Ben Schwarz
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benschwarz.bsky.social
Ben Schwarz
@benschwarz.bsky.social
3.2K followers 170 following 780 posts
Founder & Product developer @ calibreapp.com. Into sustainability, online privacy, cycling, photography, music, hiking, native country and creative pursuits 🌞
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benschwarz.bsky.social
Ben Schwarz @benschwarz.bsky.social · Apr 29
🆕 Core Web Vitals test tool update:

Now you can view up to 40 weeks (~9 months) of metrics for your sites.

Data fetched **fresh daily** from Google directly.

Enter URL, get a free #webperf dashboard 👇
calibreapp.com/tools/core-web-vitals-test
Screenshot of Calibre's free Core web vitals test tool. Largest Contentful Paint metric is displayed for calibreapp.com, observed at 2.13 seconds.
benschwarz.bsky.social
The Bureau of Meteorology (AU)'s new website cost $96.5m and performs slightly worse than the old one.

LCP & CLS both degraded.

calibreapp.com/tools/core-w...
calibreapp.com
December 1, 2025 at 6:42 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
The existence of cheese and the reality of cholesterol is proof god was a hater
December 1, 2025 at 4:41 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Why does black friday go for a month now?
November 28, 2025 at 12:13 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Yesterday I saw a marketing website for an AI product, on Firefox it CONSTANTLY re-rendered with full page content flashes — totally unable to be read or navigated.

I loaded it in Chrome and it didn’t happen at all.

useEffect bug.

“Yep, thought so.” Close tab.
November 27, 2025 at 11:22 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Spent the weekend down the coast with a few lads 💆‍♂️
Photograph of Victorian coastline, shrubs in the foreground, surfers below
November 25, 2025 at 11:56 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
We choose to deploy on a Friday and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
November 21, 2025 at 12:33 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
The AI boys on LinkedIn are really into TOON (a data format for naughty, silly little boys), which more efficient than JSON

An X post screenshotted a CSV, calling it “VSC”, an “EVEN BETTER” data format and they ate it up. Remarkable. These are not serious people.

xcancel.com/IceSolst/sta...
xcancel.com
November 18, 2025 at 8:58 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
🎧 This week in interesting websites:

LiveATC allows you to listen to LIVE audio from airport control towers, approach and departure from airports around the world.

Here's Haneda (HND, Tokyo) airport:

www.liveatc.net/search/?icao...
Airport Detail: RJTT | LiveATC.net
All Content Copyright© 2002-2025, LiveATC.net LLC, All Rights Reserved. Audio streams may not be used in any third-party products. LiveATC.net is not affiliated with the FAA or any other aviation authority.
www.liveatc.net
November 18, 2025 at 1:00 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Shoutout to all the boys who try to peddle “tech isn’t political”, nice try fuckos
benschwarz.bsky.social Ben Schwarz @benschwarz.bsky.social · 18d
Powerful page outlining how US fascist tech are using government funding to solidify their backing.

This is a regime that wants control, with violence, where necessary.

www.authoritarian-stack.info
The Authoritarian Stack
How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next
www.authoritarian-stack.info
November 13, 2025 at 7:47 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Powerful page outlining how US fascist tech are using government funding to solidify their backing.

This is a regime that wants control, with violence, where necessary.

www.authoritarian-stack.info
The Authoritarian Stack
How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next
www.authoritarian-stack.info
November 13, 2025 at 7:46 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
If AI is so great and clever why are people inventing new shitty data formats for it?

You’ve got all the compute power in the world and you can’t read json? lol, lmao even
November 12, 2025 at 6:17 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Reminder: SoftBank invested $4.4 billion dollars into WeWork 🤡
international.cnbc.com CNBC International @international.cnbc.com · 20d
Japanese giant SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in tech giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion.

Click here to read more: https://cnb.cx/49LCIs8
November 11, 2025 at 10:34 PM
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
antfu.me
My first advice to junior contributors is to STOP using vibe coding for PRs. OSS is always about people more than about code. We don't need more code generated by LLM, we need more people who care.
November 10, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
joseph.likesdogs.nz
6 years ago I started a side project to build a web accessibility tool that prioritises simple reporting and quick feedback loops so that teams can fix a11y regressions before they affect users.

