Eric Portis

@ericportis.com

1430 Followers 307 Following

Web developer; used-to-be-a-printmaker; Let’s Share What We Know

A screenshot from Cloudfront's documentation, which reads, "If you configure your origin to include any other values in the Vary header, CloudFront removes the values before returning the response to the viewer"
A world map labelled "TTFB by country". The Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australia/New Zealand are all green. The rest of Asia is Orange, and Africa is mostly gray (not enough data), with orange spots.
A older pocket pitbull in a sweater, at the vet.
The word "AMBIVALENCE" set in all caps. Screencap from a Neon Genesis Evangelion title card.
Conference stage, Scott’s GitHub PR on the big screen
A sketch of two switches. The one on the right is normal and has two stops: "Flicker" and "Slider". The one on the right is a triforce with an inverted triangle inside of a larger triangle. The larger triangle's points are labelled, "Original" at the top, and "A"and "B" at the bottom. The switch is currently set to the halfway point betwen "Original" and "B". One is to understand that with these hypothetical settings, the image comparison tool would be flickering between an original image, and some compressed version of it, "B"
King of the Hill clip where Hank says, "Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a goddang hot dog."
A young white and brown young crawling towards the camera, on a couch. He is very cute.
The concept of a "picture element" dates to the earliest days of television, for example as "Bildpunkt" (the German word for pixel, literally 'picture point') in the 1888 German patent of Paul Nipkow. According to various etymologies, the earliest publication of the term picture element itself was in Wireless World magazine in 1927, though it had been used earlier in various U.S. patents filed as early as 1911.
Color matching functions are mathematical representations of the sensitivity of the human eye to visible light, characterizing how humans perceive color. Apple has developed Apple CMF 2026 to address the limitations of the CIE 1931 CMF, and Studio Display XDR is the first Apple display to support it. Apple CMF 2026 represents a fundamental improvement in how displays are measured and calibrated, addressing systematic appearance mismatches that have persisted throughout the industry. Apple is engaged in standardization efforts through the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) to develop and define an industry-wide standard, improving visual consistency regardless of which manufacturer's display a customer is viewing.
Scan from an old typeset paper. It reads, Explanation ov a New Formula for Interpolation. By T. B. Sprague, M.A., Manager ov the Scottish Equitable Life Assurance Society. When a series ov quantitys proceed by a regular law, ther is no difficulty in interpolating between each ajacent two ov them any number ov terms with any desired degree ov accuracy.
Screenshot of the bsky.app posting interface. I am trying to post a reply that says "surely you have considered the Very Tall Image". But there's an error: "Failed to execute createImageData on CanvasRenderingContext2D: the source width is zero or not a number.
Forty six crumpled dollars sitting on a table
TRADE OFFER meme. A smarmy looking man in a cheap suit in terrible lighting tents his fingers, looking smarmy. "i receive: WebKit sizes=auto implementation; you receive: [checks pockets] $46"
Screenshot from the article. Highlighted text reads, “ the catalyst for this week’s sell-off was the release Tuesday by Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence firm, of free plug-in software tools that allow companies to automate functions like customer support and legal services”
A screenshot of the browser dev console, where I have queried for the number of <td> elements on the page. The result is: 1,236.
Benchmark results in Chrome (on the left) and Safari (on the right). Chrome's median decode time is 94.25ms, and Safari's is 48ms.
Three crudely-decorated "gingerbread man"-shaped cookies. The first resembles Spiderman, the second, Mario (kind of) and the last one has a generic smiley face, three star buttons, and a red outline. They are placed on a plate which has lots of stray dabs and splotches of frosting.
A low-res photo of Bruce's face crudely photoshopped onto the famous photo of Michael Jordan crying on the NBA championship trophy
A screenshot of the website where the photo was taken open in a browser. The devtools are open, and the alt text on the <img> element in the "Elements" tab is circled.
A screenshot of the <img sizes=auto> results, with the negative results hovered, revealing a tooltip reading, "76 respondents (1.6%) had a Negative sentiment."
