Take it further. Why is there an engagement KPI important to these companies? Because they sell advertising against it. And they do that because of capitalism. The core problem is an insufficiently strong/competent political system that can curb the excesses of capitalism for the public good.

How broken is today's frontend culture? A friend points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the 75th percentile page is more than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM: httparchive.org/reports/page...

You can tell Gemini is a white male, because he's inexperienced, unqualified, and bad at a lot of things, but the company still promoted him over somebody who had already been doing a better job for decades.

Anyone remember that cease fire? "Gaza hospitals running out of supplies as airstrikes continue"

Me: I need the mean annual Normalised Difference Vegetation Index from MODIS v6 for a given latitude and longitude, for just July and August each year between 2000 and 2025. Google Earth Engine data API: Trivial! A mere half dozen lines of code. Me: And I need to show an image next to some […]

And now…the gallery. www.infinitebacon.com

A U.S. postal worker on Long Island is accused of trying to help a man escape from ICE custody earlier this month, according to a federal criminal complaint: https://gothamist.visitlink.me/YNagDp

This week’s newsletter is about not foisting your taste on others, with a sidequest about male friendship: buttondown.com/monteiro/arc...

DOD "accidentally" invaded Mexico and this somehow isn't front page news in every paper...

omg they made Jeffrey Epstein Inbox Simulator '25 jmail.world

I hate myself. Please make this worth it. www.mulebooks.com/store/2025-s...

game design 101

So busy trying to make a living, I forget about life. youtube.com/watch?v=c1tZ...

Warning sign on the bus: These doors are sensitive. I’m thinking, “don’t say anything that might upset them.”

Mini Yoda got to meet @jamesthefourth.bsky.social at @goshcomics.bsky.social tonight.

Doing great, Grok

The thing is, they lie. Over and over and over again. I don't think there's been a single incident in Chicago where their initial account proved out. Reporters should simply *not* be reporting what they say as fact, ever.

This is an incredibly difficult but incredibly important article by Rebecca, involving Epstein, Lawrence Krauss, and others. I ocassionally get asked why I don't do skeptic events anymore, and if you read this you'll get a pretty good idea of one big reason why.

This is why all events need the Pac-Man rule - always leave a gap in your circle. What's fun is that the circles then grow until they're too big for everyone to follow a single conversation, then they sort of *bloop* like a dividing amoeba into two smaller Pac-Man circles and the cycle continues...

Come do a PhD at the @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social Astrophysics Research Centre (ARC). The avaialble PhD projects starting in the 2026/2027 school year are now up. Application deadline is January 16th . I have project on doing cool things with @vrubinobs.bsky.social Solar System discoveries 🧪🔭.

Trans Day of Remembrance, with info from Quinn: hachyderm.io/@quintessenc... A4TE highlights 58 who’ve died this year: transequality.org/news/a4te-re... Meanwhile, RFK uses today to further entrench himself in Hall of Worst People: www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-... #TransDayOfRemembrance

Every 30 mins this account will automatically choose a random video from the "VHS Vault" collection on Archive.org, take a screenshot at a random timestamp and post it here. Might be NSFW, who knows.

📣 Hear hear! The biggest savings on the Practical Accessibility course start *today*—for a limited time only. Starting today, you can get the course for 30% off — that's $279 instead of $399. The discounted price excludes sales tax that may be applied depending on where you are buying from.

@rockettara.bsky.social and I've been teaching the #MachinaEmblematica some new tricks: better image interpretation and conversational context, smarter source retrieval from the Symbola et Emblemata. It’s a bit slower now… we’ll work on that next. 😉 Try it here: machina.rainersimon.io

Determined to preserve Gaza's past, 62-year-old Suhaila Shaheen is leading efforts to rebuild the Rafah Museum after Israel's destruction ⬇️

An absolute disgrace that @ox.ac.uk hosted this celebration of murdering a journalist.

Instagram is hosting a thriving neo-Nazi marketplace. Influencers like Hayden McDougall and Dylan Shane push Nazi imagery and extremist merch to massive audiences — content that violates Meta’s own rules. The platform isn’t just failing to stop it; it’s enabling extremist propaganda to scale.

On the one hand I'm glad to see the increase in understanding that software engineering isn't writing code. On the other we now have to counter the "deduction" that this means writing code is longer a valuable skill lolol. If software engineering is a more abstract skillset than writing code […]

I’m not a great political analyst, but I do feel Labour have made a tactical error by opting to be cunts.

I will have freelance availability again from January onwards, focusing on web/dataviz accessibility: - Reviews (high-level or full audit) - Consulting, advice, documentation - Training, talks, workshops - Front-end dev 🫶🏻 Interested? DM or [email protected] #accessibility #datavizA11Y

Really enjoyed this post by @gerireid.com It felt accurate for what I've experienced from designers coming to me with specs written by AI. Designers may learn what they should include, but the specs tend to lack the contextual awareness or accuracy required. gerireid.com/blog/can-ai-...

This is y'all's chance to work on a webapp where the whole point of using Rust isn't to scale up—it's to scale DOWN. 6k reqs/s on a sub-US$30 machine is no joke. And it's a hard copyleft ecosystem that we're going to protect for the folks who rely on us! Let's do open source right.

The long tail of .gov sites that have few or no dev resources just can’t implement a JS-heavy React-based thing if that becomes the mandate. HTML/CSS/(a little) JS will win in the long run for these sites. 6/

That’s a wrap on my federal service. I wrote about my time in gov, and how it ended. matthenry.fyi/posts/moving... 1/

From 18F alum @matthenry.fyi: "If [sites like America By Design] are any indication of what was coming down the pike as the future of government websites, it's a bad sign for the people who have to build and maintain those sites, it's a bad sign for USWDS, and it's a bad sign for you as a user ... "

Just over 3 hours until Early Birds End! And they are flying out today.

This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it's actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu

mr president sir theres a story coming about how you intervened to help a sex criminal. no sir, not that sex criminal you helped….no not that one either…sir, please stop guessing sex criminals that you helped. ill give you a hint sir, hes a trafficker. no sir, not that trafficker a different one

Thought for the day: The Love Shack is a little old place where we can get together.

Did it! A guide on migrating from ingress-nginx to @ngrok.com’s operator. If you’re using a custom domain this will require a paid plan, but you get cool stuff like geographically aware load balancing, rate limiting, IP intelligence, etc. ngrok.com/blog/migrate...

A lot of people didn’t like the Washington Post journalist who was tortured and dismembered with a bone saw for writing critically about the man sitting next to me

A reminder that seven years ago almost to the day, the CIA determined that Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing of @washingtonpost.com journalist Jamal Khashoggi. I hired and worked with Jamal for a year. www.washingtonpost.com/world/nation...

This really is very bad.

Early bird pricing for State of the Browser 2026 ends at midnight GMT tonight. After that, full price tickets will be available from 17th December.

40 years ago today the world was introduced to a small boy and his best friend. Happy birthday Calvin & Hobbes.

Daily bunny no.3142 makes all their games co-op

This explains why British Library staff are on strike The union says - managers take home up to £170k with £15k bonuses, while staff offered below-inflation pay rise Meanwhile, frontline staff take abuse for the massive data breach - which managers failed to foresee @pcsunion.bsky.social