David Bushell’s Notes only feed
Slop watermarks are coming to Claude and all LLMs, thanks EU! They use a seeded pseudo-random number generator to ensure the next word is still random, but can be matched back to the seed. It’s clever, and hilarious how often Anthropic use “random” to explain how LLMs work. The current crop of “AI detectors” are absolute bogus. When Anthropic releases their watermark detection API a strong…
I jumped in at the hour mark of Miriam Suzanne’s chat with Brad Frost around the time they discuss the true costs of AI. Miriam’s words are incredible. Brad nods along seemingly agreeing, but fails to see he’s part of the problem by using (and selling) this stuff. I was hoping to better understand the perspective of someone like Brad but I’m more confused than ever.
I had this drafted on my big blog under the title “Abattoirs of taste” which I felt was too killer to waste, so I’m dropping it here unfinished. After reading it back though I had to ask myself: why am I bothering? This nonsense is not what I should be focusing on! I keep seeing the word “taste” pop up in conjunction with AI usage in web development. According to Syntax episode #1027 it is “taste”…
WordPress if famous for its backwards compatibility. That’s if you ignore its non-existent CSS strategy. Over seven years ago the Gutenberg block editor was rushed into v5.0. Ever since, WordPress has polluted the front-end with impossible to manage styles. I’ve written for years about how WordPress breaks CSS and how horrendous theming has become the norm. I tried to raise issues but they went…
This story is wild. Where to start? John Gruber posts “App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours” (now retracted) about Terry Godier’s “Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment” (since edited). Godier claimed to have built an astronomy app called Dark Hours over four months, and that Apple rejected the app “on the grounds that it was Astrology”. Gruber ran with the story, heavily…
I read: “We Stopped Using RSC on TanStack.com” and it’s incredible. They were shipping 1.1 MiB of JavaScript to the browser to render markdown and syntax highlight code examples — in the browser. They moved this work to the server (good) using React Server Components (bad). RSC proved to be unbearable, even by TanStack standards. They then wrote their own markdown parser and syntax highlighter,…
I watched a recent Jeff Geerling video (YouTube) and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The current price of a Raspberry Pi is an absolute rip off. I checked The Pi Hut and Pimoroni both are priced the same for the UK market. Raspberry Pi 5 for £292.80? Who in their right mind would buy that? I see they introduced a 1GB model for £43.20. A 1GB Pi 5 has extremely limited use, a Pi 4 or even Pi 3…
I really don’t understand the purpose of Homebrew anymore. Today I tried to rebuild my Tauri app and I get a weird error. I run tauri info to find: Weird, I thought I had installed Rust via Homebrew. I run which rustup to find: I run rustup and everything updates. I check ~/.cargo/bin and see all the Rust tools are symlinked to /opt/homebrew/bin/rustup-init — the rustup-init file does not exist. I…
Cold opens are the worst new trend in podcasting. Random talking with no context. I’m supposed to guess who is speaking and what they’re rambling on about? I look forward to the vague deja vu I get when it’s repeated in 40 minutes 🙄 This ain’t TikTok. Nobody is getting hooked on a poorly chosen mid-sentence quote that isn’t half as profound and the editor imagined. I’m getting real tired of…
I am listening to The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington. The Wheel of Time influence is obvious. The audiobooks are read by Michael Kramer who is the voice of the high fantasy genre. I’m not convinced half way into the first book but I’ll see it through.
After a long absence I’m back coding with Sublime Text. I can’t remember when or why I switched to VS Code. I moved to VSCodium for a short period last year and then gave Zed a spin. These modern apps and their “developer experience” suck. Sublime Text with five minutes of configuration in a breath of fresh air.
Lightning CSS is not fit for purpose. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ It’s practically impossible to control what CSS is actually output. The documentation and config are infuriating on missing details. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem. As soon as you try to fix issues like animation shorthand a side effect is triggered elsewhere. Lightning CSS is like one of those mini-games where you have to activate a row…
Apple has quietly discontinued Safari Technical Preview for macOS 15 (Sequoia). Version 245 was the last release. macOS 26 (Tahoe, aka Trainwreck) was required from version 256 onwards. For now it remains possible to install Safari 26 and apparently Safari 27 Beta on Sequoia. You just have to navigate Apple’s terrible system settings UI and dodge the deceptive patterns that trick you into a Tahoe…
Codeberg is “Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs”. TL;DR: keep your slop on GitHub. Nice to see a project push back against the dead internet.
I found Lumis via the Master’s blog (new name, huh?) Lumis looks to be the new hotness in syntax highlighting. Does that mean Shiki is now old and busted? I use Shiki for better syntax highlighting but I have to jump through a few hoops. Is Lumis better? Shiki churns through all 932 code snippets on my blog in around ~1800ms. Lumis can do it in ~1400ms. On one hand that’s quite a significant…
“What’s !important” is a semi-regular series on CSS-Tricks by Daniel Schwarz that covers everything hot in CSS and front-end. It’s a great round up, not just because I’m in this week’s edition! It’s nice to see CSS-Tricks ramping up quality content again. Following the Digital Ocean sale it was looking rather dicey. I feared it would be another .net magazine disaster. Remember when that just got…
I code websites for WordPress (PHP), static HTML, or my own scuffed build scripts. I have a particular project for which I decided to try one of those fancy static site generators. I asked the socials “11ty or Astro?” Both are popular but Astro had the edge. I am persevering with Astro despite spending almost an hour trying to get my code editor to recognise HTML (it’s a modern app). I was a…
Browser Hacks were a necessary evil in the Internet Explorer days. I thought they were a relic of the past but recently Safari has tempted a resurgence. Eric Meyer’s post on split-cell table headers uses @supports to detect Safari. I gave a drive-by suggestion to Sophie Koonin who adapted this for: “Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix” — that’s a really cool…
“Generative AI killed that career. Towards the end, I was asked to replace my thoughtful activity with ill-gotten slop. My prior activity was supported by my unique relationship with the tools and practices learned and refined over a long career of identifying patterns and differences. That experience, though shareable, was never fungible. And the sea, Dent - Chris Dent”
Edit: sorry RSS readers! I future-posted this with the wrong date. Now you’re seeing it again because I use the timestamp in the URL and the URL as the GUID… Just skip to my next note. Reading Salma’s post “Goodbye, forever, probably.” hits hard. Especially the part about AI killing developer education. I wish Salma all the best in her future. I don’t like to swear so choose your own word: #$@!…
