Brandon Dail
@brandondail.com
Staff Engineer at Discord working on Design Systems, Accessibility, Other Stuff™️ Collage & generative plotter artist 👋
In my audits, reading the Performance profile is where people get stuck: the flame chart and waterfall look like noise at first I built an interactive guide to make them click, every figure is interactive, plus LCP, CLS, INP and the Insights panel perf.reviews/profile-guide #WebPerf #DevTools
Reading a Performance Profile: Field Guide
An interactive field guide to the Chrome DevTools Performance panel: waterfall, flame chart, LCP, CLS, INP, and the Insights panel.
perf.reviews
It's a shame that generative image models have pursued realism so relentlessly. Reproducing training data is uninteresting and exploitative. The imperfections of early models were genuinely interesting, and will end up being the most artistically interesting artifact of all this in the long term
I’m on sabbatical this month, and I’ve been using some of my time to dust off my plotter and get back into my art. This is a CMYK print that’s using a custom algorithm based on waves and circles to layer the colors. Stopped half way through because I liked the vibes ✨
Feels like strongly typed compile-to-JS languages like Reason deserve a resurgence with LLMs. Biggest barrier was learning the new language, which has been heavily reduced, and a fast and strict type system is very valuable for agents
I appreciate that @github.com wants to give me recognition for all this work, but I'd be reticent to take credit for all 21 million open pull requests
There are two main startup tasks for @discord.com: 1. Fetch and run all the JavaScript 2. Open a socket and get your data from the gateway Those were happening sequentially; now they are parallel! This improved P50 TTI by like 12%, over a second for many folks 📉 discord.com/blog/discord...
finally the justification I needed to get back to arguing with people on the internet
madeline odent@oldenoughtosay.com · 6mo agoThe drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there
whoever at Google owns fanout-testing@google.com Google Group, I don't think you meant to send that message 🙈
Here's your friendly reminder that CSS selectors are global and evaluated RTL, so if you have selectors that are very broad like `.container > div` you might be impacting performance in a measurable way 🙈 Before and after profile of server switching after some selector optimizations in @discord.com
Ex-farm worker here. We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing. Not true AT ALL. Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are. The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour. At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.
If you’re a React Native expert and want to help us make @discord.com better, hit me up 🤙 we’re looking!
we (@discord.com) rewrote our color token system to support these new themes, and its exciting 👀 in short: color tokens are defined using a constraint-based system where colors are defined with contrast ratios. change a base color and all affected tokens update in all themes, preserving contrast ✨
Revamped Overlay & Refreshed Desktop Give Game Time a Boost
We’re releasing a new and improved version of the Game Overlay, along with a refreshed desktop app so you can further customize Discord to your style.
discord.com
Whoever did the lighting in Kingdom Come II deserves whatever the award for really good lighting is
my wife said “I think they can make a comeback” two seconds before that last interception. Sorry about that (or you’re welcome)
Somehow "Elon Musk Is a Genius" and "Elon Musk Doesn't Know How Hands Work" are being said by a lot of the same people
hearing a lot of good things about TikTok recently, downloading it to see what all the fuss is about 🙏
[as the Xenomorph extends its inner jaw to kill me]: oooooo big stretch!
In the meantime, as a reader: don’t trust any articles attributed to “staff,” and don’t trust any articles that don’t include quotes from scientists completely uninvolved in the original publication. Science is a gradual, meandering, back and forth process; sometimes we have to let it play out.
Which brings us to the scicomm point: we gotta get better at distinguishing between “here’s someone’s speculative idea that they just published” and “here’s a new discovery.” This is the former.
What does it mean for something to be Turing complete? I answer this question, and more, through a series of fully interactive Turing machine simulations! Play, pause, step forwards and backwards, and even write your own Turing machine programs in my latest blog post. samwho.dev/turing-machi...
the worst part about being a parent is that even the most cookie-cutter, clichéd story can make you cry if it happens to be about kids or parenting it’s like a cheat code the world uses on you that you can’t disable
is there any existing research on what the best contrast ratio for readability is? WCAG gives a lower bound but there’s also such a thing as too much contrast so I’m curious if there’s been any formal studies on where the sweet spot is
I try to be as honest as I can with my kids, and sometimes that’s hard to reconcile with the fact that we as a society have decided to collectively lie about a magical, immortal old man who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake
