Last month, my friend Gareth observed that the numbered lists in my blog posts “looked wrong” in his feed reader. I checked, and I decided I was following the standards correctly and it must have been his app that was misbehaving.
So he contacted the authors of Unread, his feed reader, and they fixed it. Pretty fast, I’ve got to say. And I was amused to see that I’m clearly now a test case because my name’s in their release notes!
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Musical Transients from Psynwav1 is without a doubt the best mashup/mixtape-album I’ve heard since Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Moods (which I’ve listened to literally hundreds of times since its release in 2017). Well-done, Psynwav.
It’s possible, of course… that my taste in music is not the same as your taste in music, and that’s fine.
Maybe I’m just hungry, but this morning’s breakfast bagel with brie looks especially scrumptious, right?
What if a QR code could look like a maze, hand-drawn with MS Paint?
Inspired by Oscar Cunningham‘s excellent “working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrain” and Andrew Taylor‘s “logical extension of the idea”, earlier this week, I decided to extend upon my much-earlier efforts to (ab)use QR codes and throw together the disgusting thing you see above.
Here’s how I made it:
Obviously this isn’t a clever idea for real-world scenarios. The point of QR codes’ resilience and error correction is to compensate for suboptimal conditions “in the field”, like reflections, glare, dust, grime, low light conditions, and so on.
But it’s kinda fun, right?
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I’ve grouped these four perspectives, but everything here is a spectrum. Depending on the context or day, you might find yourself at any point on the graph. And I’ve attempted to describe each perspectively [sic] generously, because I don’t believe that any are inherently good or bad. I find myself switching between perspectives throughout the day as I implement features, use tools, and read articles. A good team is probably made of members from all perspectives.
Which perspective resonates with you today? Do you also find yourself moving around the graph?
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An interesting question from Sean McPherson. He sounds like he’s focussed on LLMs for software development, for which I’ve drifted around a little within the left-hand-side of the graph. But perhaps right now, this morning, you could simplify my feelings like this:
My stance is that AI-assisted coding can be helpful (though the question remains open about whether it’s
“worth it”), so long as you’re not trying to do anything that you couldn’t do yourself, and you know how you’d go about doing it yourself. That is: it’s only useful to
accelerate tasks that are in your “known knowns” space.
As I’ve mentioned: the other week I had a coding AI help me with some code that interacted with the Google Sheets API. I know exactly how I’d go about it, but that journey would have to start with re-learning the Google Sheets API, getting an API key and giving it the appropriate permissions, and so on. That’s the kind of task that I’d be happy to outsource to a less-experienced programmer who I knew would bring a somewhat critical eye for browsing StackOverflow, and then give them some pointers on what came back, so it’s a fine candidate for an AI to step in and give it a go. Plus: I’d be treating the output as “legacy code” from the get-go, and (because the resulting tool was only for my personal use) I wasn’t too concerned with the kinds of security and accessibility considerations that GenAI can often make a pig’s ear of. So I was able to palm off the task onto Claude Sonnet and get on with something else in the meantime.
If I wanted to do something completely outside of my wheelhouse: say – “write a program in Fortran to control a robot arm” – an AI wouldn’t be a great choice. Sure, I could “vibe code” something like that, but I’d have no idea whether what it produced was any good! It wouldn’t even be useful as a springboard to learning how to do that, because I don’t have the underlying fundamentals in robotics nor Fortran. I’d be producing AI slop in software form: the kind of thing that comes out when non-programmers assume that AI can completely bridge the gap between their great business idea and a fully working app!
They’ll get a prototype that seems to do what you want, if you squint just right, but the hard part of software engineering isn’t making a barebones proof-of-concept! That’s the easy bit! (That’s why AI can do it pretty well!) The hard bit is making it work all the time, every time; making it scale; making it safe to use; making it maintainable; making it production-ready… etc.
