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streptomycinon Perl's decline was cultural

Perl CGI scripts were ubiquitously supported by shared hosts, but IIRC mod_perl was not unless you had some custom setup on a dedicated server. Also IIRC, mod_perl was just a lot more complicated to set up and use, while mod_php was dead simple.

streptomycinon Perl's decline was cultural

mod_perl was a lot more complicated, so in practice "normal people" (such as 14 year old me) didn't use it because it would have required a dedicated server and some sophisticated configuration, rather than a $2/month shared hosting account.

streptomycinon Perl's decline was cultural

For me it wasn't cultural.

Perl was my first language because I wanted to make interactive websites and that was the most common way to do it in the late 90s. Shortly after, everyone switched to PHP because mod_php was much faster than Perl CGI scripts.

streptomycinon California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

China https://x.com/bataille_chris/status/1981476968202752109

streptomycinon Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware

FWIW "quantum advantage" and "quantum supremacy" are synonyms, some people just prefer the former because the latter reminds them of "white supremacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy#Criticism_of...

streptomycinon Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

I suspect that most people would not vote for a government policy that puts their favorite websites out of business so they can do more chores :)

streptomycinon Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

In some sense, "no one wants to be advertised to" is similar to "no one wants to pay for stuff". Like yeah it'd be nice if my groceries were free, but that's not very realistic, the grocery store would just close if they had to give everything away. Advertising is similar - a cost we pay so that websites can make some money in exchange for their services. Most ad supported websites would just disappear without them.

streptomycinon EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars

Yeah, this article says the 2023 price of a new Model Y was $48k, and then in 2024 it was worth only $33k used.

But in 2024 I bought a brand new Model Y for about $33k, after factoring in all the incentives/rebates. So if anything that $33k used price sounds high.

Reality is, prices came down a lot, and also depending on how incentives/rebates are factored in, the "sale price" might be fiction.

Same with other brands too. Back then you saw some companies like Hyundai claiming their EVs were really worth like $60k MSRP, and then turning around and leasing them for $300/month with $0 down. In some states people were leasing brand new EVs for $100/month with $0 down, or less.

Now with the federal rebate gone and states removing at least some of their incentives, the numbers might start to look a little more normal.

streptomycinon America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy

In NJ it goes further and the poorest towns have much better funded schools than average. Been that way for decades. Zuckerberg even gave us an extra $100 million just for fun. None of it has affected the disparity in outcomes.

streptomycinon PWA Browser Scorecards

It says "popular mobile and desktop browsers" but doesn't include the most popular desktop browser, Chrome? I know it has Chrome for Android, but desktop Chrome supports some extra stuff (Shared Workers, File System Access API) which makes it basically the best browser for PWAs. Feels like that level of popularity and quality should be represented somewhere.

Biggest problem for me as a PWA dev is how eager mobile browsers are to delete your local data, which is not part of this scorecard. I guess that's tricky to quantify, but basically they all suck but Safari sucks more.

streptomycinon Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks

My bad, it really annoyed me when npm stopped respecting lockfiles years ago so I stopped using it. That's great news that they eventually changed their mind.

However in rare cases where I am forced to use it to contribute to some npm-using project, I have noticed that the lockfile often gets updated and I get a huge diff even though I didn't edit the dependencies. So I've always assumed that was the same issue with npm ignoring the lockfile, but maybe it's some other issue? idk

streptomycinon Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks

If they were for some reason doing `npm install` rather than `npm ci`, then `npm install` does update packages in the lock file. Personally I always found that confusing, and yarn/pnpm don't behave that way. I think most people do `npm ci` in CI, unless they are using CI to specifically test if `npm install` still works, which I guess maybe would be a good idea if you use npm since it doesn't like obeying the lock file.

streptomycinon Children and young people's reading in 2025

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449080262440...

streptomycinon Children and young people's reading in 2025

I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical violence would be particularly appealing to women in general

Are you familiar with romance novels? Which gender do you think is reading stuff like https://www.amazon.com/Morning-Glory-Milking-Cambric-Creek-e...

streptomycinon No adblocker detected

You could block only ads from Google and Meta. Most large sites use header bidding, where Google's ads are a fallback only if no other ad company bids higher, so most ad revenue come from those other companies. And IIRC Meta doesn't participate in that at all, so for them you'd just have to block ads on their own sites.

streptomycinon Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation

https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/PEG/fundamentals/annual/pro... does not look like the profit margin has increased over the past 5 years.

Also their stock underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years.

I'm not really a finance guy so probably I'm looking at it wrong, but that seems like some pretty bad price gouging.

streptomycinon Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation

Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.

Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.

Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.

streptomycinon Comparing baseball greats across eras, who comes out on top?

FWIW I've implemented a simplistic WAR in a baseball video game I wrote, so I am well aware of what it is :)

> Well there's infinite ways to combine peak and career totals, and "10 years of 1 WAR is equal to 1 year of 10 WAR" is certainly one of them.

That means that you can imagine many different ways of calculating overall career quality, even if you restrict yourself to just using WAR values. Summing up all the seasons is one of them. Others might give some additional value for exceptional seasons. For instance https://a.espncdn.com/magazine/1224NBAHOB.pdf as a simple example. I use a similar formula for Hall of Fame eligibility in my video game.

streptomycinon Comparing baseball greats across eras, who comes out on top?

Well there's infinite ways to combine peak and career totals, and "10 years of 1 WAR is equal to 1 year of 10 WAR" is certainly one of them.

streptomycinon Comparing baseball greats across eras, who comes out on top?

Even just with normal WAR https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_career.shtml he comes out at #38 all time.

I'm not sure summing up career WAR is the best way to rank players, though. It favors guys who played a long time, like Blyleven who played 22 seasons. Sandy Koufax played half as long but was undoubtedly better at his peak. Who was really "better" overall? You probably want some metric that combines career totals and peak production, but ultimately there is no universal way to come up with one definitive ranking, so we will debate it forever.

streptomycinon ‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler

My argument is that people seem to get very worked up when the Jews do something, but basically nobody cares about other similar or even worse things done by other people. I suspect this is most likely because of antisemitism (not that every anti-Israel person is an antisemite, but that the movement would not have become so prominent without a large core of dedicated antisemites).

streptomycinon ‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler

They all already completed that over the past 75 years, there aren't any Jews left in those countries anymore.

streptomycinon ‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler

There are currently about 40 countries that have a higher Muslim percentage than Israel's Jewish percentage. Many of them much higher. Many of them kicked out all their Jews in recent history.

streptomycinon My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself

Advertising is the worst way to monetize an app, except for all the others.

streptomycinon AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

I'm aware of that stuff. That's why I said "mostly". That stuff is bad, but only somewhat impedes the effectiveness of header bidding. There still is bidding going on, there still are many bids being won by companies besides Google, and there's only so much that Google can do about that even with these shenanigans. It's a far cry from all ads being sold directly through Google like on AdSense, where they can simply take a giant cut off the top and call it a day.

streptomycinon AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results.

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.

streptomycinon 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)

With a broad enough definition of "iterate" you could have. Regardless, 99% of users don't want to customize their desktop environment so the defaults are really important.

streptomycinon 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)

I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously...

Personally I still use MATE :)

streptomycinon All AI models might be the same

Oh yeah it's absolutely an interesting article!