Tom Walker

Web developer. Sometimes designer. I like code, words and mass movements. Jag lär mig #svenska.

Interested in/may post about #html #css #wordpress #openweb #decentralisation #socialism #protest

Birdsite: https://twitter.com/tomwalkr
Pronouns: He/him

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Last Notes

2026-02-17 16:38:37 UTC

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The dot-com bubble popping did not collapse the software job market... at least in the medium-term. And I hear a lot of people got cheap hardware out of it. And chairs

2026-02-14 16:50:45 UTC

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It's a signoff blob (as seen at the end of some magazine articles) but because there is a character that is a circle with an R in it, they have used that

2025-11-09 12:09:49 UTC

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This made me think of how much we celsius users take for granted that 0 is the freezing point of water and 100 is the boiling point. Do the fahrenheit people have to remember some weird numbers for this?

2025-09-08 16:52:42 UTC

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Whoever could have predicted that downloading 10GB of third party code from 1,000 different people to do simple tasks would end up this way

2025-05-08 20:35:43 UTC

Am I interested in watching a one hour video essay about a video game?
Yes. Yes, I have to admit, I am.
Am I interested in watching a two hour video essay about a video game?
Yeah OK. This better be good though.
Am I interested in watching a nine hour video essay about a video game?
You know what?
No.
We all have our limits.

2025-04-15 08:17:11 UTC

If I have a critique of the prevailing politics of Mastodon/fedi, it would be the emphasis on avoiding "complicity" via consumer choice, of the "It took a week but I finally got my phone working without anything from Google" variety.
These schemes tend to be high effort, for a total impact of "one person not using a thing". Even a small amount of activism is more effective. A donation of time or money to a relevant cause is way more effective.
Not everything is about which software you use.

2025-02-08 10:27:26 UTC

It's annoying how it is always the "high-status" commentator position to say that bad things probably won't happen – "No, Trump won't launch a coup", "No, Putin won't invade Ukraine", etc – until it happens.
Then they all say "well, no one saw this coming". No one... apart from all those people whose predictions you explicitly dismissed until the thing happened.

2025-02-06 10:58:24 UTC

People on Mastodon talk a lot about moving to the open source alternative to everything, but the real imperative now is to shift to the non-US-hosted alternative to everything.
Sometimes this overlaps but right now, geography should be the priority.

2025-01-30 19:28:50 UTC

Remember when "America's Dumbest Criminals" was a TV show and not a system of government

2025-01-14 21:59:06 UTC

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What annoys me personally is that a lot of these people don't think they are setting up something that is approximately a blog (which they are), but something that is approximately an online magazine

2025-01-14 19:38:53 UTC

Them: "We are launching a new publication"
Me: 😐
Them: "We intend to do journalism differently"
Me: 😐
Them: "We will be beholden to no one in our search for truth"
Me: It's a Substack isn't it?
Them: "You will be able to subscribe using the Substack platform"
Me: (closes tab)

2025-01-12 14:21:29 UTC

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This made me realise why it's called a jordnöt (Swedish)

2025-01-07 16:37:38 UTC

Who are the people who thought that Mark Zuckerberg was OK until now but today he's really crossed a line?
I'm seeing a lot of it and come on. It's been very clear who he is for a long, long time. They made a whole movie about it literally 15 years ago.

2024-12-21 20:31:12 UTC

A surprising number of people spent every day for a decade trying to get their follower count to go up on one social media platform, realised it's now a bust, ditched it, and then... immediately resumed that behaviour on a different platform

2024-12-10 20:34:46 UTC

Please stop adding a 'Spotify Wrapped" thing to every single app. Please

2024-11-23 14:34:05 UTC

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But they're not! Mostly because the cost is high and you don't gain anything from doing so.
Until *someone* else out there is running a relay and it succesfully federates with Bluesky's one, the network is at best "theoretically federatable", not "federated".

2024-11-23 14:06:11 UTC

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The key is that you can't run a relay. It's not just "costly" but already out of reach of pretty much everyone who isn't a VC-funded startup, and the amount of storage needed to do it (ie. to mirror every post ever) is growing every day. That's why there's only one relay. It's not meaningfully federated right now if federation is theoretically possible but not *at all* being done.