But I do benefit from coding AI sometimes. GenAI’s good at summarisation, which in turn can make it good at relatively-quickly finding things in a sprawling codebase where your explanation of those things is too-woolly to use a conventional regular expression search. It’s good at generating boilerplate that’s broadly-like examples its seen before, which means it can usually be trusted to put together skeleton applications. It’s good at “guessing what comes next” – being, as it is, “fancy autocomplete” – which means it can be helpful for prompting you for the right parameters for that rarely-used function or for speculating what you might be about to do with the well-named variable you just created.
Anyway: Sean’s article was pretty good, and it’s a quick and easy read. Once you’ve read it, perhaps you’ll share where you think you sit, on his diagram?
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Solving problems with LLMs is like solving front-end problems with NPM: the “solution” comes through installing more and more things — adding more and more context, i.e. more and more packages.
- LLM: Problem? Add more context.
- NPM: Problem? There’s a package for that.
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As I’m typing this, I’m thinking of that image of the evolution of the Raptor engine, where it evolved in simplicity:
This stands in contrast to my working with LLMs, which often wants more and more context from me to get to a generative solution:
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Jim Nielsen speaks to my experience, here. Because a programming LLM is simply taking inputs (all of your code, plus your prompt), transforming it through statistical analysis, and then producing an output (replacement code), it struggles with refactoring for simplicity unless very-carefully controlled. “Vibe coding” is very much an exercise in adding hacks upon hacks… like the increasingly-ludicrous epicycles introduced by proponents of geocentrism in its final centuries before the heliocentric model became fully accepted.
I don’t think that AIs are useless as a coding tool, and I’ve successfully used them to good effect on several occasions. I’ve even tried “vibe coding”, about which I fully agree with ‘s observation that “vibe code is legacy code”. Being able to knock out something temporary, throwaway, experimental, or for personal use only… while I work on something else… is pretty liberating.
For example: I couldn’t remember my Google Sheets API and didn’t want to re-learn it from the sprawling documentation site, but wanted a quick personal tool to manipulate such a sheet from a remote system. I was able to have an AI knock up what I needed while I cooked dinner for the kids, paying only enough attention to check-in on its work. Is it accessible? Is it secure? Is it performant? Is it maintainable? I can’t answer any of those questions, and so as a professional software engineer I have to reasonably assume the answer to all of them is “no”. But its only user is me, it does what I needed it to do, and I didn’t have to shift my focus from supervising children and a pan in order to throw it together!
Anyway: Jim hits the nail on the head here, as he so often does.
<dialog>-based HTML+CSS lightboxes
A few years ago I implemented a pure HTML + CSS solution for lightbox images, which I’ve been using on my blog ever since. It works by
pre-rendering an invisible <dialog> for each lightboxable image on the page, linking to the anchor of those dialogs, and exploiting the :target selector
to decide when to make the dialogs visible. No Javascript is required, which means low brittleness and high performance!
One thing I don’t like about it is that it that it breaks completely if the CSS fails for any reason. Depending upon CSS is safer than depending upon JS (which breaks all the time), but it’s still not great: if CSS is disabled in your browser or just “goes wrong” somehow then you’ll see a hyperlink… that doesn’t seem to go anywhere (it’s an anchor to a hidden element).
A further thing I don’t like about it is it’s semantically unsound. Linking to a dialog with the expectation that the CSS parser will then make that dialog visible isn’t really representative of what the content of the page means. Maybe we can do better.
<details>-based HTML+CSS lightboxes?
Here’s a thought I had, inspired by Patrick Chia’s <details> overlay trick and by
the categories menu in Eevee’s blog: what if we used a <details> HTML element for a lightbox? The thumbnail image would go in the
<summary> and the full image (with loading="lazy" so it doesn’t download until the details are expanded) beneath, which means it “just works” with or
without CSS… and then some CSS enhances it to make it appear like a modal overlay and allow clicking-anywhere to close it again.
Let me show you what I mean. Click on one of the thumbnails below:
Each appears to pop up in a modal overlay, but in reality they’re just unfolding a <details> panel, and some CSS is making the contents display as if if were
an overlay, complete click-to-close, scroll-blocking, and a blur filter over the background content. Without CSS, it functions as a traditional <details> block.
