Micros

I’m not quite sure where to go or what to do. I’m watching my peers slowly burn out, go quiet, quit the industry, or struggle on hoping it’ll get better in time. Even if the storm is weathered, what comes out the other side?

Businesses seem wary of investing in people or just spending money at all. I feel I have to sell the very basic concept of doing ‘good work’, rather than ‘good enough work’. Accessibility feels like something I discuss but don’t get to see through.

Things are stagnating for genuine professionals.

Many conferences are coming to their end, seeing lower attendance, and are dominated by AI talks. Of those that are surviving, many are cutting budgets or catering to smaller, focussed audiences. Most publications are seeing declining readership, and many are turning to AI for their content.

This is a clear result of education by humans being in a struggling place, with people turning to generative AI for quick solutions (and notably not to comprehensively learn). Speaking to many folks with courses, their sales have plummeted – dropped completely to nil in a disturbing number of cases.

It is gutting to feel I’d see greater success if I didn’t care who I worked for, gave up on my morals, and embraced the latest harmful fad. Grifting has long been a thing, but at present it seems there aren’t any consequences beyond one’s own conscience and that it is the optimal way to make a buck.

Pair all those issues with the dire state of everything. Computers and their components’ costs continue to inflate, the USA has a fascist government, there are major ongoing wars (and new ones being started), and everything is increasingly morally ambiguous – especially in tech.

Couple all that with the erosion of rights and companies being increasingly anti-consumer. Forcing features unwanted, removing features wanted, taking away physical media, making all a subscription, taking away our control of our devices and what software we can run on them, and eroding privacy.

Things are dire, and I’m thinking I need to pivot, because front-end developer is a job that companies are happy to have AI complete, regardless of if it is on par with a professional’s work. My work is better than sloppy AI output, but that can be hard to distinguish if one doesn’t investigate.

Perhaps a freelancer collective is needed? A distributed agency. Different people with different specialisations sharing resources and referring work to each other based on their capabilities. Every freelancer I know is reporting difficulty finding work, and they’re long established in the industry.

I don’t know how to feel or what to do. Things are bad, and while I’m sure they’ll get better to a degree eventually, I’m not sure how much better they’ll get. What does ‘better’ look like when the greatest minds in the industry have left and don’t come back? So much lost skill and knowledge.

I suppose Google Search’s full pivot to AI explains why Google dropped support for non-JavaScript usage at the end of 2025.

They should do a show like Air Crash Investigations, but instead of investigating aeroplanes, they investigate what went wrong at last Tuesday’s all-hands.

AutoMod used to have a red accent, but the logo was rainbow-ified for pride month a few years ago and it stuck.

Sometimes people are critical of it which weeds them out, and sometimes people message me because they appreciate the representation and it makes them feel safe.

Another pride month has come and gone, but AutoMod will remain as colourful as ever. True pride is deeper than recolouring a logo for a month.

Reddit is slowly winding down Old Reddit. Functionality is being removed and features are discreetly disappearing. They’re quite obviously eroding its functionality so that when they finally kill it there is less outrage.

Sucks as someone who makes money from Old Reddit stylesheets…

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/

CSS started out as something a lot simpler. Originally it was just a bare-bones means to lightly simple, majority text pages, but it quickly took off and had to keep up with the swiftly evolving web.

Along the way, mistakes were made – both genuine blunders and at the time reasonable choices which time hasn’t been kind to and which are flawed in retrospect. The CSS Working Group published the Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS, which outlines a great many of these suboptimal features. A similar story is etched into the history of many languages; they started simple with a tight scope, but decades of usage have expanded the cases beyond the original design decisions.

These mistakes obviously cannot just be fixed, for the plethora of existing software relying on them would break, and even if fallbacks were implemented, there are edge cases galore which could cause unacceptable disruption. Thus, to peer into the alternate timeline where CSS didn’t make these mistakes, I’ve created a library: FixCSS.

FixCSS tackles the mistakes and the knock-on implications of them to present a CSS where they never happened – a CSS that could have been. It works client-side, as a Node package, and via the command line (CLI). It is mostly a novelty, rather than something for production. We must live with the stylesheets we’ve cascaded ourselves into.

The source code is on Tangled: https://tangled.org/vale.rocks/FixCSS
The library can be found on NPM: https://npmx.dev/package/@declanchidlow/fixcss

There is talk of regulating smart glasses, perhaps outright banning them. I can agree with regulation, but not with a ban.

