Micros

I really dislike conducting hiring interviews.

I’ve had to vet applications and proceed through the interview process with applicants several times, and I always despise it. Not because of the people (they’re usually lovely) or any specific issue with the processes, but merely because of the overarching interview system.

As an interviewer, I feel like a playground bully holding a shorter kid’s hat just out of reach. I’ve got the power and hold it over them. Shooting the ground and their feet, I shout, ‘Dance for me!’

When holding a leadership position, I’m usually careful to avoid whatever power I hold having this impact, but it seems unavoidable in interviews.

We both speak in tip-toeing generalistics steeped in corporate sludge, never quite getting to our point or conveying it concisely. If I try to cut through the jargon and corporate speak, then it seems insincere and like a façade hidden behind ulterior motives and a sneer, even if intended genuinely. The same applies to any casual remark or small talk, even if well-intentioned.

Interviews are a necessary part of the applicant vetting process, but years of layered advice and abstracted intentions have warped them into little more than a performative tango that neither partner wishes to dance.

It is only Tuesday, but I already feel like I’ve been punted down a flight of stairs and then locked in a sensory deprivation room that someone periodically throws stun grenades into.

They’re trashing our rights, man.

They’re trashing the flow of data.

They’re trashing! Trashing! Trashing!

Hack the planet! Hack the planet! Hack the planet!

A lazy Sunday. Rain cascades down the window. A cup of tea rests by my side. Jazz plays. I’m exploring personal websites.

Oooooh yeah!

Some words from yours truly, quoted by the ever-wonderful Internet Archive – whom I love for all it does and fights for – on the occasion of their upcoming milestone of one trillion pages saved.

Landing page, LAMP stack: everything functional.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.
We have the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s most convoluted web app.
This will be that site:
Heavier than it was before.
Heavier, slower, dependency-ridden.

The Six Million Framework Website.

Trans Rights are Human Rights.

That is a fact and not something that is up for debate. Yet, LinkedIn, through omission, has deemed it acceptable to degrade transgender individuals on the platform.

They have updated their community guidelines to remove ‘Misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals’ as an example of hateful and derogatory content.

They also removed ‘like race or gender identity’ from ‘Content that negatively targets others on the basis of inherent traits, like race or gender identity, is enforced under our Hateful and Derogatory Content policies.’

This is not something that occurs as a mistake – they have made the deliberate and intentional decision to remove this language from their policies.

And no, to head it off at the pass, trying to appease a corrupt government is not valid justification for loosening protections.

Open Terms Archive, who diligently observe and record changes made to platform policies and report on them, have explained the changes in further detail: https://opentermsarchive.org/en/memos/linkedin-removes-transgender-hate-speech-protections/

To those of you who don’t know how old I am, how many years old do you think I am?

(19 people voted)

A CSS reset, but every value is suffixed with !important.

I stumbled across my website listed in a collection of ‘beige’ sites.

While you’re there, check out the rest of David Newcomb Morales’s arbourtrary site. Absolutely gorgeous.

https://arbourtrary.com/writings/beige

Just got these Digg Dark Mode-inator Sunglasses in the mail. What year is it?

Prompted by David Bushell testing how his website fared when run through automated translators, I did the same.

It isn’t perfect, but Vale.Rocks now adapts nicely for people reading in languages that read right-to-left. It feels a tad bizarre seeing the UI flipped, given how intricately familiar I am with it.

You can give it a whirl with a right-to-left language like Arabic in Kagi Translate.

https://translate.kagi.com/ar/vale.rocks/posts/lorem-ipsum

(Also, I’d quite appreciate a logical version of CSS’ translate.)

The dire moment in communications when you hit someone with a ‘Cheers, big ears’ and aren’t responded to with a ‘Same goes, big nose’.

Today I have retired GitHub-based comments via Giscus on my websites. GitHub has taken a sharp turn, and I wish to reduce my reliance on and affiliation with the platform.

Most recently GitHub has (against the will of many of its employees and community members) introduced Grok to Copilot. You can read a summary of why this decision is poor and some additional information here: https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-08-27T15:41Z/

For anyone wondering, my magnet implant is going well.

Heading down to the DOM to pick up some divs. Need anything?

(You won’t believe this. I went to grab a <kbd> for Tobias Fedder, and while I was doing so I found an old <blink> on the back shelf. The box was a bit damaged, and the register wouldn’t scan it, so they let me have it for free!)

I was once emailing someone, and I hit them with a decent screed, to which they responded, ‘By the way, that whole email looked like you had written it for one of your blog posts.’

Thinking about that evaluation, it’ll work well if I die famous and someone publishes a collection of my letters.

Shout-out to the client who just sent me a mockup titled ‘temporary final’.

I was watching a video with almost 2 million views of a man playing a video game I enjoy. To my surprise and horror, I appeared on screen.

He laughs about my kill to death ratio and kills me several times. At one point after killing me, he just laughs for a solid thirty seconds.

Brutal.

I really did find early LLMs more interesting. They were deeply flawed in interesting ways, but as time has gone on, they have become less and less so.

They have become less experimental and more productised. I still enjoy learning about LLMs but wish we’d stayed in an exploratory stage for longer.

Helping a client in their late 80s today, I replaced their old proprietary crapware with a free, open-source equivalent.

Explaining to him that it’s developed for the public benefit by volunteers all over the world sharing his same interest, he just kept repeating, ‘Wow!’

The power of FOSS.

Perhaps the real buttons are the divs we made along the way.

Doing some work for a company which has me writing some legacy CSS. Proper 2009-era stylesheets with a bit of SASS thrown in and a clear brief to work off.

Having a blast!

(As an aside, I know that everyone is talking about this upcoming flexbox malarkey, but I think I’ll stick with floats, thank you very much.)

Sticking close to the web platform has never come back to bite me. Do you know what has come back to bite me with gnarled fangs?

I feel uniquely cool when I see people’s posts in my feed reader before they announce them on their socials. Even cooler when they don’t even appear in the index of articles on their site yet.

I’m not irresponsible. I’m very responsible.

Very responsible for the deaths of at least 18 people.

Inflammable means combustible. It doesn’t mean non-flammable.

Infamous means famous for something bad, not famous.

Invisible means not visible. It does not mean visible, nor visible for something bad.

I swear, English is a linguistic mutt raised by wolves.

I know we’re all just on a big rock hurtling through space discussing how we’re making the sand we’re electrocuting do the things we want, but I’m glad I’m doing it with you lot.

I get rather hateful emails quite often. Usually due to my writing.

One of these emails referred to me as an ‘AI-loving, hypergraphia-addled, graphomaniacal, logorrheic schizophrenic’.

Hateful intent aside, that is genuinely the best insult I’ve ever received. I can picture someone sprawled over a thesaurus cackling to themselves while pursuing the perfect selection of words – refining their diction with obsessive glee and hitting send with a maniacal laugh.

Today I launched a new blog for my Revolt bot AutoMod! Given the many thousands of users that rely on the bot, I decided that a central location for news, updates, technical details, and general information was necessary.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out visually, though I’m sure I’ll be tweaking and refining it for the rest of eternity. The rainbow mesh gradient behind the header came out particularly nicely, in my opinion.

https://automod.vale.rocks/blog/introducing-the-automod-blog