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Right? Let's just keep this list as a list of people who should never hold office, or work in law enforcement ever again once Trump goes.

"Leaks" like this should just be a FoIA request. Anyone enforcing the law should have their face, and badge number, prominently shown at all times.

That's how we show that we aren't ashamed of our laws. Any time it takes a mask to do your job... you know you're doing something you ought not be doing.

So you make a bid for a website that asked for responsive design, and you tell them it’s gonna be a certain amount of money for the base set up and then an additional 20% of base for each of the additional sizes —- and that budget really just goes to testing for the most part.

And you watch how fast “responsive and accessible” from the RFP turns into, “Well let’s just support desktop and one phone screen size and we won’t bother to even spend 1 hour testing tablet or 4K or horizontal on any device or printed versions.” Clients just want low prices. Printed is always the first to get removed by clients.

I will say, I liked Drupal more than I expected to the last time I used it. But... it's still Drupal.

It feels dated. Even the "new" designs they're rolling out still feel old. They're working with a dated design system, and honestly, it feels like they had developers build it without bringing actual designers into the process. The result is always functional, but somehow a little awkward. Not unified. There's still like 3-4 different ways to do the same sorts of actions depending on where you are. It's clumsy. It's Drupal!

And true to its roots, Drupal still requires way too many third-party modules to get a build working the way I want. Half of those don't even have the "new" design system applied. So even for a CMS that cares about WCAG, they're still falling short. I'm not sure they'll ever get all the open-source developers on the same page. (I know they have a stated goal of 2027... I don't see it happening.)

More broadly, I don't have much confidence that Drupal modules will be maintained beyond a version or two. That makes anything you build on top of them inherently disposable. Which is fine; a lot of the web is disposable. But it also means I don't want to take ownership of long-term maintenance for projects built on Drupal.

Every time I have to install a third-party module in Drupal, I cringe a little. I know that two or three years down the road, when a new major version comes out, I'll be hunting down the guy who wrote the module, hoping he'll update it. Otherwise, we're forking his repo and taking responsibility for maintaining it and applying security patches ourselves. Cringe.

Meanwhile, I've really enjoyed working with Contentful, Directus, and even Statamic. There are a lot of great CMS options out there these days.

One platform I'd actively warn people away from, though, is Strapi. I've had two false starts with projects where people wanted to use it, only to run into some fundamental flaws.

Like, "Oh, you want to associate one of your 10,000 files with this page? Sure, we'll put them all in a dropdown for you to sift through... and that'll make pages take 2 minutes to load." Cringe. Run. (Ha, wait... and the whole, "We are in France, so we don't answer support emails in August." Literally what their support email told me. Yikes.)

In the last five years, Strapi is the only CMS I've built with that I just couldn't get behind on any level. I would have rather used Drupal for those projects. Ha!

I don’t know…

I’m really enjoying the software factories that I’ve built lately.

You can tell me they’re a waste of time, but man are they ever good at what I need them for.

And it’s keeping all my code standardized, and all my repositories running the same way… I’m really enjoying working with them.

Without them, AI just sort of solves the problem anyway it wants to in any given moment. Things get really chaotic.

I basically just use them to enforce standards and consistency between similar projects.

Tools like this are so amazing because they allow Claude to edit and draw and save to a single markdown file. So practical! Version control friendly. People can use them, sure. Buy AI can really take off with tools like this.

It is not sexy enough.

It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.

Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.

So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.

And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.

Man, I just want Discord to have the ability to do overlays on Mac like it can on PC so I can see who is talking when I’m playing video games. Where is that API update?

Something I noticed today...

Fired up Reddit app on my phone and here's what I saw:

1 - Post from Subreddit I subscribe to.

2 - Post from Subreddit that Reddit promoted into my feed. Not really anything I'd be interested in.

3 - Non-targeted Advertisement. (Literally an ad about some kind of medication I think, I didn't click.)

4 - Post from Subreddit that Reddit promoted into my feed. Not really anything I'd be interested in.

5 - Post from Subreddit I subscribe to.