I am so proud to say that side project is now finished, and A11y Pulse is live.

www.a11ypulse.com
A11y Pulse
A11y Pulse: Automated accessibility testing for your website. Improve your site's accessibility and compliance with ease.
www.a11ypulse.com
November 7, 2025 at 10:22 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
I’m not sure if impressed or concerned, maybe some of both:

Not handing over your passwords to federal police can result in jail time of 10 years. Ahhh the colonies
joshtaylor.bsky.social Josh Taylor @joshtaylor.bsky.social · Oct 29
Kind of an interesting story of the AFP cracking into a crypto wallet from the new commissioner today, after discovering random numbers in the notes app www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/...
During a protracted investigation, the AFP identified a well-connected alleged criminal, who we suspected had stockpiled cryptocurrency from selling a tech-type product to alleged criminals around the world. The accused criminal is incredibly bright, in his early 30s, but he was certainly no alleged Gucci gangster given he lived a frugal life while living with his mum and dad. During a search warrant at the alleged offender’s home, our digital forensic team identified password protected notes on his mobile phone. Our members accessed the notes on his phone and found an image on his device displaying random numbers and words. The numbers were divided into groups of six and there were more than 50 variations of the number groups. Our digital forensics team determined it could be related to a crypto wallet – but the accused allegedly refused to hand over his passwords for his crypto wallet, which is a Commonwealth offence that carries a penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. We knew if we couldn’t open the crypto wallet, and if the alleged offender was sentenced, upon release he would leave prison a multi-millionaire – all from the profits of organised crime. For our members, that was not an acceptable outcome. So, the task was assigned to one of our unassuming yet incredibly talented data scientists, who kept looking and looking at the number sequences. He knew something was not right. And then he had one of those scientific epiphanies. He realised the alleged offender had tried to create a crypto booby prize in how the numbers were presented. Our data scientist then removed the first number of each number sequence and then was able to decode the right sequence of numbers into a 24-word recovery seed phrase. That opened the wallet, which had a whopping $9 million. “What made you think to remove the first number of each number sequence?” His supervisor asked. He replied that some of the number strings felt wrong and they looked like they were not computer generated. He said they looked like a human had modified the sequence by adding numbers to the front of some sequences. How amazing is that? And it was not a one-off for this member. He recently did it again with another wallet, using different methodology, recovering more than $3 million in crypto.
October 29, 2025 at 3:09 AM
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
asauthors.bsky.social
The ASA welcomes the Albanese Government’s decision to rule out a Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception to Australian copyright law, which would have allowed for AI training on authors’ work.

aapnews.aap.com.au/news/copyrig...
Copyright laws to protect creatives from AI data mining
Tech developers will not have a "free pass" to use creative works to train AI systems, but advocates say more protections are needed against copyright theft.
aapnews.aap.com.au
October 26, 2025 at 10:43 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
I watch a lot of open source projects’ issues on GitHub.

On a regular occurrence, maintainers are politely asking “could you please disclose if you used LLM to generate this PR”.

This is the polite and exhausting way to say “this looks like incomprehensible bullshit, why are you wasting our time?”
October 25, 2025 at 3:58 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Any boss that says 'no politics at work' almost certainly has shitty beliefs and will create space for their own politics. Seen it play out too many times to believe otherwise.
October 23, 2025 at 11:03 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
I guarantee we’ll see lots of untested, shoddily implemented ARIA as a result of this. Because they’ll use LLMs to implement it.
simonwillison.net Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · Oct 21
It's neat to see them encourage developers to add ARIA tags to pages though, an "agent" can be thought of as effectively another form of assistive technology
There was one other detail in the announcement post that caught my eye: Website owners can also add ARIA tags to improve how ChatGPT agent works for their websites in Atlas. Which links to this: ChatGPT Atlas uses ARIA tags---the same labels and roles that support screen readers---to interpret page structure and interactive elements. To improve compatibility, follow WAI-ARIA best practices by adding descriptive roles, labels, and states to interactive elements like buttons, menus, and forms. This helps ChatGPT recognize what each element does and interact with your site more accurately. A neat reminder that AI "agents" share many of the characteristics of assistive technologies, and benefit from the same affordances.
October 21, 2025 at 10:37 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
Time to crank out the ol' us-east-1 ouija board
October 20, 2025 at 11:15 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
“AI artist” is mad because someone took the phrase, “day to night transition” FROM HIM and generated an image based on stolen content.

Apparently this constitutes as intellectual property theft. Someone call the cops, this child is upset.
Screenshot of https://xcancel.com/Artedeingenio/status/1978782755195392239
October 18, 2025 at 9:19 PM
benschwarz.bsky.social
October 17, 2025 at 11:29 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
If you want to drive a car that makes more than 70dB of tailpipe exhaust noise, you have to pay a monthly premium levy to the local EPA, and you aren't allowed to drive it between 10pm and 7am.
zachweinersmith.bsky.social Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · Oct 16
Do you have any extremely niche, but serious, ethical stances?
October 17, 2025 at 3:25 AM
benschwarz.bsky.social
I see a lot of people discovered the <output> tag for the first time this week.

My question is: why are you excited by it? I really can’t think of a pattern where it would be actively useful? It seems too limited to be valuable.
October 17, 2025 at 3:11 AM
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
benschwarz.bsky.social
My take is that either Next.js doesn't make it easy enough to create sites that perform well, or it's just not good technology.

Having used Next.js for several years (along side lots of other frameworks), and being super experienced in this area, I can tell you:

It isn't a good framework.
October 17, 2025 at 12:25 AM