Flexbox as a base layout is convenient but tricky due to CLS or “jank”. If the dimensions of the base flex container(s) are ambiguous, then the browser constantly recomputes the dimensions as HTML streams in.

My favorite trick is to give the browser dimension hints and avoid computational properties like flex. Set as many dimensions (width/height) as possible unambiguously. My Internet speed is sufficiently slow enough that I can see layout shifts in many sites, including my own (this micro blog).

Every so often I stumble upon really interesting YouTube channels. It doesn’t take very long though for all of them to go “poof” ..and gone.

Speaking of mmorpgs — this channel revisits old mmorpgs in current year. It’s mind blowing that many of them are still going, and that people still play them. I can’t even remember the last time I played a game, let alone a mmorpg.

I really need to suss out an offline mode for this thing once I find the time. There’s an isp or power company outage every 2~3 days or so. That’s a normal thing in The Bahamas btw.

It just dawned on me that social media is exactly like a mmorpg. Think about it — we’ve got characters/personas, bots, cheat codes/walkthroughs and black markets that sell accounts, followers, and clicks. (was on the shady side of the net today)

imo, it’s a fascinating demonstration of psychological prowess that corporations have convinced everyone that programming/computing is hard.

People are smart, take what they can get, and deal with a lot of computing frustation. Software is bespoke enough that technically you have to “program” in roundabout ways to get useful things done (generality).

yj is handy for converting between YAML, TOML, JSON, and HCL. yes.

yj -yj -i < config.yaml > config.json
yj -yt -i < config.yaml > config.toml
yj -yc    < config.yaml > config.hcl

imscript is interesting. It’s a collection of standalone image processing utilities: repository.

If you’re not trying to pad a resume, one of the best kept secrets to being quick with a computer is to just use “complete” programs/primitives.

Unfashionable programs with low ecosystem churn that allow quickly and predictably producing similar quality software/architecture as modern high churn ecosystems are “complete”, imo.

Sometimes it’s amusing to stumble upon the latest centralization/decentralization debate. You could argue technically against centralization, spof, and censorship until you’re blue in the face.

Decentralization is pretty much a solved technical problem, but for very special non–technical reasons everything only gets more centralized from this point onwards :-)