dbushell (u/dbushell)

dbushell commented on UK government advises deleting emails to save water gov.uk/government/news/na... · Posted by u/bifftastic

dbushell · 17 days ago

> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

Also the UK government:

> Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...

dbushell commented on Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule webapp for a conference on my phone simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw

simonw · a month ago

!!!

Yeah, it turns out those speaker avatar images are 1MB+ PNGs! And there are 170 of them.

What a fantastic cautionary tale about vibe-coding on a mobile phone (where performance analysis tools aren't easily available.)

I just fixed that with Codex - thanks for the tip: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6879631d99c48191b1ab7f84dfab8dea

As far as accessibility goes... yeah, the lack of semantic markup is pretty shocking! I'll remember to prompt for that next time I try anything like this.

I just tried it in VoiceOver on iOS and the page was at least navigable - the buttons for the days work - but yeah, I'd be very ashamed to ship something like this if it wasn't a 20 minute demo (and I'm a bit ashamed even given that.)

I'm running "Make open-sauce-2025.html accessible to screenreaders" in Codex now to see what happens.

dbushell · a month ago

it's concerning these vibe coding tools must be coerced into semantic markup

could that be solved by prefixing every prompt with a reminder?

dbushell commented on Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule webapp for a conference on my phone simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw

simonw · a month ago

!!!

Yeah, it turns out those speaker avatar images are 1MB+ PNGs! And there are 170 of them.

What a fantastic cautionary tale about vibe-coding on a mobile phone (where performance analysis tools aren't easily available.)

I just fixed that with Codex - thanks for the tip: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6879631d99c48191b1ab7f84dfab8dea

As far as accessibility goes... yeah, the lack of semantic markup is pretty shocking! I'll remember to prompt for that next time I try anything like this.

I just tried it in VoiceOver on iOS and the page was at least navigable - the buttons for the days work - but yeah, I'd be very ashamed to ship something like this if it wasn't a 20 minute demo (and I'm a bit ashamed even given that.)

I'm running "Make open-sauce-2025.html accessible to screenreaders" in Codex now to see what happens.

dbushell · a month ago

would have been fun to see how conference wifi handled that :)

dbushell commented on Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule webapp for a conference on my phone simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/simonw

dbushell · a month ago

The web app makes 176 requests and downloads 130 megabytes.

It's also <div> soup and largely inaccessible.

These and other issues could be fixed fairly quickly with a little care (if anyone cares).

dbushell commented on My First Open Source AI Generated Library lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/2... · Posted by u/thunderbong

dbushell · 2 months ago

Do developers not see the irony of publishing AI generated code with a LICENSE?

at least this one does:

> Postscriptum: Yes, I did slap an Apache 2 license on it. Is that even valid when there's barely a human in the loop? A fascinating question but not one I'm not eager to figure out myself. It is however certainly something we'll all have to confront sooner or later.

dbushell commented on An origin trial for a new HTML <permission> element (2024) developer.chrome.com/blog... · Posted by u/tentacleuno

account-5 · 2 months ago

At face value this seems reasonable, but (and this might just be me) because its being pushed by Google I have to ask myself: what's in it for Google, and what am I missing?

Manifest 3 for example breaks adblockers for the sake of 'security', and adverts are Google's business. Passkeys are pushed for security as well (and do have benefits) but for the average person locks you into a eco-system; another business model plus for Google.

So with that in mind, how does this benefit Google at the expense of the user? Making the permissions less explicit, or less separate from the content of a site might be a net benefit to Google... I don't know.

I might also be reading way too much into motivations, and/or paranoid.

dbushell · 2 months ago

It makes it easier for users to enable permissions, accidentally too, and thus lower security and privacy. Google products are designed to exploit that. Google probably has data showing a large number of users have disabled such permissions globally, with no easy path to trick them into opting back in. That would be the cynical view!

edit: also one can never be too paranoid around Google.

dbushell commented on Ensloppification dbushell.com/2025/05/30/e... · Posted by u/treadump

bitpush · 3 months ago

> I’m extremely privileged to have a job that I enjoy. My work is creative. The challenges are rewarding. I don’t take that for granted. When I imagine “AI” in the mix it does not spark joy. I tried the tab-completion slot machines; not my cup of tea. I tried image generation and was overcome with literal depression. I don’t want a future as a “prompt artist”. I’d rather pack up my privilege and find something else.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a craft that I cherish. My work is visceral; the smell of the oils, the feel of the canvas beneath my brush. The challenges of translating vision to a tangible form are deeply fulfilling. I don’t take that for granted. When I imagine computers further encroaching on design, it does not spark inspiration. I’ve seen these digital drawing tablets and "design" software; they feel cold and disconnected, like painting by numbers with a sterile stylus. I’ve witnessed the rise of computer-generated graphics and felt a profound sense of loss for the handcrafted. I don’t want a future as a “graphic operator” or a “filter adjuster.” I’d rather pack up my easel and find something else entirely.

dbushell · 3 months ago

Yes your example is exactly the same and yet I fear you're missing the point entirely.

dbushell commented on Is It JavaScript? blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

koito17 · 3 months ago

The server code example has something amusing to it.

  const fs = require('fs');
  const content = fs.readFileSync('./data.txt', 'utf8');

This code will in fact NOT run on Deno, unless one explicitly configures Deno to load JavaScript code as CommonJS. With Bun, however, this code runs without any configuration necessary.

I suppose the author is intentionally not mentioning these details, since it's greatly summarized at the end of the article. JavaScript code indeed requires a great amount of context on the ambient development environment.

There is a related article I recall reading last year, asserting that "JavaScript does not exist". Cannot find the article, unfortunately, so I will paraphase. The article explained how a modern development stack involves a composition of several code transformation tools. We are effectively writing in a fictitious language and pass it through a series of transformations until we finally get syntactically valid JavaScript. Off the top of my head: most people in frontend are likely using React and TypeScript. TSX files at least go through the TypeScript compiler and a plugin to transform JSX to JS. The outputted JS may have funny things like "CSS imports" or bundler-specific "magic comments" like the article's Preact example. That has to be specially handled by a bundler (like Vite) so that the JS file becomes syntactically valid JavaScript.

dbushell · 3 months ago

It’ll run via an ESM import of an NPM dependency, Deno just doesn’t allow commonjs at the top level

dbushell commented on Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated deno.com/blog/greatly-exa... · Posted by u/stephdin

dbushell · 3 months ago

Doesn't inspire confidence.

I guess we’ll see soon enough what Deploy will become since that's "imminent".

KV is dead if they've no desire to develop it out of beta and are working on something new. No reason to ever use it for a new project now.

Fresh is being refactored with an alpha in "late Q3 2025 (likely September)". It was a fairly basic framework to being with. The no compilation/build step was the only interesting idea and that's going away.

The runtime is actively developed but I find this statement amusing:

> We’re not chasing feature parity with other runtimes.

The release notes on Node/NPM compatibility would suggest otherwise.

dbushell commented on Third party cookies must be removed w3ctag.github.io/web-with... · Posted by u/pabs3

josefx · 4 months ago

Another "trusted" third party based tracking system. All I need to know to avoid it even when it is printed on toiletpaper.

dbushell · 4 months ago

Yep, definitely "trusted third party". For example:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

Owned by Mozilla, ran by ex-Facebook employees. I'm sure it's entirely coincidentally this W3C draft was written by Mozilla and Facebook employees.