Three responses are screenshotted. They say, "Awfully confusing syntax", "I never get these numbers right first time. Really hard to pick for truly responsive pages e.g. where the image size flexes with the page width." and "i still need to read the docs everytime I need to use this feature, the API is not intuitive at all"
A panel from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics". A series of faces lines the top, going from a photograph of a man's face (captioned "one"), through progressively cartoony illustrations of that face (captioned—"a few"—"thousands"—and "millions"), to a circle face with two dot eyes and a line for a mouth (captioned "nearly all"). Narrator Scott says, "Another is the Universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe."
3D dancing baby, from the 90s meme. The baby is dancing.
Still of The Sweedish Chef (the muppet), behind a table with various cooking implements, mouth agape, steam coming out of his ears
Screenshot of a paragraph from the article. It reads, "I pushed back and proposed alternatives and compromised and proposed alternatives and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and finally gave up; and those were only my attempts to push back. Others also pushed back and pushed back and asked for a pause and pushed back and pushed back and recanted their earlier support and pushed back and asked for a pause and asked for a pause and pushed back." Every action described in the paragraph (e.g., "pushed back", "asked for a pause") is a hyperlink, linking to the discussion in question.
Google maps showing 1d 6h drive time between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Bellingham, Washington
Six large jars and one medium jar of prunes on a kitchen table. There are some lovely dahlias in the background.
Giant printed tarp above a vendor's stall with giant photos of various fried foods
A green cabbage turned into a head (kinda like a snowman's head), with grapes for mouth, potatoes for ears, berries for eyes, and something orange as a nose
A 30" zucchini propped up in a corner on a shelf, behind a tall houseplant.
Screenshot of the updated blog post, showing off syntax highlighting
View through some binoculars. There's a big black circle with a sunset landscape in it. Some hazy islands and water in the foreground, the sky behind them goes from red to orange to yellow to blue in the back. And what's that... just barely... is it a mountain? in the haze? Maybe!
Cropped image of the international date line snaking through the pacific. It's kind of wiggly but there is a large sideways T shape that comes out of the "western" half, meaning there are large sections of the "eastern" half that are both east of the main body of the western half, but also west of the top bar of the T.
Screenshot of a quote from my dumb face. "A lot of folks in tech spend their careers build enormous (and enormously intimidating) walls of complexity. Mat's made his career out of smashing those walls: breaking 'em down with clarity and concision and making sure everything he puts into the world is inclusive, approachable, and, frankly – fun."
A print on paper. A 4x4 grid of square three-color botanical designs takes up the top half. The bottom half is a calligraph-ied recipe for YOGHOURT CREPES. The recipe is kinda hard to read; I'll note it involves cognac.
A snail on the side of a car, completely retracted into their shell
A snail on the side of a car in a parking lot.
A screenshot from the piece. "We asked for the slightest of changes, to just cover sports, sports related issues, as well as sports adjacent stories. That was preceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse."
An illustration of a flag. Upon the flag is a pint glass of fizzy water, with a superscript numeral 2 next to it. Beneath it is the contents of the footnote, "2: COME AND TAKE THEM"
A stock illustration, heavily watermarked "Adobe iStock". In stately, comosed serifs and soft, heartfelt script, it wishes, "Our deepest condolences to you and your family" in light shining type on a dark navy blue background.
ChatGPT's answer to the question "What are the best beaches in Sicily". We can see the number one beach, "San Vitro Lo Campo", which is apparently "Famous for its soft white sand and turquoise waters", but mostly what we see is whitespace, stark/minimal sans-serif type on white, no ads, nothing but words.
Chrome open to a test page. We click a green square, which triggers a view transition back and forth between two pages where it gets bigger and smaller. It's green the whole time, and there is a one-second delay every time we click. Then we click "Emulate prefers-reduced-motion: reduce" in the DevTools. Now, when we click the square, the new page loads instantly, with no transition, and the new square is red. One second later, it becomes green. This indicates we're not render-blocking on the script execution.
A script element that creates and attaches another script element, viewed in Safari's dev tools. We can see that it worked, the second script element is below it.
