🆕 blog! “I paid people to try and follow my README”

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users.

I naïvely …

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/i-paid-people-to-try-and-follow-my-readme/
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#ActivityBot #ActivityPub #developers

🆕 blog! “Some quick thoughts on Unit Testing ActivityPub”

I'll be radically honest here - I never really got the idea of "Test Driven Development". I'm much more of a "telnet into production and damn the consequences" kind of guy. Look, it's much more fun and my cardiologist recommends severe shocks every now and again.

The essence of unit testing is pretty…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/some-thoughts-on-unit-testing-activitypub/
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#ActivityBot #ActivityPub #php

If you publish any #OpenSource and you want people to use it, may I please implore you to test your README?

Can you actually follow the steps you've written down? Does it work if the user doesn't have the same development packages installed as you?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/how-to-actually-test-your-readme/

Remember, #NaBloPoMo is coming up - (inter)National Blog Posting Month.

All you have to do is publish one new blog post everyday in November. A brilliant excuse to finish all your drafts.

Very long shot. Do I know anyone in or near Phuket who can do me a favour?
I left my wallet in a hotel earlier this year. They've just let me know they found it.
Anyone over there willing to pick it up & post it back to me? Happy to pay, of course.

🆕 blog! “Are you a smartwatch "power user"?”

What do you use your smartwatch for?

A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than …

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/are-you-a-smartwatch-power-user/
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#android #gadgets #usability #watch

🆕 blog! “No errors, no warnings, no gods, no masters - HTML Purity is a Fetish”

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/no-errors-no-warnings-no-gods-no-masters-html-purity-is-a-fetish/
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#HTML #webdev

This is a shocking disclosure from #Radicle

> Network traffic between nodes is not encrypted and not authenticated.
>
> We recommend to stop using private repositories until a fix is released.
>
> Due to a lack of version negotiation features, combined with the fix being incompatible on the wire, a backward compatible mitigation is not feasible

https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol

And no promotion of the problem from @nprofile1q...

🆕 blog! “Are LLMs still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks?”

Last year I ran an experiment to test the ability of modern LLMs to correctly answer a relatively straightforward question. Every single one of them got it wrong. Some missed information, some made up false statements, none were right.

Of course the fanbois variously claimed that I was holding it…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/are-llms-still-surprisingly-bad-at-some-simple-tasks/
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#AI #internet #LLM

Finally gave in to lifestyle inflation and bought a fizzy water maker. So far I have only carbonated tap water.

What things have you successfully bubbled that I should try?

Found a useful looking Open Source tool. Distributed as source code rather than a binary, which is fair enough.

But all the README says is:

> Compile the project like any normal rust binary

Yeah, cheers pal. What a nice and user-friendly instruction. Sure that won't send me down a hundred rabbit-holes requiring me to install ever-more esoteric packages to match your dev environment.

And we wonder why people turn to LLMs for help.

(Please don't reply to tell me how to compile a Rust binary.)

I know I'm being a bit overly obsessive over getting a perfect score, but I'm struggling to think how to improve this.

I don't really want to auto generate thumbnails for my WordPress posts. The images are already reasonably well optimised - but they are undoubtedly much larger than necessary for the viewport.