Tootfinder

After 28 or so years I closed my Amazon Associates account. I long since stopped making any money from it. In the early days I wrote a plugin for a blog engine that used my associates ID by default. I think I made about $200 that way, plus another $50 with my own links. I was never very ambitious about it.

"No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment.
What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds."
Great piece by @…

We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
Twenty years ago, Kevin Kelly wrote an absolutely seminal piece for Wired. This week is a great opportunity to look back at it.

`aria-label` still does not (consistently) translate.
https://adrianroselli.com/2019/11/aria-label-does-not-translate.html#Update07
Unless you only translate never-hidden content, your `aria-label`s never change, your content is an arbitrary subs…

aria-label Does Not Translate
As of my 25 July 2025 update at the end of this post, aria-label auto-translation support is less spotty than when I first wrote this post, but still unreliable. It does, actually. Sometimes. One of the big risks of using ARIA to define text content is that it often gets…

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

For no reason, here’s a piece I wrote in 2018 about the #SupremeCourt for @… on #race,

Travel ban decision follows the Supremes' record of racial classification
(RNS) — The high court’s ruling Tuesday is not surprising. When it comes to welcoming people to America, the court almost never acts for the rights promised in the U.S. Constitution without first denying them.

I just belatedly saw this poignant essay that my friend Atul Singh wrote in May about his emotional experience moving country, and thought it deserved to be much more widely read.
https://www.fairobserver.com/fowednesday/the-pain-of-leaving-your-parents-beh…

Trump said he 'never wrote a picture in my life.' Here are four. (Jonathan Edwards/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/18/trump-epstein-drawings/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzUyODExMjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzU0MTkzNTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NTI4MTEyMDAsImp0aSI6ImQ4MWE4NGY2LWZjODUtNDJhNS1iMjE0LTgzZTZjODVkNDM3NCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9wb2xpdGljcy8yMDI1LzA3LzE4L3RydW1wLWVwc3RlaW4tZHJhd2luZ3MvIn0.d1wWUekAMhhqmz4LBg-YPOZ21L3khXdiCC-iJR3qTWo&itid=gfta
http://www.memeorandum.com/250719/p12#a250719p12

#Orwell wrote about the #JustTransition in 1947 ("Toward European Unity"):
«The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. [...] But it is by no means certain that we can afford these th…

“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women.”
Every contemporary human has drawn at least one picture. So, the 1st part is an exaggeration, like many do/have.
The 2nd part means #Trump no longer, or generally doesn't, draw women. Likely true but doesn't address #WSJ report.

Trump Claims He 'Never Wrote a Picture in My Life.' He Actually Drew Plenty of Them (Charisma Madarang/Rolling Stone)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-denies-epstein-birthday-letter-drawing-1235388615/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250718/p2#a250718p2