iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 11/09/2026

Officially a Senior Staff Engineer at @discord.com now 📈

Reposted by Brandon Dail

Joan León @nucliweb.net · 24/07/2026

In my audits, reading the Performance profile is where people get stuck: the flame chart and waterfall look like noise at first I built an interactive guide to make them click, every figure is interactive, plus LCP, CLS, INP and the Insights panel perf.reviews/profile-guide #WebPerf #DevTools

perf.reviews

Reading a Performance Profile: Field Guide

An interactive field guide to the Chrome DevTools Performance panel: waterfall, flame chart, LCP, CLS, INP, and the Insights panel.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 20/07/2026

you tellin me a petard hoisted this?

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 01/07/2026

The above image was generated with mitsua-diffusion-one, which is a self-described low quality model that is trained exclusively on public domain/CC0 images. It's my favorite for both of those reasons.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 01/07/2026

It's a shame that generative image models have pursued realism so relentlessly. Reproducing training data is uninteresting and exploitative. The imperfections of early models were genuinely interesting, and will end up being the most artistically interesting artifact of all this in the long term

an image of a beach generated with the low-quality misua-diffusion-one model, which is trained exclusively on public domain/copyright free images

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/06/2026

I’m on sabbatical this month, and I’ve been using some of my time to dust off my plotter and get back into my art. This is a CMYK print that’s using a custom algorithm based on waves and circles to layer the colors. Stopped half way through because I liked the vibes ✨

A top-down shot of a 9x12 CMYK plotter print. The print features abstract blue, red, green, and pink colors with a sharp cut-off about 60% down, where there's no blue or green. The top half looks kind of like cactuses that are flowering, and the bottom half kind of looks like lemonade.

The close-up shot of the CMK print showing the waves and circles composed together to make a green yellow pink abstract piece

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/06/2026

Feels like strongly typed compile-to-JS languages like Reason deserve a resurgence with LLMs. Biggest barrier was learning the new language, which has been heavily reduced, and a fast and strict type system is very valuable for agents

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/06/2026

I’ll just share: Richard Behiel’s series on Quantum Physics is amazing, very detailed and well visualized. Like 3blue1brown youtube.com/playlist?lis... eigenchris’s course on relativity is also very long and very good, really gets into details youtube.com/playlist?lis...

youtube.com

Quantum Physics - YouTube

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/06/2026

I got really into physics stuff over the last year and Sean Carrol’s series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe are excellent and fit exactly what you’re describing. Maybe the best options in that category for both QM and GR There are a couple YouTube channels I’d also recommend if you’re interested

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/04/2026

I appreciate that @github.com wants to give me recognition for all this work, but I'd be reticent to take credit for all 21 million open pull requests

Screenshot of github.com/pulls/authored that says I have 21 million open pull requests and 147 million closed ones. You can see a couple PRs that are clearly not the users'

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/03/2026

Opening the WebSocket connection is trivial; we already did that in an inline <script>. Sending the identify message was harder and has deps on code that was in our main bundle. We fixed this by actually shipping more JS 👺 a smaller bundle that loads first with just the modules needed to identify.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/03/2026

There are two main startup tasks for @discord.com: 1. Fetch and run all the JavaScript 2. Open a socket and get your data from the gateway Those were happening sequentially; now they are parallel! This improved P50 TTI by like 12%, over a second for many folks 📉 discord.com/blog/discord...

