Welcome to Thudfactor
Thudfactor is the personal blog of J H Williams, web developer
Recently published
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Art sources
| Good places to find free(ish) artwork for blog posts.
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Ghost (and back again)
| After years of running static sites, I had a brief flirtation with a hosted service.
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AI wants to do your work. Ask it to teach you instead.
| What happens when you ask AI to slow you down instead of speed you up.
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How to pronounce GIF
| Possible spoiler: I don’t have an easy answer for you.
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Doctor Who and the Highest Stakes
| Doctor Who has come a long way in sixty years of storytelling. Perhaps it has come too far.
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The Unceasing Drama of Social Media
| “Censorship” is just unwanted curation.
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Full Circle
| Wanting more interactivity on my blog, even at a minimal level, has made static site generators more trouble than I want to deal with.
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AI Coding (II)
| A lot of folks are asking if AI makes developers more efficient, but we'd have to know how to measure efficiency first.
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AI Coding (I)
| Giving the AI coding thing "the old college try," not that I tried that much in college.
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Honestly, I probably have more fun than anyone else with the Friday 10.
| Some thoughts after the first few weeks of my lyric guessing game.
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The question of purity tests
| When people argue about "purity tests" in politics, it’s to dodge accepting uncomfortable compromises.
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CSS guide: parents should tell children where to sit
| The principle that reshaped how I wrote CSS.
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Interactivity without JavaScript
| Bejofo reworks their JavaScript game to run without JavaScript, which is an interesting experiment — and reinforces my biggest concern about modern web development hosting infrastructure.
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We’re outsourcing to AI
| What happens when a business starts outsourcing the busy-work? Is that even useful? Or is it just another cash drain?
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The blog post image conundrum
| I’m always having a debate with myself about how to handle images for blog posts — and whether they need images at all.
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Static no longer
| I've gone and done it. I took my nice, static site and turned it dynamic. Wow, what a headache.
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Should we even call it AI?
| Words matter, but sometimes more to rhetorical approaches than to any real understanding.
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Why does work expand?
| Ever heard that “work expands to fill the time available”? Let's dig into why that’s only half the story — and what Parkinson’s Law gets wrong about how real work (and real people) actually operate.
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On Zombies
| Writing a game in Javascript, HTML, and CSS as "vanilla" as I can manage.
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Process Matters
| Writing notes by hand and rephrasing them in my own words is more valuable to me than relying on AI tools.