6 - Non-targeted Advertisement.

The pattern went on that way; every 3 posts was an ad. And fully half of the posts were from Subreddit I don't follow.

1/3 ads. 1/3 content I didn't want. 1/3 content I wanted.

I think that may be the end of Reddit for me. I don't really get a lot out of it before, and I get dramatically less when they force feed shit I don't want into my feed. What even is the point of subscribing to feeds if they're just going to put slop in that you don't subscribe to?

Also, I swore you used to be able to opt out of the feed promotions, and I swore I had those disabled, but today I can't find the settings to disable them. Cool. Cool cool cool.

In honor of the way we talked on Reddit... fuck u/spez!

My lawyer made a lot of money.

Look, without going into all the details... the contract the insurance company had pressured me to sign quickly so the contractor could start ("We don't want to lose them! It's so hard to find a contractor during the pandemic!") had a clause in it that said the contractor wasn't responsible for damages to my property caused by their crews.

So the 40-foot tree they killed by dumping all their paint thinner on the roots, or the paint splatter they got all over my fireplace using it as a mixing station, or the foundation that they cracked by breaking three tension cables while doing exploratory surgery trying to install a better drain in the laundry room (so the flood wouldn't happen again), or the electrical circuits they cut and put drywall over to hide the old plugs, or all the tools my grandfather left me that they stole... or the... look, the non-cosmetic issues in my counterclaim filled over 80 pages of a lawsuit, without photos. It was extensive, documented damage they did to my house.

Anyway, the contract also called for mandatory binding arbitration. So we went in, and the mediator was like, "OK, tossing all your claims. Great, now that those are tossed, pay them for their work."

The mediator said, "Look, we have to give the benefit of the doubt to these hard-working men who came to your aid in your hour of need. Was the job done right? Maybe not, but they were the ones you chose to hire. You can choose anyone, and you picked them and signed their contract."

Oof.

I had a video of them dumping paint thinner at the base of my tree, they did it 5x in one day. I had videos of all of it. I had soil samples showing the tree died from paint thinner being dumped on it. The mediator was like, "It's not relevant because of your contract, but I'll humor you... Yes, you have videos but we can't tell what they are dumping. Yes, you have a soil sample, but how do we know you didn't just do this to your own tree?" It was just so surreal.

It was a large company, more like a loose network of contractors that sub-sub-subcontract everything. The lack of accountability was a huge problem since there had been over 160 people in my home, plumbers, carpenters, tile guys, etc. over the span of the construction, and even though I had cameras it was on me to prove the people worked for the parent company I was in a lawsuit with and not just random people I had let into my house... "How do we know these problems were caused by XYZ company's staff or contractors?" And I'd have to be like, "You think I hired my own painters? I wasn't trying to a parallel remodel project... everyone was their guys..." But it was on me to prove and I didn't have IDs or full names fro 95% of them.

Anyway, I also found out afterward that the mediator was a retired judge who had done literally nothing but cases for them for the last two-plus years before my case. The contract called for them to be able to pick two or three mediators, and we could then pick one from their list... but the fact that one mediator was able to stay employed doing nothing but cases for this one giant insurance/contractor organization... well, I couldn't help but feel like they knew where their bread was buttered. =P

Anyway, I had to pay all my cost of living for 2+ years while not living in my house. I had to pay for my lawyer and all the experts I had hired to build my case. Since I lost the mediation, I had to pay for their lawyer. I had to pay them for the shoddy work they did, as well as a very high late penalty. This is where it gets super shady too, in that my insurance company mandated I use someone from that network, and the contract said I had to pay my deductible, and 50% up front and 50% on completion. Fair.

But it came out in mediation that the insurance company paid this contractor 100% up front. So that took all their motivation away from fixing my house and let them drag it out almost three years.

Also, I was like, "So if insurance paid you all up front... why are you demanding 50% of the remainder of the contract? And tell me again, why won't insurance cover that?"

I never got a great answer, but I was told by my insurance company they wouldn't reimburse me for the final amount because the work wasn't "done." I don't know. I asked my lawyer, and she was like, "Yeah, you signed the contract, so you're on the hook. Insurance doesn't have to pay you the remainder of the claim, especially if you don't 'finish' the work."

