Bench notes

Short technical field notes on systems weirdness

09 Feb 2026

Shopping online, warts included

Found myself in the market for sweats and windbreaker pants. ChatGPT found a myriad of decent items meeting my criteria.

Upon visiting each product page, I first enable Javascripts using NoScript, at least for the main website, occasionally enabling Javascripts from third party sites too.

Here’s a couple screengrabs from my shopping excursion today. (Many websites did function decently — even with Javascript disabled — and certainly worked well enough after commiserating with NoScript.)

Prana layout snafu

As you can see, a lot of quirky stuff occurred too.

Carhartt popup z-order quirk

This is a fairly normal experience for me. The alternative is worse: enable untrustworthy code to run in my Rube Goldberg browser environment without consent.

Duluth Trading Company selling items for NaN dollars

But hey, bought the windbreaker pants off eBay, the sweats off Amazon.