Micros

I’ve been very disappointed with DuckDuckGo results recently. Seems there was a sharp drop in quality ~3 weeks ago.

Kagi gives the best results I’ve found, but at a financial premium. I’m kinda just jumping around search engines looking for a home.

I really appreciate that people in my feeds engage in nuanced AI discussion. Yes, there are negatives. Yes, there are positives. No, flame wars don’t get us anywhere.

Thanks for all being so awesome and eloquent with your words.

I usually steer clear of political posts, but I can’t stress enough how important it is for every American to get out and vote. The world will be a little better for it.

Blimey, I’m lovin’ <dialog> and the Popover API. JavaScript free* menus without the need for any hacks.

I used to use some trickery involving CSS’s :target to implement menus…

This is only gonna get cooler when anchor positioning gets more comprehensive support. Top layer elements and anchor positioning go together like butter and toast.

‘Brittle web technology’ is one of the most perfect phrases I’ve ever encountered. It just perfectly sums up the shattering characteristic of so many dev tools.

It’s the web! It should be the wild west! Chaotic, unstoppable madness! Bodge everything and take no hostages!

Micro-blogging platforms like Bluesky and Fedi are built around following people, not topics. This is good in that I can create meaningful connections with familiar faces, but bad in that I pass up great content because I can’t just follow the parts of people’s feeds that interest me.

Sometimes I wish I could follow someone’s tech posts without their politics, or their design without their hot takes. If you’re wondering why I don’t follow you, it’s probably because of this. I still love ya!

(I’ve come to find this is somewhat doable via word filtering, although it is a bit finicky, not comprehensive, and introduces potential for false positives. I’ll trial it and see how it goes.)

I barely find myself needing CSS ‘hacks’ anymore. Most stuff I need to do is kinda just a thing now.

Thanks to all the many people who’ve made this a reality!

I’ve spent the past several years thinking Vite is pronounced ‘vite’ rather than ‘veet’. I’ve gotta start watching more dev videos or something…

Sorry for being MIA these past few days. Russia and Turkey both banned Discord, so I’ve been tied up with Revolt. We’ve had some 250K users join in the past 4 days, bringing us to over 450K users total!

If you aren’t aware, Revolt is a FOSS chat platform and decent alternative to Discord that I work on.

You can check it out at https://revolt.chat if you’re interested.

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #3,150,897! I would have jumped in earlier was it not for the invite system. I got access just before they opened it up.

Card stating

Oooh w̶̨̩̣̭͙̯͎̭̻̮̪̥̟͇̳̬͒̎̋̉̒ą̷̢̛̠̮̥͔̩̙̺̘͙̘̹̣̪͔͙̊͐̒̍̓͝ḧ̷̗́͊̓̓̽̄̎̉̈ą̷̡̹̰͖͍̥̭̫̤͈̠̀̇̔̓̓͑̅̂̊͘̚͝͝ḩ̶̤͐̍̽̀̆̂̚͝a̴͕̗̭͎̹̲̝̭͗͂͐̿͊̉̈̏̿͂̐̑̆̊̕͠͠h̶̹̑̒̐̒̈̑͋͊͠a̸̲̟̞̼̰̘͂́͌̑̔̊̔̉͗̋̈́̑̐͠͠

Genuine exchange I just had:

Person: It’s broken on mobile.

Me: Do you have a Samsung by chance?

Person: Yes, I have

Me: Do you use Samsung Internet?

Person: I’m not sure what that is. I use the default browser.

Me: I shall refrain from using the selection of words I’d like to.

Seriously, how is Samsung Internet still this much of a clusterfuck?

One great use of LLMs I’ve found is as dynamic WordPress documentation generators.

WordPress is really poorly documented. Especially block themes, which are a mess in more ways than just documentation.

People who have a minimap in their editor, why?

I had one briefly back in the Atom days, but it was never all that useful. I’ve found having breadcrumbs at the top of my editor fills every minimap use case I can imagine.

Interested to hear how people use them and if I’m perhaps missing something.

This is a quote from Gian-Carlo Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts that I think applies particularly well in the context of development:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: “How did he do it? He must be a genius!

Server upgraded and everything running again.

Bumped up to 8GB of RAM from 4GB, cleaned out the case, installed a new 4TB HDD, and migrated from Debian to NixOS.

Spent a bit of time putting together a little tool that lets you search across search engines. You can pick a default and use bangs to search a specific site, like on DuckDuckGo.

Made it mainly for myself, but I’m sure it’s of interest to other people.

https://search.vale.rocks