Tagged with #technology

On personal goals

Today, I've realised my overarching goal as a software engineer: create digital experiences that help improve mental health for the people using them.

Unwittingly I myself have trended towards community software where capitalism, media manipulation and corporate influence is minimised (open-source, privacy first, self-hosting), and writing software with these values in mind.

In my experience, capitalism and corporate software distort the incentives of software for the financial benefit of it's backers. Media manipulation uses information overload and content agendas to influence the news cycle and change the common values we live by. This ultimately is more important to them than the wellbeing of the person experiencing the artifact, but not to me.

How have I been unwittingly trying to create positive user experiences:

• Having ownership over your content through blogging software that does not demand your attention.
• Creating a safe space for content consumption of trusted resources.
• Reducing friction in everyday tasks also benefits mental health and reduces frustration.
• Having peace of mind working on technologies that avoid complexity,
• Building foundational projects to help understand how to think about replacement products that contain these values.
• Helping people make time for oneself.

‎ #technology, #projects, #society

If you want an example of why we need a viable open source phone ecosystem, try and share some assorted music files from your non-Apple pc to another person’s iPhone. #technology

Anchor bugs in Blink engine browsers

I've been looking into an issue for work where Google Chrome loads a URL ending in an anchor and scrolls to the incorrect position on the page. Imagine linking to the third heading on a page and Chrome scrolling to a indeterminable position above that. Firefox is not affected.

After ruling out all JavaScript and the particular HTML source code, it turns out that disabling the html { scroll-behavior: smooth; } CSS style fixes the issue. My theory so I suspect there is a race condition between determining the length of a page and position of the element while scrolling? This results in bugreports such as "Anchorlink going to the wrong place"

Regular behaviour is also partially broken

What's more interesting is that blink based browsers are unable to scroll to the anchor even after the page is already loaded!

Testcase:

1. load https://downloads.vandragt.com/test-long.html#test This page has an id attribute test set on the header but is otherwise plain text. Any other page will also work though.
2. The page loads and the scrollposition is correctly set at the test header.
3. Scroll up a paragraph or more than a screen, and refresh the page. Notice the scrollposition isn't set.
4. Optionally refresh many times, or press the Enter key in the address bar to attempt to reload the page. However the scroll-position is now permanently broken until you navigate away from the page.

This results in bug-reports such as "It only goes to a place when you first enter the URL to the browser, it doesn’t go to the same place when you re-fresh the page". Together this erodes the trust in the application and honestly it's hard to believe this has not been more widely reported.

There's probably an elaborate JavaScript solution but in my opinion a browser's bugs should be fixed by the browser, because in the future when the browser fixes itself a workaround might result in incorrect behaviour. #technology

The AI evolution seems scary until you realise most of the applications are summarised as a wrapper around the OpenAI API that does all the work, with the context provided by a prompt prefix. So with half a day's study most programmers can participate. #technology

Ubuntu's minimal installation appears to be the standard installation plus the removal of some packages! That's unexpected as I was trying to save installation time. #ubuntu #technology

Anyone, regardless of coding experience can now create scripts and simple WordPress plugins:

WordPress developers who want to share their AI-assisted creations with the community have also started submitting them to WordPress.org.

We can imagine the headlines in six months when another popular site or plug-in is hacked, when both the author and the generator and the webmaster don’t understand the code, and can’t review it for security weaknesses, The current tools are proof of concept creators, but please be careful not to assume production ready code.

If you want a code review done hit up an engineer, like myself #technology #ai #wordpress