is the standard, with Bing holding a fairly significant market share as well. In Russia, Yandex dominates the search market. Popular in South Korea is Naver.

There are also some countries where non-Google search engines have a significant hold, but not quite as substantial. Yandex is popular in Russia’s neighbouring countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. Yahoo! and Bing are both rather popular in Japan. Seznam remains rather popular in the Czech Republic, and Cốc Cốc does reasonably in Vietnam.

A common reason for these engines being popular is their handling of local languages using non-Latin scripts. Censorship and compliance with government regulations also influence their success.

These search engines are worth keeping front of mind if you’re targeting an aforementioned country or localising for them.

I’m looking for a device I can use for WebKit/Safari testing. However, I can’t justify splashing too much cash on a Mac that I’ll scarcely use.

I’m looking at something with Apple Silicon so that it won’t be dropped by the next software update. Currently considering a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with a broken screen, which I can use headless. Maybe a Mac Mini, but they’re pretty scarce on the second-hand market. People seem to hang onto iMacs long-term, so they aren’t really around.

Thinking the Neo down the line, perhaps.

Any thoughts?

Communism works on paper but fails in practice. Wikipedia fails on paper but works in practice. All my ideas fail on paper and then are proven failures in practice.

Sometimes you find yourself deep in the decaying bowels of the archived Safari HTML Reference and you’ve just got to look at yourself and ask ‘Where did I go wrong?’

Vague posting is going to make the work of future historians so very difficult indeed.

I always caution people against using GoDaddy. It may be the largest domain registrar, but it is also the worst I know of.

There are a great deal of reasons why. So many, in fact, that there exists an entire Wikipedia page: Controversies surrounding GoDaddy. However, even that multi-thousand-word page only covers the tip of the iceberg. It misses out so many more issues.

GoDaddy does a lot of domain squatting – more than I’ve seen from any other ‘legitimate’ registrar. GoDaddy keeps giving away people’s domains, even when they’ve been registered for decades. They’re spineless and willing to twist to corrupt agendas and are notorious for terrible support. It seems all the money they make goes to paying big-name actors to star in advertisements so they can ensnare new victims, rather than improving their actual product.

Their domain prices are also consistently higher than other services when I’ve compared them. I can’t think of a single benefit to choosing GoDaddy.

As a general rule, I don’t follow accounts or share content that neglect alt text. If someone seems open to growth, I usually try to contact them politely to explain the importance of alt text for accessibility.

I get varied responses. Some people thank me for cluing them in and make a change, and some people say they want to provide alt text but don’t know how (a good approach is to write like you’re describing something over the phone). Other people make the argument that people with disabilities don’t view their work, which is a common, lazy, ableist, and flawed claim made by people who don’t care about accessibility.

One argument that I adamantly dislike is: ‘I don’t put alt text on photos because it helps companies train AI’. At the core of this argument is prioritising inconveniencing AI companies over helping fellow humans – an ineffective attempt at sabotaging AI training by harming real people while doing virtually nothing to hinder AI corporations.

If training is your worry, consider that by omitting alt text, or worse, providing garbage, you are teaching AI systems and other people that alt text isn’t necessary and can be abused. Surely, at the end of the day, making things better for fellow humans is more important than making things insignificantly worse for AI systems?

Also, why risk publishing anything on the web if it is vulnerable to scraping? And why, specifically, draw the line at assistive technologies?

It is my true and honest opinion that every logo design process should involve a step of presenting the concept to a 14-year-old boy so they can identify anything phallic.

All my love to Adobe Illustrator, which has today decided I don’t need to use the shortcut Ctrl + Z. Wonderful stuff. Much appreciated.

My undo privileges have been undone.

I’m reducing my LinkedIn presence.

I’ve come to realise I don’t really benefit from a presence on LinkedIn. It attracts spam, scams, and unwanted messages. It also doesn’t help me find work – I’ve gotten more work from Bluesky than LinkedIn!