An old-timey, worn, sepia baseball card. A mustached ballsman stands in an awkwardly rigid pose to catch an incoming ball, apparently with his bare hands. Nothing about the pose suggests action. Underneath his name/position/team are inscribed "Hanlon, C.F., Detroits". Above him is a sponsored inscription from "Old Judge Cigarettes". The image has been annotated with three handwritten labels; the ball is "A11y requirements"; the player trying to catch the ball is "You"; around the player's bare hands is a dashed outline of a glove, suggesting that it is missing or invisible/insubstantial, and the annotation "Overlay".
But let’s be honest: we proved that you can’t build a sustainable platform around helping people create rather than consume—at least not in today’s internet economy. The math just doesn’t work when hosting costs real money and creative tools don’t generate the kind of engagement that sells ads or subscriptions.
A screenshot of the Chrome Dev Tools. The JS is loaded in a disorderly fashion; many JS requests are starting very late, only after previous ones have finished, and the last .js request doesn't finish until 1.2 seconds.
A screenshot of a Safari window open to a Stack Exchange page. The page is largely obscured by two giant popups, one asking for cookie consent and the other asking me to use my Google Account to sign in.
A screenshot of a terminal. I have run the `uptime` command, which reports that this machine has not rebooted for 22 days, 22 hours, and 25 minutes.
Wikipedia screenshot, reading "His native language is presumed to have been a Genoese dialect (Ligurian) as his first language, though Columbus probably never wrote in it. His name in 15th-century Genoese was Cristoffa Corombo, in ltalian, Cristoforo Colombo, and in Spanish Cristobal Colon"
Paint just slowly enough? The specs also try to give authors tools to tell the browser a bare-minimum amount of HTML, CSS, and JS that’s needed to paint the initial viewport, but that's incredibly hard to do well. I fully expect everybody who wants to use View Transitions — especially toolmakers and template/component authors who don’t know much about the content they’re working with or the context they’re working in — will simply slap blocking=render onto everything.
A featureless avatar stands infront of a web browser window floating in a Vision Pro-like 3D space. The web browser is showing a page about "Krakow's bed" and includes a photo of a bed in a room. Slowly, the space behind the browser window fills with a 3D version of the room with the bed, which is much bigger, richer, and of course more dimensional than the 2D photo presented in the browser window.
Scrolling Instagram on an iPhone. The last photo is blindingly bright.
Screenshot of a blockquote on a website. The quoted text reads: "This is the secret of perfection: When raw wood is carved, it becomes a tool; [...] The perfect carpenter leaves no wood to be carved." — 27. Perfection, Tao Te Ching. There is also a tooltip visible, containing this additional quote: "Those who carve wood in place of a carpenter / Often injure their hands" — Tao Te Ching, 74 Execution
Screenshot from Apple's compare page. 13.3" M1 has a "Retina display" while the 14.2" and 16.2" MBPs have a "Liquid Retina XDR display"
A math scratchpad. We start with the inputs from the MacRumors article (max'd out M3 Ultra can output 18 tokens per second while consuming 200 Watts) and add in some other inputs (LLMs use ~1.3 tokens per word, and an AA battery contains 2500 Milliamp-hours at 1.5 Volts). Multiply and divide some things and we get to: the M3 Mac Studio Ultra burns an AA battery’s worth of energy for every 935 words it writes.
A table of results, showing eight images from the cloudinary.com home page, and how many kilobytes the JXL vs AVIF versions weigh. The totals are 294Kb for JXLs and 182Kb for the AVIFs - so the AVIFs are 62% as big as the JXLs. The "best" performing AVIF is only 22% the size of the JXL - "Background_2toneBlue-home" weighs 67Kb as a JXL and only 15KB as an AVIF.
A Bluesky post from Manton Reese, where the first words are a blue hyperlink with the text, "Anna Rodrigues blogs".
Phone screenshot of a map in an earthquake app. The blue “my location” dot is right next to a giant orange circle labeled “4.5”
Screenshot of a label the tool gave me: "Reply Guy"