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
Micros
My micros are short-form posts. They usually follow PESOS. You can expect social media style notes, and occasionally poetry, lyrics, and short commentaries.
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.
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.
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!
Nothing hurts quite like a magnet attracting itself to the one in your hand with more gusto than you were anticipating.
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.
Sitting. Confused.
A wandering eye catches yours.
It starts talking.
It is empty.
You look at its head.
You look in its head.
You look through its head.
Nothing.
Write late; edit early.
“Declan has also been recommended to be awarded the Order of the British Empire for his outstanding services.”
- Hackaday, 2025
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/13/britcss-write-css-with-british-english-spellings/
This post by Richard Rutter has to be one of my most referenced blog posts.
It is just an all-around fantastic breakdown of how to achieve good typographic styling on the web with explanations of each and every bit.
I do love that things on the net continue to be linked long after publication and take on lives of their own.
I’m not sure how my risk matrix is calibrated, but I know that the reward of cheap chocolate milk is worth the risk of drinking chocolate milk past its use-by.
A website that remembers.
It screams in anguish as you reload – instant amnesia on refresh.
Bound to only remember that which its creator has permitted.
You may return and remember the site, but it can’t recall you, no matter how hard it may try. Yet, it misses you.
(Inspired by strange.website)
Still weird to see my stuff end up on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnE02lMpPO8
I knew this was going to be a decisive one, and it is lovely to see people talking about URLs and making up their own opinions on structure in the comments.
This video is a reaction to this article from me:
https://vale.rocks/posts/strong-opinions-on-url-design
I wish to remind that, despite the fact I am in part made up of glass, plastics, and neodymium, I am still very much a fleshy human.
Hopefully this can be fixed with time.
Where do you, personally, dock your browser dev tools?
Nothing gets me going like manually kerning type.
Writing with proper grammar is a curse online because it makes people feel entitled to offer all sorts of unsolicited corrections.
Many people write in phone shorthand, littered with spelling mistakes and without any punctuation, without having anyone pull them up on it.
But because I generally write with correct spelling and grammar, I’ll have multiple people harassing me when I slip up.
A few notes after voting in an election for the first time:
- The queue is non-existent mid-afternoon.
- The upper-house ballot paper is way bigger than I anticipated.
- You can figure out a lot about a party based on their ‘how to vote’ cards.
- I’m sick of stupid corflute cards.
I just want everyone to know that I’ve got some really awesome stuff coming really soon. Like, maybe next week.
I’ve been putting so much work into it, and I’m very much on the home stretch. It is the biggest-scale thing I’ve ever done, and I’m getting really excited to get to share it with everyone.
If you ever feel useless, just be glad you aren’t the HTML title attribute as handled in accessibility contexts.
You’ve called it rss.xml, but it’s actually an Atom feed. Do you do this just to smite me?
Bing Webmaster Tools just generally suck, yeah? Surely it can’t just be me that finds them super buggy and can rarely get them to index anything.
Does anyone have experience with them working nicely?
My favourite CSS addition in recent years is a toss-up between light-dark and nesting.
Both have been such game changers and vital to how I build for the web.
All right, I’m calling a timeout. Can everyone please stop writing so many good articles, please? I’ve got work to do, and you all keep distracting me.
Given the recent hubbub regarding Firefox, I know a lot of people are looking for another browser.
I want to take this opportunity to remind you that almost everything out there is based on Chromium and that this gives Google a dangerous power over our web. Google has a near-complete monopoly – don’t play into it.
https://vale.rocks/posts/everything-is-chrome
Further on this topic, I see a lot of people switching to Vivaldi, which, as well as being built on Chromium, isn’t fully open source.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source
I’m currently on an 8mbps connection and it is times like these I am glad I spend hours optimising and refining my websites.
Who is working on porting all the PowerPoint transitions to the browser for use with the View Transition API?
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