Dang… I don’t even use React and it still brings down my sites. Good beats I guess.
Readit Newsbradly commented on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com/5-dec... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
bradly commented on CSS now has an if() conditional function caniuse.com/?search=if... · Posted by u/aanthonymax
I'm pretty happy to see this, as conditionals can really help keep code manageable when trying to define CSS variables or other properties based on combinations of light mode, dark mode, high-contrast, contextual state in a document or component, etc.
if() isn't the only way to do this, though. We've been using a technique in Review Board that's roughly equivalent to if(), but compatible with any browser supporting CSS variables. It involves:
1. Defining your conditions based on selectors/media queries (say, a dark mode media selector, light mode, some data attribute on a component, etc.).
2. Defining a set of related CSS variables within those to mark which are TRUE (using an empty value) and which are FALSE (`initial`).
3. Using those CSS variables with fallback syntax to choose a value based on which is TRUE (using `var(--my-state, fallback)` syntax).
I wrote about it all here, with a handful of working examples: https://chipx86.blog/2025/08/08/what-if-using-conditional-cs...
Also includes a comparison between if() and this approach, so you can more easily get a sense of how they both work.
I recently implemented dark/light mode for the first time and was really surprised to find that in order to add a toggle I had to duplicate a both of vars/styles and use JavaScript. I'm looking forward to not having to deal with that cruft in the future.
bradly commented on Critical RCE Vulnerabilities in React and Next.js wiz.io/blog/critical-vuln... · Posted by u/gonepivoting
Dang, Cloudflare is moving fast. Cloudflare WAF proactively protects against React vulnerability https://blog.cloudflare.com/waf-rules-react-vulnerability/
Would be interesting to hear from Cloudflare the extent of exploitation before today. I'm assuming they can see if/when this started being exploited.
bradly commented on How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) reverbmachine.com/blog/de... · Posted by u/dijksterhuis
That's really cool.
Music is funny. I played the closed hi-hat sound (https://synthrecipes.org/#closed-hi-hat) a couple of times and my brain instantly started playing AC/DC's, Back in Black. I probably haven't listened to that song in 15 years and now I'm shuffling AC/DC on Spotify.
Also, the "Sub bass" link might be broken:
> Also, the "Sub bass" link might be broken
Thank you! It is now fixed <3
bradly commented on How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) reverbmachine.com/blog/de... · Posted by u/dijksterhuis
Did you know https://play.generative.fm/browse
I did not! Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Is there a way to see the source for the sounds?
One of my best and most productive work situations was remote with a week[0] together every quarter. Key to this was scheduling the next trip while we were together to make sure it was on the books. We got to meet new team members, share some meals together, work through new architecture designs with a whiteboard, and plan. Not much got done during that week, but we sure got a lot done each quarter.
[0]: This was actually Monday-Thursday with travel on Friday
There was an interesting substack that went through the logic of this type of failure[1].
The tl;dr is that phrasing the question as a Yes/No forces the answer into, well, a yes or a no. Without pre-answer reasoning trace, the LLM is forced to make a decision based on it's training data, which here is more likely to not be from 2025, so it picks no. Any further output cannot change the previous output.
[1] https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/why-does-chatgpt-think-...
That does make sense given the prompt "What is the current year and is 2026 next year?" provides the correct answer.
bradly commented on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/robbiet480
Now I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?
Good question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective.
I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wouldn't solve the breadth of Siri's functionality issues, it would have helped improve the overall user experience with the existing Siri features to avoid the seemingly reduction of quality over time.
Secondly, and admittedly farther from where I was... Apple could have started the move from ML models to LLMs much sooner. The underlying technology for LLMs started gaining popularity in papers and research quite a few years ago, and there was a real problem of each team developing their own ML models for search, similarity, recommendations, etc that were quite large and that became a problem for mobile device delivery and storage. If leadership had a way to bring the orgs together they may have landed on LLMs much sooner.
bradly commented on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/robbiet480
Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.
LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.
See: https://codepen.io/abdus/pen/bNpQqXv