Hidde
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hidde.blog
Hidde
@hidde.blog
4.7K followers 440 following 610 posts
Into front-end, web accessibility and tech ethics.

Currently working on web standards at Dutch gov. I'm also on the W3C's Advisory Board.

Blogger at hidde.blog, reader/concert goer at log.hidde.blog, speaker at talks.hiddedevries.nl.
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hidde.blog
Kassa Overall at Bird was brilliant, his new album has 8 jazz interpretations of classic hiphop tracks. #CheckTheRhyme
Kassa standing, holding the mic From left to right saxophonist, bass, percussionist and on the right Kassa on drums, behind the iconic Bird logo
November 2, 2025 at 9:33 PM
hidde.blog
Carbon accounting and their position in the GHG standards groups allows Big Tech to justify their discourse, explains Valentina Ochner.
Valentina pointing at slide listing all funders of GHG standards with big tech companies marked in blue, oil/gas marker in blue, automotive in red
October 29, 2025 at 2:44 PM
hidde.blog
✅ tech checked
photo of stage with monitor visible that shows first slide, it says 'creativity cannot be computed'
October 22, 2025 at 10:04 AM
hidde.blog
Stavanger has good rainbows
round rainbow painted onto cobble stone pavement
October 21, 2025 at 2:45 PM
hidde.blog
enjoyed this sign on the exit door of a cinema I visited this week
sign on a glass door that says 'Please (underlined) leave quietly or we're fucked', with the logo of The Nickel above
September 20, 2025 at 7:05 PM
hidde.blog
New stickers! thanks @rknight.me
two stickers, one is a pirate bay logo with the words 'training data', the other in the font of the 'you wouldn't download a movie' but it says 'you wouldn't download a training data'
September 12, 2025 at 2:15 PM
hidde.blog
love how easy it is to add fonts to Kobo's ereaders. Currently trying out Libre Baskerville.

tips for affordable and good reading fonts welcomed
picture of ereader that renders text about digital sovereignty in Dutch in Libre Baskerville, 24 mins to go, it mentions not compromising on data privacy despite lobbying activities that involved Sheryl Sandberg's girlbossing.
August 23, 2025 at 7:49 PM
hidde.blog
Noname at Paradiso Noord
noname, smiling and holding the mic, on stage with red lights noname with a lot of spotlights shining behind her in different directions
August 16, 2025 at 9:22 PM
hidde.blog
case in point: I just had a GitHub issue page not load issues because of some failing GraphQL fetch causing an error in some React component.

They used to just load these from the server. But sure, they didn't want to stifle innovation.
screenshot of Github issue page, on the right is an opened browser dev tools console that shows a fetch error in fetch-graphql.ts and an error in something.production.js that makes a ListItem.tsx error.
August 12, 2025 at 2:47 PM
hidde.blog
we went for a walk in the Alps, and met this guy on the road
cow in the middle of the road, surrounded by trees
July 26, 2025 at 8:31 AM
hidde.blog
brb is a good name for a train company
side of a blue train that says brb, in german, bayerische regiobahn, wir fahren das bahnland bayern
July 20, 2025 at 1:39 PM
hidde.blog
📺 Video of my talk at CSS Day is up! It covers how to reduce climate impact at work (if you work in tech)

you can watch it on Conffab, courtesy of @johnfallsopp.com conffab.com/presentation...
me on stage in front of slide that says 'there is only one grid' slide that says “AGI” and that it is a) not well defined, b) not in existence, c) not sure if it can solve global warming me in front of slide with screenshot of openai.com, search for global warming, which answered 'it looks like your question goes, emphasis starts, beyond what we can assist with there, emphasis ends. slide that says 'what adds to the footprint of the www?' answers: A, Data centres; 
Emissions of server hardware (making and running); B, Networks
, Data downloads/uploads' C, Consumer devices: Manufacturing laptops, phones, tablets that access the web
July 11, 2025 at 7:39 AM
hidde.blog
I do enjoy the bilinguality of signs here, the French words suddenly click when I see them on the same sign with their Dutch counterpart.

axe rouge, rode as. l'industrie, nijverheid. km is harmonised.
street in brussels with the words mentioned in post shown on signs
July 4, 2025 at 9:33 AM
hidde.blog
as someone whose profession is in (arguing about) naming things, metro station names fascinate me. How do they make them so short and clean?

