Notices by Josh Collinsworth (collinsworth@hachyderm.io)

My mind was blown by this

https://css-tip.com/screen-dimension/

2014: How do I get robots to notice my website?

2024: How do make my website impossible for robots to survive intact?

I'm sick of roguelikes.

I'm sick of luck.

I'm sick of "challenges" that are just retrying over and over, waiting for the perfect combination of unlikely events.

I'm sick of situations where it's not possible to win; where no amount of skill or preparation will ever matter.

It's not fun. It's not interesting.

Just going through the motions, hoping chance lets you by this time. But it never does.

Another all-but-hopeless restart.

Maybe tomorrow.

Life shouldn't be so much of a roguelike.

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you *don't* have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale *without* paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

"Won't it be amazing what tech we'll have in the future?"

It's amazing what tech we have NOW. It's just all unaffordable, inequitable, locked behind a never-ending subscription, built to fail, and/or data mining and advertising disguised as a product.

The tech isn't the problem, and the next round of advancements isn't going to free us.

If I had been paying for Adobe Creative Cloud every month since graduating, I would have now spent over $5,000 on it.

And if I cancelled, I'd have nothing to show for it; no access to my work, no right or ability to open the programs any longer.

Instead, I bought the Affinity creative suite, for which I have spent under $400 total (I've bought it more than once), and which I own to use for as long as they'll run.

I don't always make good choices, but this one turned out rather nicely.

Got to keep my browser from tracking me.
Got to keep my TV from tracking me.
Got to keep my phone from listening to me.
Got to keep ads away.
Got to keep my content from being ripped off.
Got to keep my data from being stolen.
Got to keep my email from being scraped.
Got to keep my contact form from being spammed.
Got to keep my feed from all the noise.
Got to keep my photos from AI.
Got to keep my doorbell from the cops.

Got to keep awful fucking busy just to be on the Internet these days.

Made this just for fun.

Honest LinkedIn notifications: https://codepen.io/collinsworth/pen/eYxMQbj

It took almost four years, but I just had my first positive Covid test. 😞

(Hard to be surprised; I was traveling internationally last week. But still.)

Really tired of "we must adapt to this new reality" takes in response to horrible people doing preventable things.

Fuck that.

Make anti-vaxxers adapt to 20th century medicine. Make selfish people adapt to living in a society. Make billionaires adapt to paying their fair share. Make climate deniers adapt to science. Make conspiracy theorists adapt to reality. Make fascists adapt to getting punched in the face.

The rest of us aren't the ones who need to be "adapting."

Once more: fuck that.

I took this photo of my kid playing with his blocks the other day, and when I realized it reminded me of something, well...I had to make this.

The more you optimize for building quickly, the more you'll be building the same thing everybody else is.

The entire lifecycle of startups is:

- Put users first
- Shift to extracting all possible value from users
- All-company five-alarm scramble to avoid being replaced by a smaller company that's still putting users first

This pattern just keeps repeating, and it absolutely astounds me that every time it happens, people act like it was some wild, unpredictable upset.