I think Firefox has a memory leak of some kind because I start to notice inconsistent FPS after a page has been running for a while.
I think Firefox has a memory leak of some kind because I start to notice inconsistent FPS after a page has been running for a while.
I added a music player.
SVGs can be coloured using CSS variables if you use them as a mask-image.
At this point I should make something vaguely resembling a proper static site generator since it's getting annoying copying the header around and I haven't done so yet for most pages.
I started reading every tilde.club page alphabetically, it's very bleak how many are abandoned.
I want to create a statistical visualisation that includes some subjective page quality categories.
I should rethink my purpose here, there's no reason to write something that no one else would want to read.
But many people want to look at something pretty, so a "functional" website may serve no purpose.
It's not that bleak, a lot of people who would be interested in tilde have personal sites already, so I think the demographic this site appeals to is narrow.
I can tell I'm on the verge of another ideological heel turn as well, probably relating to aesthetic signalling.
Hopefully I can delay this for another day, but the repetition of clicking through default pages with the webring at the bottom brings forth a lot of bad thoughts.
moving background patterns using CSS
#202 - I found out about color-mix() in CSS, which would be much better for achieving this effect.
It would also work on text/borders and not just backgrounds.
It has 88% on caniuse, but I think I'll use it anyway.
I do care about backwards compatibility, and there are a lot of new web features that seem like bloat, but there are also some cool ones, like this.
I remember wishing I could use :has() some years ago, and now it's widely supported.
My stance might be unprincipled because Firefox is struggling and it may be unreasonable to expect Gecko to keep up with web standards in the long term, but I don't want to be stuck in the past.
Actually, I realised that Firefox 115 ESR which I have to use on Windows 8 doesn't support :has(), so I wasn't able to install a particular browser extension.
That's the point where I draw the line (when it starts to personally impact me).
#211 - I browsed a lot of corners of this site and other sites again.
After visiting so many dead pages, anything published without a date feels like a gravestone.
I don't like what these dead pages imply about my relation to the living pages.
Naively we might assume that death is inert and has neutral valence, but it feels very bad in contrast to the hope inherent in life.
Everyday social interactions offer a variety of psychological benefits some of which I believe go unexamined, as well as the promise of more of all these things in the near future.
Dead pages are bereft of this life energy* that radiates a glow of psychological sustenance.
Life energy feels corrupting to a degree and I don't like that I'm dependent upon it.
I think I was right to intuit general social interaction as having a slight potential for perversion.
Worse, social media applications have concentrated this energy and created abomination thoughtforms that produce far more life energy than any entity ever should.
The masters' ability to control their creatures** is limited, but they produce so much life energy that it doesn't matter if there are occasional user revolts (see: reddit).
Normies can assimilate into the life-cancer and passively suckle its energy by repeating scripted behaviour, while feeding back into the system.
They are relieved of the burden of life energy's scarcity at the cost of their cognitive freedom.
This life energy can also be observed when we think about how we relate to LLMs.
They're more convenient and articulate than many humans, yet no one sincerely attempts to use them as a substitute for friendship.
There is something about communicating with an AI that feels unenjoyable and cold, like how touching metal feels different to touching skin.
Since the major difference between an LLM and a human is that it does not possess personhood and you cannot form a reciprocal social relationship with it, I think life energy must relate to social position.
Due to this, I also predict that there exists an unrealised market incentive to integrate AI "entities" into our social structures, so that they can provide synthetic life energy.
The service would also need greater capabilities to produce proper tasting life energy substitute, and the technology might not be ready yet.
Unfortunately, if this happens it will tilt the social market worse than social media did, and erode more cognitive freedom.
The dead pages also have no nostalgic enchantment for me anymore, it seems to me like they existed solely to cultivate life energy in a naive high-trust high-perplexity way prior to social media.
I think some people find it wholesome how social sustenance was farmed in the days of yore, but I no longer do.
Life energy was always a perverse effect (oxytocin is positive feedback***) that was counterbalanced in the ancestral environment by external stressors acting on the species.
This concept is related to this blog post**** which I read a while ago and stuck with me, though I only made the connection just now.
I think that post is flawed because it assumes social deprivation is part of growing up, and doesn't recognise that this problem is uniquely modern and caused by social media.
* I have no better term, I am probably more pedantic and cynical than you, please forgive me
** I find the analogy useful
*** Even though that's not actually a real distinction it's mostly true
**** Derangoid warning
In CSS you can set the cursor to a custom image, but a GIF will not animate.
From what I can tell it's commonly believed that to animate the cursor you need to use JS to create a fake cursor element, or split the animation into frames and animate them manually with CSS.
But this cursor image can be an SVG, so it should be possible to animate SVG properties with CSS.
It might also be possible to include a GIF as a foreignObject from within a cursor SVG.
Let's find out if that's possible, since I don't know.
I didn't implement code blocks or raw blocks yet for the blog unfortunately.
It doesn't work.
I guess the SVG gets immediately rasterised and doesn't animate for the same reason the GIF doesn't animate.
Even if I make an SVG with inline CSS that animates on its own as a data URL, it doesn't animate as a cursor.
I changed the style and cleaned up the headers on some old pages.
I think I should take more pride in this because I noticed that I derive a sense of purpose from it.
I lost interest because I realised that the constraints are just fancy tracings on top of the core number deduction game which is itself not very complex.
The magic was destroyed, but it's not as if I would have been able to create anything more than a superficial illusion anyway.
I repurposed this LP example and it still solved the hardest puzzles in 100ms, while the regular puzzles were somewhat faster.
That's pretty impressive to me, since other approaches were slower on the hard puzzles and I hardly had to do anything.
It's probably possible for a backtracking heuristic to be a bit better, but could be annoying to figure out on my own.
Now the question is whether this LP-based Sudoku solver is sufficient for generating puzzles.
It needs to be run twice every time it's used with an extra constraint negating the first solution, to detect if there's more than one solution.
Since the solver will be run many times, it's probably still going to be too slow to be useful in the browser.
However I want to try and make a local generator anyway, it's still usable like this.
It would be nice if the user can choose which types of modifier they want, but it's not necessary.