I am a luddite and to me there is a lot of joy in technology. In technology that we deploy for all our wellbeing. Solar panels and vaccines, high-speed rail and wikipedia.
But they joy stems from the feeling of being able to be part of humanity in an embedded, meaningful way. Not from buying shit.
I feel like people think "birds are dinosaurs" is a weird fun fact that is "technically true" but I don't know how to emphasize that there are tens of thousands of species of theropod dinosaur on the planet with us right now. People keep them AS PETS.
WE EAT THEM.
Did you know that when you use formatted text in a Bluesky message, assistive technology like Screen Readers can't understand it, so your text can be easily misunderstood.
[No shade to the OP, just an example of how easy it is to create barriers to understanding for people who use assistive tech]
Fuck the Artists
Looking back at January, I am watching *way too much* YouTube, particularly Shorts 😬 I also haven't touched my feed reader in _months_.
Let's see what happens in Feb if I delete the YouTube app on my phone, and reorder my apps so that Reader is where it was 🤞
#FeedReader #RSS #IndieWeb #YouTube
Others have already mentioned it, but another piece of support from Krystal.io. Solid company, great support, have kept prices pretty fair for over a decade now, no signs of that changing. All UK infra, largely green energy.
2025 marked a decade on the indie web, so I challenged myself to make 10 small improvements to my site(s).
It turned into a bit more than that, so as the year ends, I decided to write up the various side quests I've been on: theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/the-ad...
#IndieWeb #HappyNewYear #Blogging
For those who, like me, love speculative and alien evolution, there's a remarkable new book out, "Wildlife on the Planet Furaha" by Gert van Dijk. www.crowood.com/book/wildlif...
I feel like I've seen some pretty clear stats that basically no one digs into their phone's OS settings. Outside of wallpapers and _maybe_ icons, customisation is rare. And yet somehow people might want to homebrew their own UIs now?
Any chance of a weekly "here's what's changed/now available" feed? Igalia has one that's _nice_ but never quite works the way I want it to. I'd love to be able to get a list of "here's what's brand new, and here's what just passed over the threshold of actually useable" 😅
I wouldn't skip a11y as a result, but it makes components a pain. Stuff like Input components and up needing UUID functions. It would be amazing to be able to target label/input (etc.) via querySelector style syntax instead of it only being ID (or data-attributes, or just anything that isn't global)
Recently had an example of this, fundamentally a two-column flex that, when it does wrap, wants to completely change the layout of the contents. E.g. go from space-between, with alternating left/right text alignment, to fully centred.
Being able to know when that parent wrapped would be great!
I see localisation has already been mentioned, I'll add account-specific state/customisation (different users, when authenticated, may get different navs) to that list, as well as accessibility, as people use different font sizes (or different fonts completely)
Well this was a fascinating thread. As someone who has worked with React/Gatsby/Next/Remix for about 5 years, native Windows is slower than Mac, but really only on npm install. Never had any other issues. Never even considered running Node apps via WSL (use it for some PHP stuff but that's it)
And if work wasn't paying for my license, I would stop using it all together.
Environmental (and non-theft related ethical) concerns continue to be an issue.
It's not a justification that I like, but the utility over DDG, Google, Bing et al. (all of whom run an AI search _anyway_) does add up
I'd also be happy if the whole industry disappeared tomorrow. It wouldn't really impact my day-to-day, and the trade-offs would just go in reverse.
I feel _okay_ using Copilot, purely because it was (allegedly) trained on public code. I now do not use other forms for ethical reasons…
I will say, the Copilot review has also massively reduced stupid error loops (typos, single missed connections, that kind of thing), which has sped up the team, and saves face, frankly. It also hallucinates, and says dumb stuff; I have concerns that some people seem to just merge every suggestion…
Despite this, I find myself turning to it more often that not. For languages I don't know, it gets code working. For those I do, it's a better search engine than just about anything else, bar MDN and (some!) official docs. And when it correctly automates a repetitive task, it feels great…
Add on top how hallucinations can send you down utterly non-existent rabbit holes (not helped by the fact that I've likely already lost trust in "official" sources, which Copilot has already proven wrong or incomplete), and whenever I've tracked time, it comes out net negative…
However! My guess would be that we would gain far more in efficiency if search engines yielded better results, and dev tools/services had better documentation. For every quick autocomplete win, I reckon we lost far more in fighting bad recommendations and the loss of flow you get dismissing pop ups…
I do use the Copilot "Explain" function quite a lot, alongside prev. mentioned replacement of search engines. I often find that Copilot can surface functions and APIs that even the official documentation lacks (most recently with several WordPress plugins)…
In terms of usefulness, I find Copilot's autocomplete (via VSCode) 50/50 in terms of benefit vs irritation. It sometimes automates repetitive tasks (typically refactors), but it's also very inconsistent in when it tries to "help". I find it less and less useful the better I know the language…
I work as a senior front-end dev at a company that provides GitHub Copilot licenses and expects you to (at minimum) use GitHub's Copilot code reviewer. I have, in the past, used Claude as a form of search engine replacement, particularly for documentation, though at this point Copilot is all I use…
Frontend Devs of bsky, looking for community input:
Are you using AI/LLMs in your day-to-day work?
Are you all-in or only dabbling?
What has been working well?
What has been frustrating?
How has your workflow changed?
Do you feel more or less productive?
Do you feel like a better dev?
Not sure if a CKEditor plugin exists for WordPress, but if it does then I would recommend it. Craft has one and it's a very nice Markdown editor that outputs HTML, so feels like it would work.
We've already had a great response to this. Thank you everyone who took the time to make a ranking - I know there's a lot of proposals.
If you haven't, there's still time!
bsky.app/profile/fire...
Is there any way to _remove_ a selection? Definitely clicked one by accident, and also figured I'd be able to remove, so added more (hard to jump back and forth, much easier to read down the list and just grab any that I know would be useful for me)
Eurgh, just had two emails in the span of 30 minutes from two companies that I personally use announcing "new AI tools". Both are B Corps. I wonder how that certification is being updated to account for the energy/resource spike these tools are likely to produce? 😔
Do dashboards count as a navigation pattern? The kind of thing I'm specifically thinking about are where you have some data (maybe a table, maybe a graph, maybe a summary card) and can either change it's "shape" or click into it for a filtered view. Common (in that use case) but feels tricky
A pile of dinosaur merch, including a miniature Rabbuck from After Man, a cork Thylacine coaster, DinoCon logo badge, several books, stickers, and sew on patches, and an adorable, orange, watercolour painting of a Spinosaurus, looking very pleased with the fish they're holding in their arms.
Stacked palaeoart stickers, prints, and cards, with even more in the background. The main focus is a whimsical ink-pen print of various bizarre shaped ammonites, full of comic tableaus.
More piles of palaeoart, mainly cards and prints. A colourful, blue icthyosaur skeleton is tucked beneath a cartoonish image of a Parasaurolophus in dense vegetation, with a speech bubble containing "honk again, I can't find you!".
The full haul, with a pile of 20+ palaeoart prints in the foreground, and a backdrop of Almost Real zines, framed prints (including a Pachycephalosaurus made from local slate chips), and figures. The book Speed Thief is visible amongst a pile of stickers, and the general impression is one of colourful, joyful, palaeo chaos.
No, no, *you* spent slightly too much money at #DinoConUK 😅
A completely wonderful weekend and event! Will have to start saving for next year... 🦕
(And there were several things I missed out on buying too, due to forgetting to bring cash on day one!)
