Firehose

My photos have hit 100K views on Unsplash!

I’m ebullient! This is only 3 months after I hit 50K views.

Go give ‘em a look: https://unsplash.com/@outervale

Which one of you sneaks into my computer and adds typos to my posts between final proofing and publication?

A subtle sanding; a smoothing of sound.
A bloom on audio; a blurring of waveform.
A warm fuzz; a whisper from the past.
Precision with velvet edges.

Apparently I’ve reached some level of ‘fame’ now where people try to breach my accounts and send me death threats.

That’s fun.

I’m turning 19 today.

As a present to you all, I’m calling a Switch 2 Nintendo Direct today and implementing tariffs in the US.

I will also be travelling back in time to premiere 2001: A Space Odyssey and Beethoven’s First Symphony, as well as introducing the US dollar.

No need to thank me.

I fear that technology has, to an extent, moved past the state of permitting independence.

Complexity has reached a point where it simply isn’t viable for independent creation of browser engines or operating systems as we’ve seen in the past.

As this continues, it furthers the moat companies have.

en dash –
em dash —
enm dash ⸺
emm dash ⸻

AI can generate images, but it certainly cannot create ‘art’ – at least not as I define it.

I believe it can be used as a tool while creating art, but its output is not by default ‘art’.

Art requires creativity, and that is something a machine does not have.

I’ve been making improvements to Vale.Rocks using Polypane’s suggestions, which pick up things standard browser dev tools miss.

Also, Portal is awesome for testing across devices.

Polypane also has a celebration button that appears when I fix all accessibility issues, which is an absolute joy.

I have a few minor niggles, but on the whole I’m really liking Polypane.

Regarding those niggles, Kilian Valkhof is absolutely fantastic and extremely receptive to feedback, which is wonderful.

If this world had any sense left, we would be bringing back the ThinkLight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkLight

I pushed to prod,
Prod pushed back.

I prodded prod,
It cracked and cracked.

I fixed the bug,
Or so I swore.

One last deploy…
And prod is no more.

People keep talking about AI-generated imagery as something that is going to be really bad. Or that it is going to be indistinguishable from real photos.

I don’t think people realise we passed that point quite a while ago.

The ‘tells’ are already gone; there is just a lot of stuff still releasing generated with lesser models that people do happen to notice – it is almost a redirection of sorts.

The web went wrong when we dropped the ‘hyper’ from ‘hyperlink’.

I think people seem to downplay that when artificial intelligence companies release new models/features, they tend to do so with minimal guardrails.

I don’t think it is hyperbole to suggest this is done for the PR boost gained by spurring online discussion, though it could also just be part of the churn and rush to appear on top where sound guardrails are not considered a necessity. Either way, models tend to become less controversial and more presentable over time.

Recently OpenAI released their GPT-4o image generation with rather relaxed guardrails (it being able to generate political content and images of celebrities without consent). This came hot off the heels of Google’s latest Imagen model, so there was reason to rush to market and ‘one-up’ Google.

Obviously much of AI risk is centred around swift progress and companies prioritising that progress over safety, but minimising safety specifically for the sake of public perception and marketing strikes me as something we are moving closer towards.

This triggers two main thoughts for me:

• How far are companies willing to relax their guardrails to beat competitors to market?
• Where is ‘the line’ between a model with relaxed enough guardrails to spur public discussion but not relaxed enough to cause significant damages to the company’s perception and wider societal risk?

“I already know what this is gonna be about before I read it.”

User then proceeds to continue their comment with something entirely unrelated to the contents of my article.

I’m looking at you, Reddit and Hacker News.

CORS blimey!

I find it very odd when people refer to ‘two main browser engines’, those being Gecko and WebKit.

Do people really think Blink hasn’t diverged significantly enough to consider it another engine at this point?

Quite possibly the most beautiful website I’ve ever come across.

It makes me feel and brings me melancholy with spittings of nostalgia.

https://thesoundof.love

Reject modernity (Next.js); embrace tradition (PHP).

Put the groundwork for a testing instance of a website live five minutes ago, and I’m already seeing multiple login attempts hammering /wp-admin.

Not only is it a Ghost site, but it isn’t even properly live yet!

Further proof that I am not an LLM is found in the fact that I use en dashes, not em dashes.

This also acts to prove I am not American and that I am the sort of nerd that cares about typography and gets hung up on punctuation.

My desk gets a bit of a feature at the 11:30 mark.

My laptop is usually in place of that old iPad 4, and that CRT was salvaged from the verge. Took quite the effort to lug it home – as you might imagine!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkwjXv79Duo

Nothing hurts quite like a magnet attracting itself to the one in your hand with more gusto than you were anticipating.