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I might be a little (a lot) over that 18 hour mark for "solving every fundamental problem preventing one from making xkit pause-until-hovered every single* animated gif on the site and also adding a preference to it to optionally wait to download the animated image source until you hover it and also making every load and hover animation frame perfect"

but the effect is lessened because a) I bet someone would notice in days or weeks rather than months if this one was shipped, and b) I think I was pretty certain about the feasibility of at least half of it.

*except the tumblrmart image for the rainbow checkmarks, and that was only because I couldn't get the label to work right. *shakes fist*

the trouble with the way that things work sometimes is that the coolest achievements are sometimes not really clear from the outside or actually particularly useful.

I have basically solved every fundamental problem preventing one from being able to create custom palettes for tumblr that will work seamlessly on, at the moment, exactly three pages that most people don't have access to. I honestly believe that if we shipped these patches tomorrow, no one would notice for months.

this took me around 18 hours and included writing a responsive webpage just for experimentation, learning a bit about color systems, using a library I eventually didn't need to use, doing some css specificity research, discovering a handful of new web extension apis, installing an old version of chromium, and making fairly extensive use of a tool I spent another like 7 hours creating for my own personal use just to speed up investigating the tumblr code.

it's not cool because it's useful or particularly elegant. it's cool because I was pretty sure, for a long time, that it wasn't going to be possible to do at all.

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Ah, neat: there's now (as of Firefox 125, early-ish last year) browser-native CSS for optimizing infinite scroll rendering performance—basically everything Tumblr's "virtual scroller" code does but with less hacks (I assume control-f searching works seamlessly). Of course, production websites presumably want to support older browsers than "came out early last year," so this isn't actually useful, but still.

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whenever I think about those people in high school who appeared to be friends with like 150 people, I'm like. was that real or just something they managed to project? I've heard some statistic that supposedly humans can have around 15 friends but like. I don't know how to have two. most weeks I don't have one correctly

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every web development project needs two engineers. not because of collaboration or idea-bouncing or review, though those are also benefits. no, every web project needs two engineers so that one can run firefox and the other can run chromium

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I try not to be mean about the fact that every so often an API in Firefox just. doesn't work. but man, every so often an API in Firefox just. doesn't work

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Spin this wheel of ~300 AO3 tags three times.

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post goes here about how sports stats are all "this player has the third best average a [minimum volume: b]" but rather than having an arbitrary cutoff for volume we totally have basic statistics that convert volume to confidence and we could compare player statistics on that basis, make a website with a database of it, etc. but like I'm not the one to do that

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I wonder if there's any metadata submitted with Chrome extensions. Would be kind of neat if the "find alternative" link on New XKit included Palettes for Tumblr and XKit Rewritten instead of. Whatever this is.

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https://github.com/pulls?q=

...well. huh. there's a page I didn't expect to exist.

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What the hell?

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you know, I bet if I still lived on the east coast and Was Normal... okay you know what actually the set of conditions I'm imagining here are kind of complicated to pin down and that part's not important to the concept; let's start over.

you know, I bet if I saw my relatives in-person a lot, I wouldn't read kid fic with the same sort of idealized... not idyllicism, that's not the right word. I dunno, the same sort of rose-colored glasses, I guess. like—sure, it was never likely, but I always thought I'd enjoy being one of the... uncles, I suppose it would have been? er, like, the kid people, the people who pay more attention to the next generation than the current one when they walk into a room. whether or not I would have been doesn't really matter; in either case I'd have a realistic notion of whether—well, either I wouldn't, or I'd have gotten a lot of real-world experience—I don't know if this is translating and I'm not sure how to say it?

maybe it's easier to put it the other way: I enjoy reading fiction about raising children that I'm quite sure is a really cherry-picked picture of what the experience is like. and I'm totally fine with that, I view it as just entertainment, but I don't know that I'd be able to suspend that disbelief if I didn't have so much distance from the next generation of my extended family as I do, something which I thought about a lot when I was younger. yeah, that was much clearer.

mind you...

a) that's not to say I would or wouldn't like it (the "it" possibly referring to a lot of things in the above paragraphs). maybe I'd really want kids and think the fiction is a bit silly. maybe I'd really not want kids and thank the heavens for the fiction because of its entertainment/escapism value. maybe the fiction is super accurate and having kids is a blast actually; you never know.

b) actually I kind of thought this sort of thing about cats before I'd handled a cat ("probably they're less perfect precious angels than portrayed in fiction but I might still like the real version") and it turns out that in reality cats are perfect precious angels, exactly as portrayed. so by that logic, maybe... well. like I said: maybe the fiction is super accurate and having kids is a blast actually; you never know.

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just looked in the mirror and like. I really don't look 30, huh. I guess that's a good thing? I mean, I certainly don't act 30, so at the very least it's more match-y than the other way around

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so the thing about this is that, like... no, two things:

the fact that google is putting this complete joke of a tool on its search results page, the page that shows you things on the internet for which you have searched, categorically makes this its fault. when laypeople are confused about how "AI" works and think that because chatbots are coherent they're capable of reason and thus ask them for information about the world and get hot garbage, you can argue somewhat about whose fault the inaccuracy ultimately is, about whether the responsibility for understanding what a tool is for is on the user or on the one explaining the use case. here there's no ambiguity: google is the one burning the truth for warmth. google is the one fucking people, and by extension fucking society, and by extension fucking you.

you can tell that none of this was engineered by people who understand how actual sentient beings think, either. because, look, zoom out: the correct answer is on the page. if I had a little pet assistant who was born on the internet and didn't know much about the world but could process text and give me answers, the first piece of information I would feed them so they could be a useful assistant would be, I dunno, how about, the first page of google results for the query? if I could get a better answer by feeding "summarize this: [control-v the regular google results page]" into chatgpt than by asking google's own product, then what the ever loving fuck is google's product getting fed?

yeah yeah I know no one will read that text block. here, have another amusing google summarization failure:

(yes, I did check the sources in that dropdown, and no, none of their headlines or contents are at all ambiguous about the fact that the teams interested in trading for him are, in point of fact, not his current employer. the current holder of his multiyear contract, specifically; this is not a "he'll be a free agent next year and so this is an awkward wording referencing phoenix potentially resigning him" situation, it's just wrong.)

proposal: we fire the industry into the sun

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note that I didn't actually use the above shortcut; it explodes when you use it on more than a few files, so taking a folder as input is pretty useless. this one works for right clicking one or a few selected files, though:

(for the folder use case I made a oneshot action that just does this:

and then called it in parallel batches of 20 from a node script using this, which still has a ton of overhead that I didn't bother to spend more time optimizing because whatever who cares. it runs)

worst language in the world. bar none. bar none! absolute fucking travesty.

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proposal: we fire the industry into the sun