2024-11-23 11:33:08 UTC

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Just throwing this in because you're giving them too much credit for being federated:
"Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either."
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

2024-11-16 13:49:36 UTC

This is an interesting dive into some of the more technical aspects of how decentralised Bluesky is (isn't), which goes out of its way to be fair and assumes more good faith than I would to be honest.
The main part I didn't know already is that hosting a "relay" means you must mirror *all* content on the network (4TB+).
There is no reason to do so, in terms of anything useful it allows you to do. But the "decentralisation" claim relies on people doing it anyway.
https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won

2024-11-14 22:30:43 UTC

Decentralised social media site Bluesky has gone down under the load of new users.
Not to worry, I'll just use one of the other decentralised instances. One of the many wonders of decentralisation.
... What do you mean, there aren't any?
... If a central server goes down, I can't get onto this oh-so-decentralised network?
I guess this must just be how decentralisation works!

2024-11-14 13:44:09 UTC

I find Mastodon "cosy" but in terms of mainstream adoption, it has missed its shot. Really it missed it a while ago.
Someone will reply to say "it's called the fediverse and I don't want mainstream adoption" and uh, congratulations I guess? You have got your wish.
However - important addendum - I expect Mastodon (/fediverse whatevs) to still be here in a decade. I do not expect that of Bluesky.

2024-11-12 23:44:32 UTC

Just saw someone on Bluesky check the list of everyone who is blocking them and post it with little notes about each person
and hmm, I dunno, feels like the fact that this is possible is storing up some big trouble for later

2024-11-10 18:05:46 UTC

You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who tells you that a political campaign – any political campaign ever, anywhere in the world – was "flawless".
No campaign ever has been.
What they mean is "shut up".

2024-11-06 16:33:04 UTC

If your analysis of US voter trends doesn't include the absolutely incredible amount of voter suppression in US elections then it is a bad analysis

2024-10-21 17:12:46 UTC

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Yeah I see. As written it's basically not-invented-here ActivityPub with extra steps for a couple of questionable gains

2024-10-21 14:08:06 UTC

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I agree with you overall, but curious about in what sense Bluesky wants to "reinvent the internet"?

2024-10-19 16:45:53 UTC

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This is a very vanilla option but I would probably send it to Nintendo.
I don't know the cost of out-of-warranty repairs though (assuming it is out of warranty) and obviously no use if it has other modifications.

2024-10-18 13:54:29 UTC

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https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader
I have used this once but not sure if it still works.

2024-10-14 19:06:15 UTC

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My point is that your restriction there (stylistic content) is not enforced and nor is it honoured by most people. The idea that CSS can only change style, not content, is a horse that has very much bolted. Another example would be the order property, which lets you change the order of grid/flexbox content.

2024-10-14 18:55:14 UTC

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A strange list of complaints... a lot of it seems to revolve around the idea that CSS is mere styling and shouldn't change the actual text. But .element::before { content: 'whatever'; } has been a baseline feature for well over a decade now.

2024-10-11 17:19:04 UTC

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It was a noble effort but millions of people believe the most ridiculous bullshit and it spreads in a matter of minutes. You can't "fact check harder" your way out of this

2024-10-11 17:15:06 UTC

If you're having to publish fact checks about "is the government controlling the weather?" it may be time to just admit that fact checking doesn't work

2024-09-26 22:44:57 UTC

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ClassicPress is based around the idea that the critical error in Wordpress history was switching editor, which at this point seems like quite a retro complaint. The old editor feels janky and, if you have a couple of plugins, crowded with cruft

2024-09-22 12:36:09 UTC

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Cloud still didn't quite die but it has been a while since I heard anyone banging on about "serverless"

2024-09-21 14:56:16 UTC

"Get on board with AI or get left behind!"
I already got "left behind" by NFTs and the metaverse in just the last few years, and it didn't seem to do me any harm.

2024-08-22 15:49:18 UTC

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I don't like the name "pineapple", shall we rename those too?

2024-08-22 15:41:54 UTC

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So we're supposed to rename something that already has a name because of some unspecified objection?

2024-07-20 09:53:10 UTC

Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers