tomw

tomw, 7 months ago to random

There's something so comforting about committing a design to CMYK instead of putting it out there for web browsers to screw up

tomw, 7 months ago to random

There is a huge distance between the actual rhythm of my day and the rhythm assumed by everyone who ever emails me

tomw, 7 months ago to random

webp has never done anything but annoy me in every context where I have ever encountered it

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Do you ever worry that something you post after 10 seconds of thought will go mega-viral and then for the rest of your life people will call you "the donkus bonkus guy"

tomw, 7 months ago to random

It's amazing to me that anyone still believes in the "marketplace of ideas" BS when you see how far and wide obvious conspiracy theories have been able to spread, unhindered by attempts at refutation

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Thing I dislike to an unreasonable degree:

Automated order emails that say something like "Wow, great choice!"

You have no idea what I chose, obviously, this being a template.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Seriously though, who is buying all of these farming games?

Why are there so many?

tomw, 8 months ago to random

I miss when electronics used to come with instruction books instead of sheets of paper with stuff like "do not light on fire" and "do not stand on appliance" translated (poorly) into 100 languages

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Do you ever have a day that has a lot of sub-plots

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Today I have been to London Bridge the train station, London Bridge the tube station, and London Bridge the actual bridge.

None of these, I can report, were falling down.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

I don't post much politics on here but:

I'll be at this march tomorrow to rejoin the EU

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-national-rejoin-march-westminster-b2416850.html

tomw, 8 months ago to random

The state of identity verification in the UK:

1. "You need a utility bill with your full name and address".
2. Of course these are all online now, and even if you try to get paper ones for this very purpose the companies keep pushing you to online instead.
3. Go download a PDF of the bill.
4. "We cannot accept online bills, it must have been posted to your address"
5. Print out the PDF
6. Take a photo of it
7. Email it to them
8. Accepted

tomw, 8 months ago to random

NFTs didn't become worthless today. They always were.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Deciding between "is" and "are" for collective nouns has become an unwinnable situation.

The natural-sounding answer is usually "are" but you get a lot of upset pedants.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

It's called being a millennial because we will forever believe that the 1990s were ten years ago and the 1980s were twenty years ago

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Practice self-care today by not using React

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Webp? Heic? Avif?

Make it stop! Just use the normal image formats that every program can open and every image upload function accepts.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Another day, another set of user reports of web form errors caused by... session cookies not working/being blocked.

Third-party tracking cookies are bad, but indiscriminate blocking of cookies is now so widespread that using them anywhere, for any reason, just causes it to fail on some config somewhere.

I can only conclude from this that cookies are, for all practical purposes, dead.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Every so often I see a post about how LLMs fail logic puzzles.

And... yes? Of course they do. The only way it could solve it is if it has seen the puzzle before or a substantially similar one. (But that might cause it to give the answer to the similar one, not the correct answer.)

Why is this even tested so often or considered surprising? It is, in essence, an autocomplete. It does not understand logic. It has no concept of a correct answer. It gives the most likely completion.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

My theory: the entire existence of web apps was caused by stupid corporate "you can't install anything on your computer" policies

tomw, 8 months ago to random

What do I know about Starfield? Well I know he eats stasagna and hates Stondays.

tomw, 8 months ago to webdev

Did you know that <input step="10"> in #html not only makes the up/down arrows on your number input go up and down in steps of 10, it also outright rejects as invalid any keyed-in number that isn't a multiple of 10, and does so with a user-facing error that is too cryptic for any user to understand the issue?

I now know this. Guess how I found it out.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Today I saw a stage show, and there was some sort of problem halfway through.

Anyway, they didn't say "the show must go on!", they paused for a bit and then said "sorry, the show isn't going to continue".

I guess I overestimated the firmness of the "show must go on" rule.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Seen at the ticket arcade.

Just ~189,500 tickets to go.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Do not trust AI to tell you which mushrooms to pick.

By extension, you can no longer trust Amazon results for that, or Google results either.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai