James Clark | Technically Product

Petit fours are the most spiteful of all the fours

The design equivalent of 'writing is thinking'

If you're looking for a new band name, you could do worse than turning to an HP Lovecraft story for inspiration. The Twilight Abysses, The Kaleidoscopic Polyhedrons, The Tonal Patterns, Walpurgis Rhythm, The Bubble Congeries, Spacetime Seethings... And this is all from a single paragraph!

I bought some delicious cured ham from the deli today. It is made from a breed of pig that has a really big nose! Apparently it's called cyrano ham

I thought 'Chip' was a nickname for someone named after a parent (and 'Skip' if they are named after a grandparent)

Last night I had a dream that I'd joined a psychic police force in Exeter whose members could teleport anywhere just by visualizing that place. The only problem was, I had aphantasia (in the dream) so I couldn't visualise mental images or teleport anywhere! Might make for an interesting novel?

A Google Search Impact badge saying "Congratulations! Your site reached 250K clicks from Google Search in the past 28 days"

One of my clients is absolutely smashing organic search! I'm supporting them on ad ops mostly so can't take credit for this, but still good to see

Very nice! Copilot took this exercise much more seriously for me but I did get 8% Pragmatic Risk Assessment: "You’re not paranoid — you’re prepared."

The Talisman and Black House have always seemed to me to be thematic opposites. One is about youth and adventure; the other is about age and place. I love them both greatly though and can't wait for this. Thank you!

Yesterday I used the HTML <picture> tag for the first time.

When I learned this stuff originally, XHTML was the big thing and the <picture> tag didn't even exist. So it's good to update my dinosaur knowledge!

Yessays

Ah Luke, I struggle with this from the other side. My inclination is to offer solutions, because it's difficult for me to see how validation alone can help. All I can say really is that an attempt to fix (even if misguided) is usually an attempt to make things easier, not harder.

We're all dying and irrelevant, if you think about it

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Do any of my mutuals use Ko-fi? This is me - give me a follow and I'll happily reciprocate ko-fi.com/technicallyp...

Oh, I should update my profile pic

We need a Wayback Machine Wayback Machine

Interesting... but the gains can compound. So the gain from doing A+B might be more than the gain of doing A plus the gain of doing B. Difficult to estimate!

Possibly me, as I've never heard it called "Pancake Tuesday" in my life! I do however enjoy Father's Sunday (sometimes called Fathering Day).

Have you read "Only You Can Save Mankind" and its sequels? Easy to overlook as they are young adult novels - but hey, it's more Pratchett

Because of my left-wing political beliefs, I often find myself karlmarxxing

What's interesting is that, by and large, these *are* coming from technical people. If they are not developers, they tend to be SEOs, analysts, digital marketers and so on. Perhaps they are just early adopters of the technology, but I wonder if there's some other factor at play.

Vibe-coding a Chrome extension with Gemini CLI to summarize articles I often find myself staring at a wall of text online. It could be a lengthy technical article, a detailed news report, or a deep-dive blog post. My first thought is often: “Is this worth the time to r...

I've come across a few Chrome extensions that have been vibe coded. They tend to be free, niche tools - but I can foresee somebody building one with enough value to charge for it. glaforge.dev/posts/2025/0...

So what you're basically saying is, cultural contrarianism is overrated?

No, because Twitter is deliberately not a level playing field. In engaging with people there, you are just legitimizing the platform.

I don't know if it's related, but I'm surprised by the general shoddiness of Windows 11. Sometimes things sit over the taskbar. Sometimes the wallpaper just goes black. These are basic operations in a mature product!

Folks, you’re not going to believe this, but

Nice. A lack of response is itself a response

The only surprising thing here is that somebody double checked the figures

I couldn't work out why I was the only person that liked this, then I realised that all the other Brits must have combusted in the sunshine

Right! I'm not even sure what a "better" decision would look like. My decisions are good *because* they're mine - in tune with my desires, interests, and priorities

I thought this was about the AI bubble to start with! Hang in there, better times are coming.