Accessibility is probably improved over my previous approach, too (though if you know better, please tell me!).
The code’s pretty tidy, too. Here’s the HTML:
<details class="details-lightbox" aria-label="larger image"> <summary> <img src="thumb.webp" alt="Alt text for the thumbnail image."> </summary> <div> <img src="full.webp" alt="Larger image: alt text for the full image." loading="lazy"> </div> </details>
The CSS is more-involved, but not excessive (and can probably be optimised a little further):
.details-lightbox { summary { display: block; cursor: zoom-in; &::before { content: ''; backdrop-filter: none; transition: backdrop-filter 0.5s, background 0.2s; background: transparent; } } & > div img { max-width: 95vw; max-height: 95vh; box-shadow: 0 0 12px #fff6; opacity: 0; transition: filter 0.3s, opacity 0.6s; filter: blur(6px); } &[open] > div { position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100vw; height: 100vh; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 110; pointer-events: none; img { opacity: 1; filter: none; } } &[open] > summary { cursor: auto; &::before { content: ''; background: #000a; backdrop-filter: blur(6px); position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100vw; height: 100vw; z-index: 109; } } } body:has(.details-lightbox[open]) { overflow: hidden; }
Native CSS nesting is super nice for this kind of thing. Being able to use :has on the body to detect whether there exists an open lightbox and prevent
scrolling, if so, is another CSS feature I’m appreciating today.
I’m not going to roll this out anywhere rightaway, but I’ll keep it in my back pocket for the next time I feel a blog redesign coming on. It feels tidier and more-universal than my current approach, and I don’t think it’s an enormous sacrifice to lose the ability to hotlink directly to an open image in a post.
What do you think?
A moderately-large house spider dropped down and startled my dog as she napped in her basket, so now she’s hiding under my desk and refusing to return to bed. 🙄😂
This checkin to GC2CWQ7 #036 Just Northamptonshire reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
As a semi-regular at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention who likes to get up earlier then the others I share my tent with, I’ve done my fair share of early morning geocaching in this neck of the woods.
Of course: over the years this practice has exhausted most of tree caches local to Cropredy and my morning walks have begun to take me further and further afield. But this is certainly the first time I’ve walked to the next county in search of a cache!
Coming across the fields from Williamscot via Prescote Farm treated me to gorgeous rolling hills free fields of freshly-harvested corn getting picked at by families of deer, while the red kites above went looking for their breakfasts.
The final hill up to the GZ required a bit of a push for my legs which were dancing until late last night, but soon I was close and the cache was quickly found in the second place I looked.
TFTC. Oxfordshire says hello!
This checkin to GCAJH34 Jonah's Oak reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My little tribe and I have, in some form of another, been attending Cropredy for decades: intermittently in the past, but lately with more regularity every year. For me, it’s coincided with the growth of our family: I’ve been attending with my partner and her husband approximately since our eldest child, now 11, was born.
As our group’s early riser, I’ve a longstanding tradition of getting up while everybody else lies in, to take a walk and perhaps find a geocache or two. Of course I soon ran out of caches in Cropredy itself and my morning walks now take me much further afield!
Last year I was very ill and had to be sent home from Cropredy before I had the opportunity to log this cache, but I’m back again this year and taking a moment at the Oak to reflect on those we’ve all loved and lost.
Answers to follow as soon as signal permits. TFTC.
This checkin to GC8Z1F6 Church Micro 13672...Great Bourton ⛪️ reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. There I – being the earliest riser of us – have in turn made a tradition of getting up early to find a nearby geocache on any morning that I’m up before the kids.
This practice has already eliminated all of the caches in Cropredy itself, and so now my morning walks take me further afield. This morning I opted to follow the footpath over the fields to Great Bourton to investigate the two multicaches commencing in the churchyard.
Having determined the coordinates for both and (unsuccessfully) attempting the other cache first, I was optimistic for a smiley face here. The GZ was easy to find – I’d stopped here to check my map on the way out! – and I was soon searching in earnest.