The content on LinkedIn is not useful to me. The people I care about are more present on other platforms, and I get more AI prose and images in my feed than I do genuine content. The relevant information I do get is often false, with there being a lot of accessibility slop in particular.

LinkedIn is run by Microsoft and cosy with the United States’ regime. It has removed protections for transgender individuals and fails to properly moderate misinformation. The platform actively penalises certain content, such that I don’t feel free to say what I want or to link freely.

LinkedIn also absolutely chugs whenever I try to use it. Perhaps that is related to scanning everyone’s computers for installed browser extensions. The site is very poorly optimised for mobile and consistently pushes me to use the app.

I’m not leaving entirely, as having an account makes it easier to combat accounts that steal my work, and having no presence on the platform can prove a red flag for some. I have cleared out my profile, though. If you wish to contact me or want to keep up with what I’m doing, my site has all you need.

I’ve been trying in relative vain to figure out how I feel about people reacting to my content. I’ve had enough success that YouTubers and streamers alike have published reactions to my content.

These reactions don’t fall under fair use or fair dealing in most cases, so legally they’re pretty grey. I’ve seen some reaction channels which I think could reasonably class their content as transformative, not only reacting to one piece of content but also cross-referencing it with other relevant bits of information and sometimes anecdotes to present a wider degree of information.

However, I’ve also seen some channels which fail to build on the source material. I’ve seen videos of streamers leaving a video playing while taking a break from the stream or sitting in silence for minutes while letting content play. I’ve had people read my content verbatim without any input of their own. I’ve also seen people butcher my work by failing to fully read or comprehend it, such that they critique my work in front of their followers without having done due diligence.

I’ve never seen any evidence of significant traffic to my site from video hosting sites, indicating that the people who watch reaction content don’t generally follow the links to view the source content themselves. Why would they? What have they to gain from visiting the source when they’ve just been exposed to the content in full via another medium?

I think that, in the majority of cases, the original creator should be consulted before their content is reacted to. If you do try to have the content taken down for infringement, influencer culture means that it can backfire by stirring up quite the drama, even if you’re in the right.

I like to think I know a lot, but given how much there is to know I’m certain I actually know very little. I’m so privileged that the front-end community is such an open place willing to share and distribute knowledge freely.

I look forward to learning so much more.

One of my ‘rules’ is to not make notes in design files. It forces me to make fresh judgements every time, which helps me re-evaluate my work more objectively.

Living in a Commonwealth country, I get a lot of exposure to the British royal family. I despise the fact that a royal family has any power in the modern age. I entirely fail to see how a monarchy is any less authoritarian than a dictatorship. Leaders should be democratically elected based on their virtues, not because of arbitrary factors such as being born into a specific family.

I feel sometimes we collectively fail to appreciate how underpowered computers of the past were. Especially when it comes to game consoles.

This level of performance was in pursuit of a lower price point, and games only managed to be as impressive as they were because they could target fixed hardware. Optimisations could be made for specific resolutions, processors, GPUs, and provided system-specific APIs, which isn’t possible with the wide array of configurations seen in general-purpose computers, even if many personal computers had rivalling hardware.

There are some fantastic edits of films by dedicated fans which take the same source media in different aspect ratios from different releases (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, widescreen, open mattes, scans, etc) and combine them to present the most comprehensive picture. Unfortunately because they don’t overlap perfectly, corners can be left lacking visual content, as represented by the orange below:

This has traditionally been addressed with ambient lighting fills, which are gradients based on the available image, but this can look jarring – it is just a blurry approximation after all.

I think filling these voids with generative outpainting is a good application of generative AI. It doesn’t detract from the art due to being confined to the very corners, and it allows the art to be more fully appreciated by reducing distraction. This is in contrast to AI conversions from 4:3 to 16:9, which I feel introduce significant alterations to the framing and context surrounding the content.