So often I run into a software footgun that has been created because it was the easiest way, and technically fits the requirements. And somehow authors often overlook the fact that it won't really serve the users as well, because they are not born with the intrinsic knowledge of where the footgun is and how to avoid it.

"But, if they hold it right, it will work!.."

something

Here's a thing... If a person is known to be a shameless liar, no matter how similar their political views are to my own, there is no reason to believe they would stick to them when it's no longer convenient.

By the same token, if a person is a ruthless asshole, I'd rather not give them free rein to carry out something I am sympathetic to, because the next I may be the subject of their ruthlessness.

It's sad really, we desperately need the best people to lead us, but politics is so antithetical to ethics that truly wonderful people prefer to do other things.

PSA: If your Chrome browser updated and declared uBlock Origin "no longer supported", that's a bit of a misdirection. You can go to "Manage Extensions" page, select uBlock Origin and click "Keep for now". And it will work. For now.

Thinking more on web #decluttering, I now believe that this is largely a matter of control.

My programming career started in web development and even though I was never good at the design part, it was always immensely satisfying to get my web site look just right. Perfect margins, best color scheme, nicest fonts, but all of it according to me.

Herein lies the problem: web sites are largely created to represent the tastes (or corporate style) of the creators, and not the preferences of visitors. I think that the key to a user-firendly web is giving back the control to the users.

The hard part of it is how much control should we give back. In the attachment are three versions of the same blog post: one with my current blog's theme (the green one, designed according to my tastes), one with all styles stripped off (literally zero custom CSS), and the second is the very minimal styling (mostly browser defaults, but some minimal styling to improve readability).

Which one is better for the user? I dunno.

I’m certainly not the first to come up with it, but this seems like an interesting joint design for 3d prints that need some measure of adjustability at assembly time, and being stiff the rest of it.

#3dprinting

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40090179 is as sad as it is hilarious...

At some point Chrome OS implemented fashionable (but utterly unusable) overlay scroll bars, and it took 7 years of users complaining for the team to implement a setting to get the normal scroll bars back. Which was harder for them than you'd think for various technical reasons. And non-technical.

But here's the kicker: for the setting to do anything, you gotta go into chrome://flags#overlay-scrollbars and flip that flag first

What I've learned from observing politics and tech is that not having any ethics is good for business

I guess I'm not becoming rich any time soon

Software development is not art. Nor is it a craft.

It is experimental science — at least when done well. It's the "applied" discipline to the computer science.

A hypothesis and experiment are everywhere throughout the field. A unit test is an experiment to verify that a piece of code does what we think it does. A good unit test is falsifiable — it is designed to fail if the underlying hypothesis is false (hence why TDD preaches writing tests first).

Production canaries are an experiment that verifies the hypothesis of the program's expectations of its environment match the real environment. The best monitoring and alerting I've ever seen was written in the same style: to detect whether an assumption holds true.

It strikes me that a lot of hype bubbles in tech are akin to pseudoscience: there is a kernel of truth to them, but they disregard any sign that opposes their desired conclusion.

Lately I've been contemplating enshittification of the web and how overbearing all the styles and scripts can be. We spend so much time, traffic and watts trying to coax browsers into making things accessible and nice to read.

As an exercise, I saved one of the pages from my blog and purged all CSS, JS, Twitter Bootstrap, fonts and unnecessary markup from it.

And you know what? The result is pretty darn readable and nice to look at.

A part of my blog publishing script is a broken link checker. It's a bit sad to see how year to year I have to update more and more of them to point at Web Archive... Honestly, it and Wikipedia are probably the sites of the highest public value of them all. Please throw a few bucks their way next time you use them.

Printing a tool holder for a 3d printer is a rite of passage of sorts for a 3d printer owner. I’m pretty late to the party, but I’m quite pleased with the results.

I'm usually not big on watching keynotes, but I recognized the speaker's name, and gave this one a go: Fear in Tech - Titus Winters - Keynote Meeting C++ 2024 - YouTube

I was not disappointed, Titus made a lot of points that struck home.

From it, I've also learned the stochastic parrot term, which is a great way to describe what LLMs actually do.

Don't throw away your browser tab when you are done with it, only to reach for a new one! Keep it aside, and reuse it when you need to browse some sites. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Open the tab you set aside.
2. Activate the address bar (Ctrl+L can do that quickly for you!).
3. Delete the content of the address bar, and type the new address, or a search query.
4. Hit Enter! Continue with your browsing as if it were a fresh tab!

If you closed a tab by accident, it's not too late! Press Ctrl+Shift+T to restore the most recently closed tab. (Consult your local IT expert for instructions on your specific case, terms and conditions apply).

Be responsible! Recycle tabs! ♲