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 17/02/2026

finally the justification I needed to get back to arguing with people on the internet

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/01/2026

whoever at Google owns fanout-testing@google.com Google Group, I don't think you meant to send that message 🙈

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 28/01/2026

yeah they are right to left, but it doesn't find all the divs, it has a div its rendering and iterates through the rules RTL to see what applies. So imagine its walking the DOM and checking styles for each element, not walking the stylesheet and checking the DOM for each rule.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/01/2026

*I meant `.container div` (descendant selector)

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/01/2026

oops meant `.container div`

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/01/2026

Here's your friendly reminder that CSS selectors are global and evaluated RTL, so if you have selectors that are very broad like `.container > div` you might be impacting performance in a measurable way 🙈 Before and after profile of server switching after some selector optimizations in @discord.com

Two screenshots from Chrome DevTools side-by-side. On the left it says "Before" and shows that rendering took 1518 milliseconds. On the right it says "After" and shows that rendering took 610 milliseconds.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Ex-farm worker here. We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing. Not true AT ALL. Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are. The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour. At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/06/2025

If you’re a React Native expert and want to help us make @discord.com better, hit me up 🤙 we’re looking!

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 15/04/2025

had a daughter the other day, we’re big fans ❤️

A newborn baby hand resting on top of a man’s middle finger, as if they were holding hands

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/03/2025

what are you measuring the contrast of? Ash is 9.49:1 for the chat text, which is lower than the others to approximately match the original dark theme (which is 9.36:1)

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/03/2025

ouch, I’ll make sure that gets fixed.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/03/2025

for example, text-secondary here is defined in terms of a contrast ratio with a background token. This defines the color across all themes; no hand picked colors! that bg token is also defined using a contrast constraint. If anything in the constraint dep graph changes, it propagates automatically

yaml code that reads:

# text-secondary.yaml
type: text
constraints:
scale: neutral
contrast: 6
with: background-surface-highest

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/03/2025

we (@discord.com) rewrote our color token system to support these new themes, and its exciting 👀 in short: color tokens are defined using a constraint-based system where colors are defined with contrast ratios. change a base color and all affected tokens update in all themes, preserving contrast ✨

discord.com

Revamped Overlay & Refreshed Desktop Give Game Time a Boost

We’re releasing a new and improved version of the Game Overlay, along with a refreshed desktop app so you can further customize Discord to your style.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 12/02/2025

Whoever did the lighting in Kingdom Come II deserves whatever the award for really good lighting is

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

$500 pack of cards casually sitting on the shelf 🫣

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

Not the Canada commercial lmaoooooo

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

my wife said “I think they can make a comeback” two seconds before that last interception. Sorry about that (or you’re welcome)

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/02/2025

long overdue, but I did it 🫡

screenshot of x.com showing the @aweary account; the page says "This account doesn't exist"

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Jill Twiss @jilltwiss.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Somehow "Elon Musk Is a Genius" and "Elon Musk Doesn't Know How Hands Work" are being said by a lot of the same people

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 19/01/2025

hearing a lot of good things about TikTok recently, downloading it to see what all the fuss is about 🙏

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 16/01/2025

[as the Xenomorph extends its inner jaw to kill me]: oooooo big stretch!

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

In the meantime, as a reader: don’t trust any articles attributed to “staff,” and don’t trust any articles that don’t include quotes from scientists completely uninvolved in the original publication. Science is a gradual, meandering, back and forth process; sometimes we have to let it play out.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Which brings us to the scicomm point: we gotta get better at distinguishing between “here’s someone’s speculative idea that they just published” and “here’s a new discovery.” This is the former.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 20/12/2024

What does it mean for something to be Turing complete? I answer this question, and more, through a series of fully interactive Turing machine simulations! Play, pause, step forwards and backwards, and even write your own Turing machine programs in my latest blog post. samwho.dev/turing-machi...

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 20/12/2024

the worst part about being a parent is that even the most cookie-cutter, clichéd story can make you cry if it happens to be about kids or parenting it’s like a cheat code the world uses on you that you can’t disable

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 19/12/2024

is there any existing research on what the best contrast ratio for readability is? WCAG gives a lower bound but there’s also such a thing as too much contrast so I’m curious if there’s been any formal studies on where the sweet spot is

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/12/2024

he knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/12/2024

I try to be as honest as I can with my kids, and sometimes that’s hard to reconcile with the fact that we as a society have decided to collectively lie about a magical, immortal old man who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake

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