frithsun

What only a small subset of highly specialized programmers should know about memory (2007) [pdf]

The mastodon team literally hard codes political censorship into its codebase.

I recommend an alternative to mastodon with greater openness that you may wish to check out: twitter.com.

"every form of refuge has its price"

Every lifestyle has its own pain and perks. Heck, Kato Kaelin found out the hard way that even living in a celebrity's pool house comes with its risks and problems. A lot of it boils down to deciding what kind of suffering you are least uncomfortable with.

I believe a lot of this was driven by fed rate shenanigans creating far more investment wealth than there were organic opportunities for investing it. All of these market-distorting startup deals were just symptoms of that broader systemic monetary policy error.

While the mom and pop taxi companies and others impacted by it have my sympathy and support, all the regulatory alternatives other than waiting until they achieve a monopoly and then breaking them up seem to cause as many problems as they aim to solve.

This is why I stubbornly refuse to use Typescript.

Javascript is an ECMA standard. I'll just do the JSDoc hack and cheer for TC39 rather than waste my time with a technology that's great for now but will probably end up being technical debt.

Think of how little somebody who uses C, bash, vim, and javascript has had to adapt in the past several decades, all because they avoided technologies where the buck stops with a community rather than a corporation.

Corporations are cool and all. I'm not a dirty hippie. But at the end of the day they don't make money when things don't change.

The artificial division between the "database" and "real programming" is the original sin behind everything wrong with modern programming.

The fight for WASI is dramatically more important for the future of tech than AI, bitcoin, and all the other silly fads.

If WASM gets sucked into the vortex of pragmatism and fails at its original mission of discarding all of the technical debt and obsolete paradigms, then we'll miss out on a golden opportunity to reinvent the modern technology stack.

Those who want to deliver something that works right now can fork the project and call it WARN (WebAssemblyish Right Now).

One more threat to javascript developers trying to make it in today's economy.

Modern software is so slow because objects, by definition, are post-paradigmatic. Every program is, in essence, an exercise in metaprogramming that can't be reliably optimized, built upon, or chained together with other objects.

And then you have hundreds of failed attempts to solve that problem which don't actually strike at the root problem, further making a mess of the computing environment so that it requires multiple gigabytes of resident memory to write and execute "hello world."