Rather, I became a physicist to stare at large databases of histograms produced by a Lovecraftian-autocomplete of dubious correctness and say “yeah that’s probably ok I guess” to add to humanity’s knowledge frontier.

Why are we even doing all this? - Rikab Gambhir

This whole satirical piece is excellent.

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For searching the rest of the web I pay for Kagi and disable all the slop (sigh).

I remembered to update the form-action directive in my content security policy. Apparently I have an old article on HTTP security headers.

Speaking of CSP, Google are not content and have invented a new connection allowlists header. I glanced over the spec and it seems reasonable. But this is Google, it’s probably another backdoor for fingerprinting (sigh).

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For every component, we’ve documented the applicable success criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, at levels A, AA, and AAA. We’ve also added our own recommendations for things WCAG doesn’t cover, such as usability when using high contrast themes.

Introducing the Accessible Components Library - Craig Abbott

There is a lot to learn from this library. I especially like the Tabs web component. I’ve tried to build similar before and have never been sure if I got it right. This reference is reassuring! I look forward to studying new patterns in future updates.

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The Unlicense ‘license’ Dan chose is interesting. It waives copyright putting the work into public domain. Since copyright is not easily shaken off, it falls back to a modified MIT license. Copyright should be unwaivable in my opinion. Human rights are inalienable and this protects people against exploitation. Of course, the entire idea of copyright has been peverted and destroyed beyond meaning. So whatever!

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We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime.

Deno is joining Cloudflare - Ryan Dahl

Deno’s decline didn’t go unnoticed. Following Dahl’s silence after half the team was laid off it became clear that his focus was elsewhere. What was left of Deno Land Inc. has been tweeting AI fantasies and vibe-coding Temu Cloudflare. — now they’re being assimilated into the real Cloudflare collective.

Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model. This will involve merging code and ideas from celld back into workerd.

Deno is joining Cloudflare - Kenton Varda and Ryan Dahl

Cloudflare claims to support open source and that “‘Lock-in’ actually hurts” but evidently they’re not keen on open source competition. So Dahl’s pivot to an acquisition paid off^† and probably just in time. I felt that an acquisition was unlikely. That was before the celld project, which is what Cloudflare are actually buying here to swiftly consume. Celld was a bit of a ‘left field hail mary’, as the Yanks say.

I don’t want to harp on about this but in a Hacker News comment yesterday, Dahl himself now admits:

It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does. Why reimplement Node? It works.

Hacker News: Cloudflare acquires Deno - @rough-sea

I was saying exactly that for years:

Where are those developers? They’re using Node. Maybe Node compatibility is the solution? Nope. It ain’t working. Why would a Node developer move to Deno only to continue using Node APIs and NPM modules?

Something’s off (The Deno Package Paradox)

Venture capital led to bad decisions and killed innovation. Now the corporate machine has come to sweep up what’s left. I have thoughts on Cloudflare but I’ll save those for the big blog one day.

^† At least for Deno’s investors who weren’t seeing any return on the 20-whatever million invested. I bet Cloudflare got 50 cents on the dollar.

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That said, I don’t like pseudo-elements. They’re a dead end for style and content. A failure/abuse of the standardisation process to rush things in via CSS.

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Anyone with a blog and public email address in [current year] can probably attest to that experience. Apparently the audacity to prefer not to fund billionaires really upsets people?

Several of those people were even able to form a coherent sentence. A few latched on to my “Play Synthesised Audio” button as the ultimate “gotcha!”

The Web Speech API and SpeechSynthesis I used have been around since 2018. Back when “machine learning” wasn’t designed to violate humanity. As far as I know these APIs are old school text-to-speech (and sound like it). However, I am no longer confident. I can’t test or trust all browsers & operating systems.

The button was a “nice to have” feature but it’s not worth the hassle.

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“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, [web developers are surveyed,] leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave birth to it comes again.”

The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan

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If you’re reading this my website is now built and deployed with Node.

If not… well, I’m in for a miserable weekend!

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I thought it was just me. Like a sudden onset skill issue, or a crumb under my keyboard.

The amount of “I thought it was just me!” on the socials suggest we’re not going crazy.

Marcin Wichary says Apple Notes is a problem:

On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)

“I trust in TextEdit.” - Marcin Wichary

That was shared in February. I’m a big Notes user, it may well be the common denominator in all my copy/paste failures. I’m keeping track to see if it happens without Notes involved. Notes is the only app in Apple’s ecosystem that I still use. Bugs and sync failures elsewhere has led me to find alternatives for everything else.

