yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

48 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1976, NASA rolled out its first space shuttle, named Enterprise, from its manufacturing plant in Palmdale, CA.

The shuttle was planned to be named the Constitution, but thanks to a massive write-in campaign by Star Trek fans, President Ford relented and advised NASA to change the name to Enterprise.

Star Trek creator Roddenberry and many of the show’s cast members attended the Shuttle rollout ceremony.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/45-years-ago-space-shuttle-enterprise-makes-its-public-debut/
1/n

In her prime, Ellen McIlwaine had up-and-comers like Bruce Springsteen open for her... but eventually, her career took a turn, and she began driving a bus in Calgary. Her story is being told on film at CIFF. #yyc #calgary

https://livewirecalgary.com/2024/09/10/bruce-springsteen-opened-for-her-but-she-ended-life-in-obscurity-the-forgotten-story-of-ellen-mcilwaine-to-play-at-ciff/

This is the sort of madness I absolutely love to see in the world. Marvellous.

Man builds £30,000 canal in his garden to house his barge
https://metro.co.uk/2024/08/20/man-builds-30-000-canal-garden-house-barge-21458913/

"Whenever I, or someone else, posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, it DDoS's me and brings the site down for a couple minutes."

https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me

Grace Hopper famously said that the most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've always done it this way."

We traveled through the Canadian Rocky Mountains yesterday. Some amazing views from The Canadian.

The frontend community is in crisis. I know, because I could spend every waking hour helping e-commerce and productivity apps fix the *unbelievably* bad performance that is now the hallmark of contemporary, JavaScript-first web development.

But it's worse than that. This stuff has infected public services; the sorts of sites that have to serve *everyone*, iPhone or no.

Part 2 of this series is the hardest to watch, but essential to understand how far we've fallen:

https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/

@slightlyoff I’ve wanted to get back to you for a while because you were a big reason for our e-commerce website being the way it was, technically speaking.

We took your earlier publications to heart, and we applied every kind of optimization we could think of, just to try and stay a little bit ahead of the competition. I think we did all right in that respect.

When the company was shut down at the end of 2018, I finally put together a document outlining our techniques. It’s not a tutorial and lots of things aren’t perfect, but I think a lot of this can still be used.

I was weirdly proud of the server-side cached pre-renders for several cohorts (at FRONTEND > web server > httpd in the link below), which we were continuously building for the 5 most viewed pages. These on disk static pages didn’t have a long TTL but this allowed us to reevaluate the need for a pricy CDN.

These Apache2 rules allow for high throughput of the pages that are cached in this way. Because of this, we have been able to withstand traffic generated through TV mentions and other publicity without the help of a CDN or any autoscaling.

Of course we eventually placed nginx in front of httpd and these rules became somewhat redundant, but not if you include brotli and other CPU-heavy compression.

Anyway I’m geeking out on a dead website. Here’s the doc:

https://github.com/GuillaumeRossolini/il

The whole AI thing has me endlessly confused. Half the market is crashing because investors didn't see any signs of payoff in the quarterly earnings report, but I'm so lost as to what exactly they were expecting to see. Did they just not pay any attention at all to what these companies were actually doing with AI?

Were they expecting exponential Instagram usage growth as a result of Meta making it so you can have a conversation with the search bar? Or maybe everyone was going to buy 10 new Windows licenses in celebration of Microsoft announcing they want to install AI powered spyware on everyone's computer? Or was Google going to sell more ads by replacing all the search results with reddit shitposts. Either I'm missing something or everyone's 2 remaining brain cells are just really busy fighting to death for 3rd place.

Mac people: if you miss the older style menus bars, when they still looked cool, give Lickable Menu Bar a try. mtm set up with the shiny Tiger menu bar again, and really like it.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/lickable-menu-bar/id6444217677?mt=12

@mcc I worked at Tripod (owned by Lycos) when Lycos also acquired Angelfire. It turned out that the entire site (login, html editor, uploader, everything) was run on a single CGI that was written in C.

The CGI binary was named a.out, which I was told stood for “angelfire.out”.

This is unrelated to your 404 page, but I don’t get many chances to tell this story.

Just saw a Google AI commercial in the Olympics where a kid asks AI to write a heart-felt letter to her Olympic hero.

Are marketers insane? The whole point of heart-felt letters is that they come from a place of authenticity.

As the general vibe heats up, why not distract yourself with a way to keep cool that we abandoned for some reason?

youtu.be/uhbDfi7Ee7k

Beloved Apple blog TUAW was shut down in 2015, sold to private equity, then sold to a company in Hong Kong. It recently relaunched as an AI content farm using the stolen identities and bylines of its former human staff. A nightmare:

https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publishing-ai-articles-under-the-names-of-its-old-human-staff/

Justice #Sotomayor dissent:

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be #immune from #criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal #law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such #immunity.
…if the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our #democracy, I dissent."

This week at Config I gave a talk about pixel fonts that I think turned out really well.

It’s called “In defense of an old pixel,” and I don’t think I ever worked harder on a talk before. Check it out here! (25 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w

Mastodon expects you to accurately set the language of your post before posting.

There are real-world accessibility problems if you set it incorrectly, including:

(a) Mastodon's translation feature may not work correctly

(b) when people follow you they can opt-in to only receive posts you send in a particular language. If you mis-label the language of your posts you may be inadvertently spamming your followers.

Earlier this week I had a passenger who tried to bully me.

I was driving the 29 Sunset, and as is normal for me, I was making big enthusiastic stop and transfer announcements. I’m a little atypical for transit operators: I love to make announcements. I draw out the syllables. I sound a little like a WWE announcer crossed with an old time carnival barker. Mostly, people love it. I get lots of compliments and the occasional commendation. I find that making these announcements helps me keep focused on the flow of the route and connects me to my passengers as a person. People recognize my voice, and will sometimes remember me from a different route a year later. But most of all it’s fun, and feels good. I’ll even do it on an empty bus.

So a few months ago we learned that the individual running polyfill.io silently sold the service to an obscure chinese company.

This popular (and well done / very useful) service was created by the Financial Times, who stopped maintaining it and "donated it to the community", meaning that it relied on a few volunteers to continue running it (and on Fastly who provided the hosting for free). 1/7