Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Don't. Even. Publish. Stuff. That. ONLY. Supports. Dark. Mode.

I mean, I know a LOT of people love dark mode, and given the benefits that darkening interfaces provides... I get it.

But there are some people (like me) who may be visually impaired. Astigmatism, for example, can make reading text that is white on dark a real PITA. An effect known as "halation" occurs, where each letter behaves as if it were a flashlight, gaining its own halo of light and making all text read more blurry than normal.

No matter how good your glasses are, astigmatism still causes you to see a little blurry—it's something you get used to. But this damn effect makes all the text read as if you don't have your glasses on, or even worse, leading to much more tired eyes or even pain.

For everyone's sake, if you really care about accessibility, respect user preferences. If you want a dark interface by default, offer a light version if the user specifies it (in web design, this would be prefers-color-scheme: light). The same goes for light interfaces.

“Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors”

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html

this_is_fine.gif 😬

This is a must read for people who want to protect our planet and also explore space.

Tl;dr SpaceX has been illegally polluting the landscape around Starbase, which is built near wetlands and the gulf of Mexico.

This is the exclusive report many journalists (and I’ll be one later) are basing articles.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-waters-in-texas-tceq-epa-found.html

why call it a pay wall when you can call it a bill gate

Hi linux people!

is there any way to not have my qemu/kvm libvirtd Windows 10 virtual machine not refresh at 64hz? because um. it's insufferable.

yes i installed the guest drivers from the fedora site and that improved things a lot (and got me to this place)

here is my proposal: a browser plugin that is a little pet that “eats” tracking cookies and says yum and grows every time

A question came into focus for me yesterday: is the success of Open Source for early-in-career folks building portfolios a contributor to frontend's ethical dessication?

OSS is "software for me, incidentally for thee"; does introducing that ethos to young programmers keep us from driving home the lesson that when you get paid to write code, your responsibilities are to users and customers?

Yesterday we had another example of LLMs creating support issues for us.

User: "hi, how do I do this thing? Your docs say I can go here and change some options, but there's no settings there"
Me: "that's right, we don't have such a feature, but also we don't say you can do it in the docs, where did you read that?"
User: "oh I didn't actually read the docs, I asked 'AI' and it hallucinated this answer. Sorry!"

At this rate I'm looking forward to 2025 when I'll be spending 100% of my time doing support to correct falsehoods about our app made up by LLMs

The frontend community is in crisis. I know, because I could spend every waking hour helping e-commerce and productivity apps fix the *unbelievably* bad performance that is now the hallmark of contemporary, JavaScript-first web development.

But it's worse than that. This stuff has infected public services; the sorts of sites that have to serve *everyone*, iPhone or no.

Part 2 of this series is the hardest to watch, but essential to understand how far we've fallen:

https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/

Corporations are a poison.

Anyway, think about the implications of the things you say.

I listened to people talk about what this company would do with this man inevitably died for years. I probably repeated the line.

Everyone always said it with a kind of chuckle. As if it was easier to say that than "retires" or "takes another job." As if it was somehow better to imagine his children grieving than it was to suppose he'd ever just move on.

I spent half a decade working for a big tech company in the Games/Social space. You've heard of it, but I'm not naming it here because the point of this story is universally applicable.

One of my key job responsibilities when I was brought on was Learn Everything from That Guy so someone knows what he knows in case he gets hit by a bus.

Eventually, I built a whole team to operate the tools That Guy built, and to build new tools that solve the same problems in our new software stack/with less manual work.

That Guy grew less vital to the success of the company, and he retired shortly after I left. Everything he had been responsible for was transfered to two people I hired and trained, or was turned off.

Less than a year later, That Guy was involved in a head on collision and died on the spot. This was a few days ago. I don't know if the collision involved a bus.

The pragmatist in my head says "see, it was a real risk." The compassionate part of my head says "why the fuck do we talk about other human beings with such a callous disregard for their sum."

That Guy was repeatedly reduced to a set of skills and institutional knowledge. Leadership feared he would die and that would negatively impact the business. Leadership didn't give a solitary fuck about his life.

He was one for the first 50 employees in the organization. He was the second or third longest serving member of the company. He was a pragmatic, overworked sysadmin who was mistreated and undervalued, and put in a position to engineer the majority of the infrastructure of a multibillion dollar company single handedly.

it is so humid that my yarn is sticking to the wooden knitting needles and wow i absolutely hate everything about that

Commander Riker,

There has been a security breach in our computer system. Your search history is being broadcast to the entire crew.

Worf

"Removing focus indicators for keyboard users is like hiding the cursor for mouse users." - @matuzo in Web Accessibility Cookbook

Brilliant comparison!

In fact, it made me wonder... can you hide a cursor for mouse users? Yep, you can set it to a custom png file that's completely transparent.

If you want to see for yourself how annoying that is, visit https://nonvisualwebsite.com/ #a11y