These are all of my long-form articles. An Atom feed contains their full text. If that has any problems, I also have a legacy RSS feed.
Timestamp format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM, as per RFC 3339. Sorted newest to oldest.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
MDN’s AI Help can’t critically examine training data’s gaps, biases, and unrelated topics. It’s a useful demonstration of LLMs’ uncorrectable lucid lies.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
An informal proposal for dedicated elements for spoiler tags in HTML: use-cases, syntax, semantics, recommended UA behavior, and comparisons with “details”
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A compilation of my reasons and non-reasons for proactively de-federating from Facebook/Meta-affiliated projects, and refusing to support them.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Documentation on which Fediverse blocklists I offer, how they are made, their differences, their caveats, and their intended use.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
“GNU/Linux” distinguishes Linux distributions primarily by the presence of GNU software, which is seldom the most meaningful or practical distinction.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Avoid de-anonymization through analysis of your writing style. Defend against machine- and human-driven stylometric identification.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A horrible idea to determine the legality of GitHub Copilot, or of re-creating proprietary speech synthesizers: create legal precedent that doesn't exist yet!
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
"Privacy" can mean different things in different contexts. Tracking-reduction and tracking-evasion represent different goals with some conflict and overlap.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A response to some problematic CLI UX advice, with alternative recommendations for designing more accessible CLI utilities.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
My take on where Manifest V3 fits into the current ad-blocking landscape: it has some benefits which should complement but not replace existing approaches
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
While source code is critical for user autonomy, it isn't required to evaluate software security or understand run-time behavior.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Recently, people have been telling webmasters to add a Permissions-Policy header to their sites to opt out of FLoC. The reality of the situation isn't so simple.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
How open platforms become closed, and how standards-driven development can prevent it from happening.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
WhatsApp's rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call "user domestication".
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A lengthy guide to making simple, inclusive sites focused on content before form. Emphasizes brutalist design and accessibility to include under-represented users.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Efficient redundancy via repository mirroring with nothing but git.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
A seires on setting up resilient git-based project workflows, free of vendor lock-in.
Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar.
Seirdy's obligatory inagural blog post, which is barely longer than this description.