Microblog

I bet if you went back 100 years and described Spotify/Apple Music/Bandcamp to them, they would assume that in the future no one is working and everyone is listening to music all day every day in some kind of utopian paradise.

social.lol/@bw/110806152684706481

To be clear, though, as much as I can understand the frustrations, my Mastodon experience has been the opposite. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in tech (sup NERDS) or I just lucked out with my instance (social.lol).

Everyone is nice. There are lots of creative, interesting people posting art, code, statuses, silly things, serious things—just a good variety of stuff.

When I log into Bluesky, I don’t know who to follow and it looks like mostly just screaming.

social.lol/@bw/110805468300307779

PHP 8 cost me a new customer. I can see in the logs where they tried to subscribe. But they hit PHP 8’s insidious error, `Warning: Undefined array key…`.

For better or worse, checking an array value using a possibly-non-existent key was a common pattern in PHP code. You could do it in an if statement and count on the result being truthy or falsey. Yeah I know, I know. But still.

This change makes ton of existing code problematic.

Here’s the best fix that I know of: mattwatson.org/blog/20230716-l

social.lol/@bw/110804012602130784

I wish there was a CSS media query for the user’s scrollbar preference. macOS has three options for when to show scrollbars:

- Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
- When scrolling
- Always

I set mine to “Always” (even though many native apps including Setapp and Apple Music ignore it and disappear them anyway).

But it would be nice for web apps to know the user’s preference.

Screenshot of the macOS Appearance setting. I’m highlighting the scrollbar section I described in the post.

social.lol/@bw/110799822189626157

My mom’s ancient miniature poodle is the only dog I’ve ever seen that, when given a treat, will just stare at it like “idk what you want me to do with that.”

But then bark if one of the other dogs get close to it.

Photo of a miniature poodle sitting majestically in a rocking chair staring out of the window.

social.lol/@bw/110742898905607551

Just to recap, the three times I glanced at the clock this afternoon went like:

- 12:34
- 2:34:56
- 4:20

If I don’t show up tomorrow, I’ve either won the lottery or the universe took me.

social.lol/@bw/110742854480218888