For a lot of folks with severe visual impairments, smart glasses paired with image recognition are a great aid. For general usage by other people, a convenient glasses-based camera is great for capturing the exact perspective of the wearer while avoiding bulky head mounted camera gear.

However, what isn’t right is creepy, discreet, non-consensual recording, especially given who the recordings are in the hands of. Social media companies are not good custodians of data, Meta especially not. They should not share people’s eyes into the world. It is true that in many places you are legally able to record in public, but the legal fact doesn’t change the ethical and moral correctness. Flock has surveillance cameras across the United States for tracking people’s every move, and while legal, I think them reprehensible. Same applies to privacy-eroding face based cameras.

Smart glasses should use local or data-protections vetted object recognition models, be disconnected from surveillance operations and big tech, and have large, bright recording lights that are directly integrated with the camera, such that the camera cannot operate in isolation. It should also be made clear they are camera equipped, perhaps with an overt reflective patch as part of their design.

I don’t think a ban it a good idea, as bans are very rarely good ideas, but I do think that regulation is necessary and prudent. I fear that restricting their availability so they can only be used as an accessibility aid would end commercial investment into them entirely, but then removing the data-collecting ‘perv glasses’ aspects would also dissuade companies from further developing them.

I don’t actually understand why everyone keeps talking about using AI for coding.

I simply can’t see how artificial insemination helps with building software.

I play a fun game when checking domains that have expired called ‘Is it now a porn site, a gambling site, or did they fail a pivot into crypto/NFTs?’

Some applications and websites have inbuilt theming capabilities. Others lack anything of the sort but can be themed by external means.

I’d prefer people don’t theme or alter my work, as a painter prefers people not to alter their paintings. Please don’t theme our apps pops to mind. Of course, the web is a medium in which some modification can be expected. From zooming, to forcing fonts, to high-contrast mode, etc, people will modify sites. Particularly on the web, people will theme and modify things as they see fit. It is very much part of the platform’s ethos – user agent stylesheets and extensions and whatnot.

I know that I personally alter websites all the time. Whether that be deleting an element, forcing dark mode, stopping an annoying visual effect, or something more substantial. I also know that people have altered websites I’ve worked on (and icons I’ve designed), and that doing so usually makes me feel something adjacent to bad, conjuring thoughts of ‘Have I failed, such that people must undo or change my work?’.

Another line of thought in my own theming of sites (and indeed, creation of my own bespoke apps) is that I’m being exposed to less design. Exposure to different interfaces and flourishes is inspiring. You find new interface patterns and stay up-to-date with trends by seeing what is popular and in use. As a developer and designer, keeping track with what is ‘in’ is important, as is finding inspiration to motivate oneself and apply to other contexts. By forcing everything existing into my own rigid pre-existing structures, I’m walling myself off. In some cases, this is necessary, such as when the design is really bad or user-hostile, but in many other cases it is something I’m doing out of pure comfort with the known.

The screen door effect is the name given to the undesirable visual artefact produced by tiny lines separating pixels and/or subpixels in displays. It is particularly an issue for displays on head-mounted devices, as they are positioned close to the viewer and magnified by lenses. The effect is named for being similar to looking through a screen door, as seen here:

Not only does the screen door effect harm image quality, but it also harms colour, reducing brightness and vibrance by masking the image with darkness.

There are only two file formats: disguised zips and renamed text files.

JSON? Text. EPUB? Zip. CSV? Text. EXE? Zip. SVG? Text. DOCX? Zip. ICS? Text. APK? Zip.

Google’s AI Overview just confidently informed me that the PDA operating system EPOC (which isn’t an acronym and is instead a reference to the term ‘epoch’) actually stands for ‘Electronic Piece of Cheese’.

Unwelcome memories of setting up Windows 10 in bulk and Cortana vomiting its spiel from every single computer simultaneously.

Hi there! I’m Cortana, and I’m here to help. A little sign-in here, a touch of Wi-Fi there, and we’ll have your PC ready for all you plan to do. Use your voice or…

Happened to be at the place I was born the other day, and the thought crossed my mind that, while there, my overall velocity was zero.

Let’s say it takes 30 minutes to read 8000 words, and lets assume that people only read a third of that (10 minutes). Based on my (under-representing) GoatCounter stats, 6000 people viewed my post about browsers on game consoles.

That calculates to people having spent a collective time of over 40 days reading that post.

