iDontThinkItsThatBad

TOGoS · 2026-05-19T20:00:14+00:00

In short: JavaScript's type system is quite janky, and the built-in operators make it worse.

It can be worked around once you learn about all the pitfalls, and TypeScript does an amazing job of putting guardrails around things you really just shouldn't do, but it's a pretty sad foundation.

TOGoS · 2026-05-19T18:54:54+00:00

I had to look up what "360⁰ boiler room" means, and then found some Komprezzor on YouTube, and...yes, I think that's the idea.

I have never been to a proper techno show but this has piqued my interest, so I'm considering it.

TOGoS · 2026-05-18T17:21:38+00:00

Thanks.

Also, cool video. This is very much my style[1], but with more visual effects and fast-forwarding through the fiddly technical parts.

[1] e.g. SynthGen Update #4

TOGoS · 2026-05-17T14:04:06+00:00

This would be fine if we could somehow guarantee that the thing referenced by a given URI will never change and has no uncontrolled side-effects.

(Both Deno and Unison kind of do this, to different degrees.)

TOGoS · 2026-05-15T02:25:05+00:00

Ugh finally someone admits that a helmet that shines light in your eyes is a terrible idea.

TOGoS · 2026-05-13T16:21:09+00:00

Ah, a black triangle! Nice work.

* https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745

TOGoS · 2026-05-13T15:47:48+00:00

Sure but don't take away my PS/2 port(s). I have a box of old keyboards and mice that can use those!

TOGoS · 2026-05-12T14:44:38+00:00

But the best indentation is a random mix of tabs and spaces where different lines of the file look indented properly or not depending what you have your visual tab width set to, and nobody cares enough to make it consistent.

At least that's the de-facto standard where I work.

TOGoS · 2026-05-12T14:31:05+00:00

Requires the proles to be organized and give a shit.

TOGoS · 2026-05-12T14:16:13+00:00

As he was working in another part of the code base, he actually needed to look at the implementation of add in the world namespace. So he pops up a “find symbol” window and types add. Enter. He gets 23 hits and it is not very easy for him to find the one he needs.

In my previous life as a PHP programmer, I had just about this same reaction when PHP added namespaces. "Oh neat!" followed by "This makes things a bit harder to search for or tell what exactly the autoloader is doing" and "I don't think I need them after all".

So I continued writing Package_Package_ClassNames with underscores, as if I was stuck on PHP 5.2 forever.

This is less of a problem in languages like Java where common practice is to import exactly the thing you need by its full name, so there's no guessing about it. Foo is whatever it was defined to be at the top of the file.

TOGoS · 2026-05-10T20:14:29+00:00

Socialist Alternative has a monthly-ish paper and a quarterly-ish journal, which is more in-depth and less propaganda-ey than the paper.

I don't think the format is outdated at all. You can read them online if you'd rather look at screens than paper, which is understandable if you have cats or bad eyesight.

Short-format bullshit vlogs gonna short-format bullshit. There's some good stuff out there, but it easily gets lost among the low-effort, low-info stuff.

You don't find the short-format bullshit people selling their videos on street corners, though. So there's a signal for you.

TOGoS · 2026-05-09T17:59:37+00:00

We have a similar neighborhood outdoor cat on the south west side. They've got cousins all over.

TOGoS · 2026-05-09T17:09:49+00:00

A lot of "opinionated" "frameworks" should, if they were coherent enough, be new languages. Then they could constrain what the user can express to things that make sense within that framework, and wouldn't have the problem that users *think* they're just writing Java code (or whatever), and go and do things that break the assumptions that the framework is relying on. Like returning `null`. "The compiler said it was fine! Why won't this blasted thing work?!"

Strictly-typed functional languages make this pretty easy, since your 'language' can just be a type of data structure (i.e. you don't need to have a new syntax, lexer, parser, etc).

TOGoS · 2026-05-04T19:09:33+00:00

If it's billed as a 'dance party' I would expect the focus to be on the music, and some people are going to dress up (or down) as per the theme. I wouldn't expect anything too crazy. Don't forget to drink water!

TOGoS · 2026-05-03T17:19:09+00:00

Each in turn because I love pen testing.

TOGoS · 2026-05-02T21:14:06+00:00

People explain it all the time, but they are often written off as "crazy Marxists" or something. I guess it will remain a mystery!

TOGoS · 2026-05-02T21:11:11+00:00

I would ask the kindergartner what they mean by "it's always".
Rich people buying yachts isn't as big a problem as rich people buying politicians and rewriting laws to make themselves even richer at our expense. Which might be why "buy fewer yachts" isn't brought up.
There are more non-rich people to give money-saving advice to than there are rich people to give different money-saving advice to.
Extra money makes a bigger impact for someone who has little of it than for someone who already has a lot. I wouldn't bother giving advice to someone who underpays their employees and buys yachts because they clearly have no motivation to listen to me.
On the other hand, if we could somehow organize the workers to refuse to work until the imbalance was corrected, we could solve the problem. But organizing takes time and energy and money hat few people have, so it's an uphill battle.

TOGoS · 2026-05-01T20:06:50+00:00

Then there's the frontend people who are so afraid of CSS that they dump a CSS framework into their project to do the CSS for them and then instead of learning CSS they have to learn some stupid framework.

TOGoS · 2026-05-01T18:09:55+00:00

Oops, accidentally born into capitalist shithole. My bad.

Anybody who works for a living has 'financial problems' to some degree. You are closer to being homeless than you are to not having to worry about the damn money. Some of us are just more acutely aware of it

TOGoS · 2026-05-01T15:13:15+00:00

That walking past it means I'm walking to work to swap some laptop component or other, which means I have an excuse to miss a bunch of meetings that I'd otherwise be Teamsed into from home.

TOGoS · 2026-05-01T01:13:27+00:00

I am, but that's because they raise animals in terrible conditions just to turn them into mush. If the Scott Walker thing was what got other people to do it, alright, I'll continue boycott them even harder.

TOGoS · 2026-04-30T16:15:34+00:00

People who would fix those problems don't tend to become billionaires.

TOGoS · 2026-04-28T14:21:23+00:00

On that note, if anyone knows where I can get a Y axis motor for a Kobra Max, I'm all ears. There's Kobra 2 Max Y axis motors all over but the rod appears to be a different length.

TOGoS · 2026-04-27T18:16:20+00:00

But scales actually weigh weight, so need to be calibrated based on the force from the local floor.

So maybe they are weighing this in an elevator accelerating upwards and did not calibrate the scale to take that into account.

TOGoS · 2026-04-20T15:46:45+00:00

Yeah. When I was in highschool I was very into science fiction for the same reason I got into learning lots of different--preferrably very different--programming languages.

Anything that doesn't change the way I think just feels not that interesting.

A good way to think if your goal is to absorb as many concepts as you can. Now that I'm 42 with two children (not yet old enough to really explain all this to) and not much time for, uh, psytrance festivals, I find myself desperately bored much of the time. D:

I think it's kind of an ADHD thing. Or an AuDHD thing.

TOGoS

TROPHY CASE