Feels like the contractor either got paid twice, or likely got paid up front and then, once they got my money, were able to reimburse the insurance company... who was, in truth, their real client. They had some sort of collusion going on the whole time. Insurance companies should not be allowed to own, or partner with, any contractors they recommend. It's all so dirty.

Oh, and, "Why didn't I have a better lawyer?" you ask... Well, I had to go through over 50 in my area just to find one that would take my case. Any firm I wanted to hire gave me a polite decline, "Sorry, we're not taking on new clients." A friend of mine was a lawyer in another state, he said, "They probably all have consulted with the parent company, or want to, so they are declining due to conflict of interest." Then, just to add some bad luck, my original lawyer had a heart attack and had to pawn me off on to another firm last minute. I don't know, the first first wasn't very good either, but the second really didn't care.

And... "Why didn't you go to court?" Well yeah, I could have walked from mediation... certainly couldn't have done worse than I did at mediation. But my lawyer said, "If you want to take this to trial, you'll need to give me a retainer in the $150k range, and it'll likely be 2-3 years before the case is heard, and you will be required to document the state of the house monthly and not move back in until this is all over..." And she ended with, "And,as much as you want to fight this... you're going to get the same result due to this contract in court that you'd get here. Cut your losses and move on." God bless the Texas legal system.

All of it felt crooked, man. It's not good for my rage levels to think about this. Ha. Live and learn, but insurance companies and especially their contractors are shady people. Out to screw you any way they can.

100% this, and I thought, "They'll fix this in 27.0.1, they have to..." Nope, still a mess.

How does this get by testing? Like it's a great feature, and it's just broken now. All the things you said, and half the time when I bring up virtual desktops various windows freeze the original size and can't be moved to a new desktop. Plus, when I resize a window, all of the virtual desktops lose their preview thumbnails, so I can't tell what's running where. It's just so maddening. And worse by the fact that they waited what a week to do a "hotfix" OS release and still didn't bother to fix this.

Edit: A few versions ago they finally got Spaces working correctly for people with multiple monitors. It was a buggy mess since launch as soon as you had 2-3 monitors. And I get it... Apple has always hated anyone who plugged in a few monitors at once -- wanting to get work done isn't cool enough for them. =P

But yeah now it doesn't even work right on one monitor.

Man... I know this post will have some real "angry old man shaking his fists at the clouds" energy, but this latest OS update, even 27.0.1, is just so freakin' janky.

Spaces... the windows don't layer right. So I can't always move them to a new space. When I bring up the various desktops, some windows just freeze at the original size and refuse to move.

Similarly, the desktop previews for other desktops don't work. They start out working, but as soon as I resize a window, the previews in the virtual desktops go blank, so I can't see which desktops have files and applications running.

Also, probably the most annoying, my laptop (M4 Max MBP) battery life is just gone from what it was a week ago. It used to last a day; now it's maybe 4 hours -- I've noticed the fan is on a lot more which is likely the cause.

The laptop went from always being quiet, cool, to being warm when I pick it up.

And yeah, I've tuned all the settings, fixed what I could, but Spaces and virtual desktops are just broke.

As someone who has been using virtual desktops for as long as Apple has had this feature... man, it's just a total drain on productivity to try and shoehorn everything into one desktop. I hate it. Might as well be using a computer that isn't my own.

And as someone who has used Mac for 40 years at this point... I'm just not used to Apple breaking this much. They were sticklers for detail, and that's why I love their products. But this latest OS feels untested. Do they only care about users using one application at a time? Feels like they just gave up on advanced users. Anyone running Spaces / virtual desktops would have noticed all these bugs.

The last OS added a ton of bullshit transparent glitter; this one broke how I use my computer. It sucks knowing that even Apple can't get things right today. Flat out just sucks.

Wish I could just roll back. Left waiting for them to maybe, hopefully, someday put in a patch to fix all the stuff they just broke. Just maddening.