In the low-angled light of the morning sun, the shade of the thick leafy canopy made for challenging conditions, so I flicked my torch on and pointed it in the direction of the host object… and there, clear as day despite its camouflage, was the cache. Easy as pie! SL.
I was briefly tempted to re-try the cache I failed to find earlier, under the assumption that the container would look similar to this and the same technique might bear fruit. But I didn’t feel like doubling back twice more while my stomach was rumbling, so I carried on towards Cropredy to see whether any others if my party were yet ready for some grub.
TFTC.
This checkin to GC91EH6 War Memorial #1,340 ~ Great Bourton 🌹 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. There I – being the earliest riser of us – have in turn made a tradition of getting up early to find a nearby geocache on any morning that I’m up before the kids.
This practice has already eliminated all of the caches in Cropredy itself, and so now my morning walks take me further afield. This morning I opted to follow the footpath over the fields to Great Bourton to investigate the two multicaches commencing in the churchyard.
Solving for both was easy enough, and I opted to seek this one first, given that the other could become part of my route back to my tent. As others have observed, finding the right footpath was slightly tricky: it looks a bit like a communal driveway, to begin with… and then, for the moment at least, looks as though it might become a building site!
But I pressed on towards the target coordinates and soon spotted a likely host. I searched for a bit without luck, then hit up the hint: looks like I need to go deeper, I figured, and pushed into the foliage.
But after 20 minutes or so of searching all around the conceivable spots, I was still struggling. Plus I’d narrowly avoided kneeling in something truly gross and couldn’t face another round of crawling about under a hedge. And further, I realised I’d soon need some breakfast so I gave up on this one and made a move for the second. Maybe another year!
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“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet, when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.
“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”
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Not that hitch-hiking is remotely as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago, but even if it were then it wouldn’t be so revolutionary to, say, take a photo of everybody you give a ride to. We’re all carrying cameras all the time, and the price of taking a snap is basically nothing.
But for Doug Biggert, who died in 2023, began doing this with an analogue camera as he drove around California from 1973 onwards? That’s quite something. Little wonder he had to explain his project to his passengers (helped, later on, by carrying a copy of the photo album he’d collected so-far that he could show them).
A really interesting gallery with a similarly-compelling story. Also: man – look at the wear-and-tear on his VW Bug!
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I somehow missed this “most punk rock thing ever” moment the other month. If you did too, let me catch you up:
For a weekend in June, in what was clearly designed to act as a protest to Pride month events, human turd/bar owner Mark Fitzpatrick decided to put on a “straight pride” festival in Boise, Idaho. Called “Hetero Awesome Fest”, it was as under-subscribed as perhaps it ought to be (having a similar turnout to the “world’s smallest pride parade”). And that would have made it a non-story, except for the moment when local singer-songwriter Daniel Hamrick got up to perform his set:
I can’t begin to fathom the courage it takes to get on-stage in front of an ultra-conservative crowd (well, barely a crowd…) in a right-leaning US state to protest their event by singing a song about a trans boy. But that’s exactly what Hamrick did. After catching spectators off-guard, perhaps, by taking the perhaps-“masculine-telegraphing” step of drawing attention to part of his army uniform, the singer swiftly switched outfit to show off a “Keep Canyon County Queer” t-shirt, slip on a jacket with various Pride-related patches, and then immediately launched into Boy, a song lamenting the persecution of a trans child by their family and community.
Needless to say, this was the first, last, and only song Daniel Hamrick got to play at Hetero Awesome Fest. But man, what a beautiful protest!
(There are other videos online that aren’t nabbed from the official event feed and so don’t cut-out abruptly.)
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I still get that powerful feeling that anything is possible when I open a web browser — it’s not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but it’s still there.
This. This is the optimistic side of the coin represented by the things I’ve been expressing in notes like this, articles like that, and reposts like the other.
As cynical as you can get at the state of the Web right now… as much as it doesn’t command the level of inspirational raw potential of “anything is possible” that it might have once… it’s still pretty damn magical, and we should lean into that.