Apple fanboys’ new coping mantra has been that “Golden Gate” is a “Snow Leopard” release. Meaning that lack of exciting new features were made up by fixes and stability. I’m not sure it was true back then, it’s certainly not today.

Update: oh dear, “macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess”

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The inverted colours come from my custom dark mode experiment. The jiggery-pokery in my build system was quite the challenge that only I shall appreciate. Hopefully though you’ll enjoy the occasional design variety it allows.

I don’t plan every post to have a unique style, but it’s nice to have the ability without too much hassle. It doesn’t break RSS either, unlike my previous experiments!

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Well it turns out Radicle is not a serious project.

Two critical security vulnerabilities in the network protocol used by Radicle nodes were reported.

Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol - Radicle

Kostis Maninakis discovered a major vulnerability.

As it turns out, after the handshake, everything the two nodes say to each other goes over the plain TCP socket unencrypted: gossip, repository ids, the addresses of other nodes, and the Git objects themselves, private repositories included.

Vulnerability disclosure: Radicle nodes send private repositories in cleartext - Kostis Maninakis

I never looked at how Radicle was supposed to work, but the official report suggests the developers thought data was encrypted? Radicle’s plans are to replace the underlying networking protocol. This will be a gruelling “backwards-incompatible” fix.

Oh dear… How can anyone trust Radicle after this? I’m sorry, but if you’re that careless, clueless even, is it even responsible to continue the project? That’s harsh to say but we’re talking about security. If you don’t have the expertise don’t get in the game. The only way I’d consider Radicle 2.0 is if multiple 3rd-party experts audited the network.

Shame, because the idea sounded cool.

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As I noted at the end of “I said no and Apple said yes” it’s impossible to keep up with this bullshit. Every day there is a new atrocity.

Furthermore there is no worthwhile career in AI-driven development. That has become abundantly clear. The entire AI industry is driving to dehumanise and commoditise labour. I need to add “never” to my policy at the very least.

I’ll probably edit it a little shorter.

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• The Moai Island Puzzle - Alice Arisugawa
• The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino

Moai Island was great. Perhaps my second favourite of the shin honkaku genre behind The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. I had somewhat of an idea of how events unfolded but I fell for a red herring and totally misidentified the killer. The explanation of why a certain character took a certain journey around the island is clever.

Suspect X isn’t a whodunit but a how-dunit. It begins with the murder and then follows both the murderer and the detectives as the cover-up unravels. The story was well structured and if you’re attentive things don’t quite add up. I’d give this book five stars but the very last page ruined it for me! I don’t think that ending was necessary.

I appreciate these books being short (compared to my usual fantasy choices). I suppose there is only so long you can draw out a mystery.

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Let me make it clear: without people at the top of their game sharing their experience and knowledge — regardless of whatever “game changing” technology is in place — we are pulling up the ladders and committing our industry to stagnation and death. We’ve already fucked it up over the last few years for junior developers by instead of investing in them, playing the slot machines (also known as LLMs) to — you guessed it — make the money number go up, but there’s still hope for recovery.

You’ll miss publishers when they’re gone - Andy Bell

• CSS-Tricks is dead.
• Smashing Magazine is sloppy.
• Piccalilli is struggling.
• Anyone remember .NET magazine?

The “web whetstones” I depend on to stay sharp are falling one by one.

Master.dev Blog is going strong with authors like Chris Coyier and Temani Afif. Checking my RSS feeds I don’t see other regular large publishers. Most blogs I subscribe to are individual developers. Many of them have gone quiet too. I’m hanging in there! I like a distributed web but I see the value of publications.

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I dialled back every setting I could and macOS 27 is fine, I guess.

The stupid glass bubbles everywhere scream for attention. That’s the entire design aesthetic of Liquid Glass — pointless animations and glossy effects that beg for your eyeballs. Apple says it “brings more focus to content” but the exact opposite is true. “Look at me I’m glass!” it screams as it literally pushes content away requiring more wasted space. Apple reminds you at every glance that they own the system.

Apple’s icons have been discussed by Tonsky and Nielsen — they’re bad! The UI is full of meaningless abstract shapes with no label (sometimes not even a tooltip).

iOS 27 on my iPhone 12 performs like shit now. Just like the Apple TV glass update I’d already mistakenly applied. I’m not a big mobile user so whatever. I cancelled my Apple One subscription so the TV is just an Infuse x Jellyfin player now.

TL;DR: tolerable but a step backwards.

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This is a proud achievement! How does one go about framing an audio clip to display in my office? Have the transcript framed and printed?

I’m sure I’ve been mentioned on earlier episodes for more valuable contributions to the industry but I’ll take what I can get in this economy!

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