Thoughts on the election of Joe Biden. First, let’s admit it’s pretty amazing that Biden won. If you look historically at US Presidential elections all the forces were tilted toward a Trump win: Trump was an incumbent, which is a huge advantage. The economy was doing good. We had a national catastrophe (Covid) and Americans traditionally rally around the President when faced with such adversity, just think of Bush’s rise in popularity after the 9-11 attacks.

Some random thoughts before the final day of voting in the 2020 US Presidential election: At least now more people realize the importance of politics. “How bad could it be?” may have gotten him into the office, but “Oh, that bad!” will probably remove him. The press, at least the legitimate press, like CNN and the NYTimes, finally overcame their crippling addiction to falling for every single Trump troll.

Here are two great talks by Google engineers on dealing with large sets of data and how they can be used to improve your product. The first is a talk by Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: The point of the talk is that having more data is better than having a more clever algorithm. And you can see this in action in this second talk by Douglas Merrill.

This is a reminder from the running-just-to-stay-in-the-same-place department that if you run a blog you probably want to set a Referrer-Policy header: Referrer-Policy: unsafe-url Chrome MDN This notice brought to you by the “What broke my webmention implementation this time?” department.

We need to talk about Shadow DOM. While the Google official docs strongly encourage the use of Shadow DOM, I quite strongly disagree. As an example, a couple weeks ago I realized I could style the <summary> part of a <details><summary> set of elements as a button, which would look great and more readily indicate its function. You can see the improvement here: Before: After: Thankfully I hadn’t swallowed the party-line on Shadown DOM and this is the full set of CSS changes I had to make, just the following additions: