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! ♲

Nothing good can be called "CrowdStrike".

Am I the only one who often puts the headphones on without any music just because they keep my ears warm?

TIL you can use emoji in Gmail labels. I'm afraid I'm gonna do a lot of terrible things with it now

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than geopolitics.