Be really obnoxious about the ballot format in the Florida 2000 election until they either fix it or news outlets do a good job educating people about how to correctly vote for Gore

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

• loads more slowly on HDD
• now small enough for your SSD

I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

Technically, BazaarVoice is the one preventing you from leaving a review.

This is actually an example of technology working correctly. Web sites are able to delegate parts of their functionality to other services that are able to act independently. Your browser refuses to interact with BazaarVoice, but Petsmart continues to function.

It’s also an example of markets working poorly. It’s great that companies can use a third party service to handle reviews, so we don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel. It’s not great that companies like Petsmart are so big that they don’t have to care about who they delegate that job to. They can use a cheap-as-hell sketchy AI service that will grind their users into an algorithmic paste, and pocket the savings, with no worry that you might go elsewhere (what are you gonna do? shop at kind-hearted Bezos’ store instead?)

Lemme share the tea for anyone who isn’t aware:

• Owl house is a show by Dana Terrace that ran on Disney
• It slowly developed into big pro-LGBTQ themes
• Disney panicked, cancelled the show, claimed it was unpopular despite excellent ratings
• Dana Terrace left with a bunch of others to form an independent studio
• Their first show (Knights of Guinevere) features a floating amusement park that rains garbage all over the workers below, and robots that have orbs on their heads that produce a silhouette strikingly similar to that of Mickey Mouse

I see what you’re saying, but the fact that it can be ambiguous is actually what makes it so useful to fascist organizers.

They thrive on phrases that allow them to wink at each other when they want to, but claim innocence if someone calls them out.

I think maybe the biggest conceptual mistake in computer science was calling them “tests”.

That word has all sorts of incorrect connotations to it:

• That they should be made after the implementation
• That they’re only useful if you’re unsure of the implementation
• That they should be looking for deviations from intention, instead of giving you a richer palette with which to paint your intention

You get this notion of running off to apply a ruler and a level to some structure that’s already built, adding notes to a clipboard about what’s wrong with it.

You should think of it as a pencil and paper — a place where you can be abstract, not worry about the nitty-gritty details (unless you want to), and focus on what would be right about an implementation that adheres to this design.

Like “I don’t care how it does it, but if you unmount and remount this component it should show the previous state without waiting for an HTTP request”.

Very different mindset from “Okay, I implemented this caching system, now I’m gonna write tests to see if there are any off-by-one errors when retrieving indexed data”.

I think that, very often, writing tests after the impl is worse than not writing tests at all. Cuz unless you’re some sort of wizard, you probably didn’t write the impl with enough flexibility for your tests to be flexible too. So you end up with brittle tests that break for bad reasons and reproduce all of the same assumptions that the impl has.

You spent extra time on the task, and the result is that when you have to come back and change the impl you’ll have to spend extra time changing the tests too. Instead of the tests helping you write the code faster in the first place, and helping you limit your tests to only what you actually care about keeping the same long-term.

No apps, no code, just intent and execution.

So the only problems you’re left with are:

• Making a precise description of what you want, at high and low levels of detail with consistent terminology
• Verifying that the system is behaving as you expect, by exercising specific parts of it in isolation
• The ability to make small incremental steps from one complete working state to the next complete working state, so you don’t get stuck by painting yourself into a corner

Problems which… code is much better than English at handling.

And always will be.

Almost like there’s a reason code exists other than just “Idk let’s make it hard so normies can’t do it mwahaha”.

This is basically what the Luddites were fighting against:

A world where labor has no opportunity to develop skills or use them, no authority over the machinery which dictates the nature of what is made and how, chasing fewer and fewer jobs for less and less pay.

Their solution was to take sledgehammers to the factories. The owners, of course, hired thugs to shoot them. And the politicians ruled that the machines were sort of the property of the crown, and therefore destruction of these machines should be punishable by public execution.

Funny enough, data centers today are considered strategic assets under the protection of DHS. Which is a fancy way of saying: still owned by the crown, still gonna shoot you if you try to negotiate via sledgehammer.

Its supposedly open source??

NPM users: “…and?”

Headline makes her sound petty, when she’s actually the most important anti-monopoly figure of the past 40 years

People have thought for thousands of years that they were living in the time of a great final battle against eternal tyranny — and that they were destined to fail.

There’s a strange comfort in being certain of doom. It makes the world simple and understandable. Predictable, and therefore less jarring. Doom is invulnerable to good news — in fact, good news is always bad news in the framework of doom, because it means delaying the inevitable and inviting false hope.

But the real story of the last several thousand years is that the world is complex. People are more complex than we could’ve understood even a hundred years ago. And the universe may be even stranger than we possibly can imagine.

I’m not telling you to be certain of a positive outcome. I’m just telling you to let go of certainty.

Needs an integrated battery and USB-C alt mode for display so you can use a keyboard + AR glasses and nothing else

I assume this means they’re trying to clear out the LCD stock and be OLED-only soon?

I’d settle for just requiring interoperability. Seems like a reasonable requirement for a government to demand the ability to change vendors.

We have that requirement when it comes to munitions. You’re not allowed to sell the military a gun for which you are the only ammo manufacturer.

A side effect would probably be that more commercial software would be interoperable as a result, just because it’s easier for the vendors to maintain a single product rather than wildly different variants.

I’ve gone back to Hand of Fate 2 for like… the 15th time. Just such a cool concept. In a world full of card-based roguelikes, I’ve still never seen anything else quite like it.

Your deck isn’t just the equipment and buffs you might gain. It’s also the threats you might face, and the clues that might lead to new quests.

You’re playing against the deck, in many ways. Such a simple inversion, but it opens up the door to so many interesting modifiers.

Not fired though, like the MSNBC host that said hateful words lead to hateful actions.

Free speech is when you’re allowed to openly coordinate the extermination of people you don’t like but then when someone says that’s bad they get deported or fired

Not exactly an answer, but I’ll take the opportunity to point out that Bun has a shell feature which makes it easy to mix and match JS and Bash in the same script, and it provides a compatibility layer for Windows users so that you don’t have to worry about platform differences in shell capabilities. https://bun.sh/guides/runtime/shell