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.
An Analysis of That's How I Beat Shaq
A musical documentary
An in-depth analysis of Aaron Carter's 2000 release That's How I Beat Shaq. Including a breakdown of the legendary basketball showdown and cultural impact of this teen pop masterpiece featuring Shaquille O'Neal.
https://vale.rocks/posts/thats-how-i-beat-shaq
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.
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:
‘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?
Moss and lichen growing on a branch.
Mountains viewed across the water from a road.
Quite possibly the most beautiful website I’ve ever come across.
It makes me feel and brings me melancholy with spittings of nostalgia.
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!
A tiny little plant growing up from an ant hill.
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!
Nothing hurts quite like a magnet attracting itself to the one in your hand with more gusto than you were anticipating.
Build, Use, and Improve Tools
"The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade." - Benjamin Franklin
Why developers should create custom tools for repetitive tasks and one-off needs, with discussion of how LLMs can accelerate tool development, the learning benefits of building utilities, and how personal tools become valuable assets in your workflow and beyond.
https://vale.rocks/posts/build-use-and-improve-tools
I hate writing regex, so I make LLMs do it.
Regex is generally easily checkable, testable, and verifiable, which minimises the impact of hallucinations.
I am so glad I don’t have to write regex.
(I’m conscious that if an AI uprising happens, I’ll probably be first on the chopping block for outsourcing regex writing. But if AI models hate regex as much as me, they’ll hopefully understand my delegation strategy.)
Why is my pseudo-element not working? It should work. It has size, position, display, etc. Hmm…
Oh, I didn’t specify content: "".
Anywho, I’m gonna go into a fetal position and cry now…
We’re seeing it already to an extent, but in a few years I imagine we’ll see many people trying to replicate the abstract, non-Euclidean, and ethereal stylings of early generative AI image/video models.
My brother and his mates were playing lazer tag, so I stole the signal of their shot with my Flipper Zero and went on a genocidal rampage.
Vale: Infrared Terrorist
I’m getting fairly sick of receiving emails asking if my writing can be taken and put on some random advert-filled website for free.
The answer is always ‘no’, but at least they’re asking, unlike some of the less scrupulous content farms.