Lots of vague figures and assumptions here, but still crazy to think about that amount of human life being spent reading my screed.

I’d love to be able to use a writer deck. Some sort of little distraction-free device built just for writing without the luring distractions posed by the rest of a computer. Something with a nice keyboard and pleasant screen – maybe e-ink?

Unfortunately, writer decks just don’t fit my needs. I can identify genuine value for creative writers, or people writing stories for the facts of which they already know, but that is very rarely me. Almost everything I write requires research, so I’m usually split between my writing buffer and a browser, and by the time a browser is introduced, the benefit of a writer deck is nullified.

In addition to traversing the World Wide Web for research, much of my writing is technical, so I find myself needing a way to write code and test it. That means I need to configure – and maintain – a development environment, and that whatever device I might use as a writer deck needs to be capable of performing these development tasks, ideally at such a speed that it doesn’t break my writing flow.

I’d love a writer deck, and it’d be fit for writing a novel or the likes, but for my needs I’m afraid it is impractical.

Absolutely bonkers to see a single person referenced as ‘Web Implementer’ in the credits for old browsers. Even slightly later browsers with a small team of five or so people absolutely blow my mind.

The early web was a very different beast to the one we know now, that’s for sure.

Every single time someone talks to me at a normal speaking pace after I’ve been using a screen reader at Mach 10 speeds, it sounds like they’re ultra-drunk.

I dug out my old graphic design portfolio.

I love it for being an almost physical manifestation of my website, albeit a slightly older version. The colours and type might have changed since I put this portfolio together, but the general style remains intact.

Stumbling towards the domain registrar with a crisp note in my hand in the same fashion as the drunk stumbles towards the bar with hand outstretched, steadying himself momentarily on the back of your chair before taking another step and finding himself on the floor.

At Maccas and we see a dozen or more rats scuttering around the car park bins. We pull up to the drive-thru window and mention ‘Wow, you’ve got a lot of rats out there!’.

We finish ordering and as we drive on she yells to her manager through the busy restaurant ‘This guy says we’ve got rats!’.

🤦

Sometimes people message me to say thanks to me for sharing my code publicly, because it has helped them understand something.

Such messages reach me sending electric strikes of fear into my heart. I can’t stress enough how bad of an idea referencing any of my code is. I feel I must apologise.

Just discovered this is a thing you can do if you’re so inclined. https://youtube.com/tv works on non-television devices (as long as you spoof your user agent).

I love when platforms shut down due to a flawed business model lacking profitability, so another platform comes along aiming to fill the void left by the old platform but also copies the flawed business model, also fails to profit, and then also shuts down.

One of my favourite genres of business.

‘Did you add an extra page to the site just so the footer links would balance nicely?’

Me? No. Pfft. I— Y’know— Me? Ha. I— I’d never! Not something I’d do… nope…

If you suffer from acne or get the occasional pimple, you may be familiar with pimple patches. The good (non-psuedoscience/gimmick) patches are hydrocolloid patches, which absorb the fluid and form a gel from it.

You can buy rolls of adhesive hydrocolloid dressings for prices that are negligible compared to a comparable volume of pimple patches at their premium prices. Patches cut from hydrocolloid rolls aren’t usually quite as invisible as purpose-designed patches, but they are transparent. The raise around the edge of the patch due to its non-tapered thickness is the most obvious part, but you could feasibly trim them yourself to minimise the visibility.

You can cut these rolls to suit, only using as much as you need, and they’ve been proven both scientifically and anecdotally to work on popped and unpopped pimples while deterring scarring due to the moist healing process. They do not work on deep, blind cystic acne or blackheads, however. In addition to hydrocolloid’s properties, a patch also disincentivises idle picking and protects the site from muck and bacteria. Even if you buy a hydrocolloid roll and find it useless for treating pimples, it is still a valuable tool more generally for burns, cuts, and scrapes.

To use, you should first gently wash and then dry the application site. Next, cut the patch to size, peel off the backing, and apply it where needed. I’ve had great success with them.

The only agent I’m trusting is Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. He is a long serving member of CONTROL, a secret US government counterintelligence agency.

Was helping out a (seemingly) nice client in her 80s who was locked out of her Facebook, and based on the vibe I got from her (and her very vocal support of Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson), I’m almost certain her account was suspended due to spewing hate speech and harassing people. 😬

There’s simply too much good human made stuff out there to justify wasting time consuming AI made slop.