This one, in Brussels, is named Arts-Law (it's at the crossing of arts street and law street)
escalator and station name sign at kunst wet station
July 4, 2025 at 9:29 AM
hidde.blog
Little Simz at the Royal Festival Hall was incredible.

Live band, Chineke orchestra, Obongjayar, Miraa May, Wretch 32… old and new music, it's creatively such a wide range.
simz with guitar in purple lights like the lotus album cover simz with mic, surrounded by orchestra and band
June 22, 2025 at 10:37 PM
hidde.blog
a good hotel cat for your timeline #CSSDay #CatsOfBluesky
british shorthair staring somewhat annoyed into the camera
June 7, 2025 at 5:00 PM
hidde.blog
“Ethics aside, what I like about generative AI…” will be even harder to say for people who have read Empire of AI.

Top notch reporting on the good, the bad and the colonialist and disaster capitalist aspects of generative AI and large language models. For ethics you need facts. The evil is banal.
picture of cover on ereader, empire of AI - dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, Karen Hao picture of text. It reads: Okiny was on his way to something better. He had just met a girl next door named Cynthia who for the first time made him imagine what it would be like to build a family. Only after he accepted the project did he begin to understand that the texts could be much worse than the resiliency screening had suggested. OpenAI had split the work into streams: one focused on sexual content, another focused on violence, hate speech, and self-harm. Violence split into an independent third stream in February 2022. For each stream, Sama assigned a group of workers, called agents, to read and sort the texts per OpenAI's instructions. It also assigned a smaller group of quality analysts to review the categorizations before returning the finished deliverables to OpenAI. Okinyi was placed as a quality analyst on the sexual content team, contracted to review fifteen thousand pieces of content a
June 1, 2025 at 5:09 AM
hidde.blog
The web was always intended for blogging (source: www.w3.org/History/1992...)
screenshot of browser displaying linked url with the words 'personal notebook' highlighted.. full text: heading Intended Uses. Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has its specific requirements in the way of features required. List of six items. General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc. Completely centralized publishing - online help, documentation, tutorial etc More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life Collaborative authoring Collaborative design of something other than the hypertext itself Personal noteboo
May 29, 2025 at 2:20 PM
hidde.blog
I could, but won't, live post all of AI Con.

It very clearly explains why human language is different from synthetic text, and this is inherent.
Though the most basic and fundamental use of language is in face-to-face communication, once we have acquired a linguistic system, we can use it to understand linguistic artifacts even in the absence of co-situatedness, at a distance of space and even time. But we still apply the same techniques of imagining the mind behind the text, constructing a model of common ground with the author, and seeking to guess what the author might have been using the words to get their audience to understand. Language models, problematically, have no subjectivity with which to perform intersubjectivity. Despite the frequent claims of Al researchers, these models do not learn "just like children do." Simply modeling the distribution of words in text provides no access to meaning, nothing from which to deduce communicative intent.
May 13, 2025 at 8:02 PM
hidde.blog
this morning my preorder of The AI Con arrived, I can't wait to read more!
the AI con cover on a Kobo ereader
May 13, 2025 at 8:00 PM
hidde.blog
2020: $deliveryDate = $sentDate + 1;
2025: “The mentioned period is a prediction based on AI”
note for predicted delivery date: “The mentioned period is a prediction made by GoParcel based on AI. This prediction is still subject to change and will become more accurate towards the delivery time.“ Above, there is more info: May 7, 9am to 8pm, package has not yet been received or processed by the carrier.
May 6, 2025 at 6:42 PM
hidde.blog
They printed my article in the Service Gazette that was published for the International User Needs First conference in Amsterdam 🎉

Full text available on my blog: hidde.blog/five-ways-gr...
picture of Service Gazette newspaper, main article heading reads “Digital service resilience: What endures when government innovation units close” photo of the article that is on the linked page
April 10, 2025 at 10:48 AM
hidde.blog
took all your banana suggestions to a talk i did tonight, cheers everyone.
me in front of slide full of bananas
March 27, 2025 at 7:07 PM
hidde.blog
loved hearing Michael Mayo's awesome creativity with @nvreez.bsky.social yesterday!
4 musicians on stage, michael mayo is behind microphone in the middle and in the top right are neon letters that say lantarenvenster (venue name)
March 15, 2025 at 7:23 PM
hidde.blog
Nubya Garcia was fantastic! 💯 so worth it to see her live, amazing band too
nubya in the middle on saxophone in red dress, from left to right keyboard, bass and Sam Jones on drums
February 19, 2025 at 7:02 AM