Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

New web devs: "The web dev tech stack is so ridiculously complicated. Why do I have to install like three layers of tools just to make a simple webpage with CSS?"

Meanwhile, webkit adds to CSS a preview feature of something that sass had in 2006.

https://webkit.org/blog/13813/try-css-nesting-today-in-safari-technology-preview/

I don't think it's biologically possible for me to get enough of Dr. Dinosaur. #AtomicrRobo

In possibly the most cyberpunk fate I can think of, the operators of the "Nothing, Forever" AI-generated eternal Seinfeld episode on Twitch found they were saturating ChatGPT, leading to downtime. To resolve the issue, they switched from the "DaVinci" language model to the "Curie" model.

For all the complaining people do about ChatGPT's niceness and morality filters, they're actually pretty subtle and sophisticated.

After the cutover, "Nothing, Forever" got banned from Twitch for transphobia.

Apparently, when one Mastodon node defederates from another, follow lists get deleted.

Regardless of the reasons for federating / defederating, dumping the follows list when a defederation occurs is deleting user data without warning and therefore fails Software Engineering 101.

I never got into open source because I get too easily frustrated by developers failing to document their build environment (assuming they bothered to document anything at all).

"Hey I tried to build your giant library, but I'm getting an error where it says it doesn't recognize the --c++20 flag and suggests I mean --c++2a?"

"Oh yeah, you need to use g++ 11, and we do mean g++, Clang definitely won't work. Also you want openjdk 17 or later, and the specific version of python Guido von Rossum compiled in a drug-fueled haze at a rager in Burbank in 2013, which I can mail to you on thumb drive if you don't have."

No, phone, I don't think I'll be applying that remedy.

So I've learned that #Facebook / #Meta discontinued support for Portal by... my relative's Portal no longer allowing alarms to be set.

... As of yesterday.

Especially relative to Google's handling of shutting down #Stadia, this is embarrassing. No fanfare, barely any news, and the product is still advertised on Meta's website (and the built-in dashboard still lists setting alarms as a feature).

Terrible EOL experience and it really puts me off buying any future hardware from Meta.

By far my favorite special operator in #Lisp, `the` `(the value-type form)` is the operator declaring that `form` has type `value-type`, examples `(the number 3)`, `(the string (get-user-name))`.

Naively, one might assume this declares a value has a specific type. That is true, but not the way one might think. The formal definition is that *the program behavior is undefined if the value does NOT have that specific type*.

That definition means a given LISP compiler / interpreter is *allowed* to assert-and-crash if the types mismatch (because crashing is a valid undefined behavior)... But it also acts as an escape hatch for high-performance LISP engines to save resources by throwing the dynamic typing data away. In other words, `(the)` is the "paint this expression red to let the code go faster" special operator. ;)

Truly, an era of miracles in which we live.

For pedagogy reasons, writing something that I would definitely write in #TypeScript in #JavaScript because I can't guarantee the end-user is going to have a TypeScript stack.

JavaScript is still a hole of a language, but I guess I've used it long enough that I'm getting that Cypher-in-the-Matrix thing.

"I don't even see the lack of modules. I just see closure, closure, one exposed variable name..."

@lauren So an interesting wrinkle in the story of this documentary being taken down from YouTube... Is it being taken down at the behest of the Indian government, or at the behest of the original copyright owner?

Because it looks like archive.org killed their links at the request of the BBC.

https://blog.archive.org/2023/01/27/bbc-modi-documentary-removal/

Unwritten office etiquette point number whatever:

If you schedule an hour-long meeting, it is most reasonable to provide an agenda; you're asking for an eighth of a regular work day from people; you'd better be telling them why.

... Really, this rule applies to half-hour meetings as well, but half-hour meetings can *sometimes* be summarized by the name of the meeting alone.