Ben Schwarz
@benschwarz.bsky.social
3.2K followers 170 following 700 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
🆕 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.
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
jakearchibald.com
I dug into progressive image rendering and found a bunch of common assumptions aren't quite true.

➡️ JPEG & WebP progressive-renders worse in Safari
➡️ AVIF _does_ support progressive
➡️ But JPEG XL in Safari doesn't
➡️ JPEG XL decodes much slower than AVIF
⬇️ and more

jakearchibald.com/2025/present...
The present and potential future of progressive image rendering
Exploring progressive image rendering across JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL.
jakearchibald.com
benschwarz.bsky.social
The main issue with next.js is that instead of delivering raw HTML, content is (usually) rendered client side.

Performance suffers because client-side content rendering is slow & more “expensive” than it could be.

TLDR; it’s a slow, inefficient way to render a website and it shows!
benschwarz.bsky.social
Are you saying “once the SPA has loaded its fast”?
benschwarz.bsky.social
According to HTTP Archive, Next.js sites see the **worst** Core Web Vitals performance when compared to other popular frameworks

httparchive.org/reports/tech...
Screenshot from https://httparchive.org/reports/techreport/tech?tech=ALL,Next.js,Ruby+on+Rails,Astro,SvelteKit,Svelte,React,VitePress&geo=ALL&rank=ALL&page=1
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
ryanmulligan.dev
Container queries and CSS make it simple to smoothly transition an element to the other side of its parent container without knowing exact dimensions or distance.

Read more in my latest post: ryanmulligan.dev/blog/transit...
benschwarz.bsky.social
Back in 2015, there was a Reply All Podcast episode about a guy in France who made a living in the 80s using Minitel sex chat rooms where he pretended to be a few different women.

2025 Innovation: You can tell an LLM you want to fuck it 🙄

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1...
benschwarz.bsky.social
I hope Scott's phone melts from the incoming calls influx and the sensation causes him to immediately shit himself (again) until he dies.
benschwarz.bsky.social
All this talk of teen social media ban from the eSaftey commissioner who wants to pick and choose websites that are “safe” or “not safe” (based on ??? criteria), but what about games like Roblox built for children having nazi and child pornography content? Crickets!

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...
How sexual predators and far-right extremists are using Roblox to target children
Experts warn Roblox has a predator problem, amid reports Australian children are being exposed to a range of disturbing experiences on the platform.
www.abc.net.au
benschwarz.bsky.social
AirPods Pro 3 hearing test is pretty interesting, it plays tones at different frequencies at low volume.

You tap the screen when you hear it. I had to breathe very slowly (or hold breath) to hear, but got good results.
AirPods hearing test results screenshot
benschwarz.bsky.social
The eSafety commissioners choice to pick and choose “appropriate” websites would be hilarious if it wasn’t so concerning.

They’re so far out of their depth, and their ignorance is going to cause disastrous consequences for all Australians.
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
virginia.alertbutnotalarmed.com
I made something! Monomarks.at is an open social bookmarking tool along the lines of Pinboard or Delicious, and it's based on ATProto, because I was inspired by @danabra.mov's widely-read post. Log in with your Bluesky account to save bookmarks and browse links posted by the people you follow. 😎
Monomarks: open social bookmarking
Open social bookmarks
Monomarks.at
benschwarz.bsky.social
Congrats! Did your beard get a mini citizenship document as well?
benschwarz.bsky.social
takes a long drag of cig while staring at the floor, "yeah, I remember the bad old days"
benschwarz.bsky.social
Honestly I don’t care about this algorithm or other algorithms, they’re good and they’re getting better, cool.

I don’t want to EVER handle these formats manually, because there’s too many options and support is so fragmented.

IMO they should be output from a CDN in best available format.
benschwarz.bsky.social
I have, and want to go back. Was too busy this year.
Reposted by Ben Schwarz
robin.berjon.com
If you think this is US-only, it's not.

If you think the GDPR protects you, it's doesn't.

If you hadn't realised privacy is a national security and corporate espionage issue, it is.

If you think politicians can't tackle this, they can.

If you believe that tech or business need this, they don't.
benschwarz.bsky.social
Prior to making a major DNS change you can lower the TTL to a really frequent time window, e.g five minutes. When you make a change, you can see it confirmed within 5 mins, rather than potentially HOURS.

Also helpful if you make a mistake and want to undo and rethink :)
benschwarz.bsky.social
Today Vercel (derogatory) announced their series F funding, with a valuation of 9.3 Billion. It’s another $300m investment round.

Cancel your account today, let’s see how quickly that valuation can drop.
benschwarz.bsky.social
Cool, we know exactly who Guillermo is now.
Guillermo from Vercel pictured with war criminal Netanyahu
benschwarz.bsky.social
If you work in tech and your response to governments forcing age verification is "Itz FiNe I‘ll jUst usE a VpN", then you missed the whole fucking point.

This is when you use your knowledge, care, and moral backbone to protect the people you claim to build for.
benschwarz.bsky.social
tbh I intentionally try not to keep up with the exploits of tech people I don’t want anything to do with
benschwarz.bsky.social
Me: I wonder why I receive job applicants for jobs that don't exist?

Also me: Oh. I think I know why.
Screenshot of LoopCV website with "using AI" highlighted
benschwarz.bsky.social
My mouth actually dropped when I saw this. I can’t believe he met, posed, had the photo taken, and posted it. Truly aghast. Abhorrent.