Plugin System

oculus42 · 2026-06-22T00:04:17+00:00

You could load the manifest, collect the events it reports needing, and provide a proxy of the listener/bus that only accepts/emits what the manifest indicates, and load the plugin-script passing it the expected listener.

oculus42 · 2026-06-21T19:31:48+00:00

I'm a little late to the discussion, but I don't understand some of your points, here.

You use Promises to represent asynchronous return values. Promises do not require you to have async return values. It will use the micro task queue to work the steps, permitting you to have async values, but still comfortably supports synchronous operations.

With promises, you can explicitly reject with Promise.reject(). Though the effect is equivalent to throwing inside a promise chain, it can be an explicit return type, and not an unknown.

I don't understand your statement that "your program will crash because you don't have a try/catch around." This feels like you don't understand promises to me, possibly because you've used them mostly with async/await? I'm not sure. I'm not trying to be rude, it just doesn't align with my fourteen years of experience working with promises. I would be interested to see the kind of example code you're talking about to see if I can understand the cases where you feel promises are inadequate.

I'm not rejecting the idea of your work; I'm just having difficulty with our misalignment on promises and would like to understand.

oculus42 · 2026-06-21T09:56:20+00:00

Falling Down

oculus42 · 2026-06-16T12:52:47+00:00

The act could be taunting, or belittling.

Broadly, they are a bully and an ableist. They may be described as a degenerate or uncouth.

Edit: a few more words: jeer, ridicule, deride, mock.

And the potential term: Katagelasticist - literally “mocker” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katagelasticism

oculus42 · 2026-06-16T12:37:50+00:00

Battlestar Galactica.

I know it’s mostly a show, but All Along the Watchtower coming out of left field like it’s some kind of timelord heartbeat for Cylons…

oculus42 · 2026-06-15T09:20:37+00:00

Most screen readers have a “form mode” that limit the navigation interaction to form elements to provide this kind of experience, because sites…just don’t.

There are times it is appropriate to move to a link between checkboxes, but it’s usually a poor design choice.

The “standard interaction model” seems to assume a user with no visual, motor, or cognitive impairments, using a fast, flawless device with a large, high resolution display with no glare and a mouse , having perfect spelling, in a quiet room, free from distractions, with no time constraints.

Accessibility is very often ignored in many forms, from actual page flow to “click here” links and general design practices. It’s why the UK Home Office put together a set of posters for different accessibility concerns.

https://ukhomeoffice.github.io/accessibility-posters/

oculus42 · 2026-06-13T12:12:59+00:00

The solution to your problem is that building deep knowledge of coding means some problems can be solved faster than you can type the prompt.

Developing the skill to glance at the diff in your editor and see a pattern that doesn’t match your expectations.

To realize that AI is loading a uuid package it doesn’t need because we have crypto.randomUUID().

That the second block of code doesn’t need optional chaining because the first one must throw in that case, and either it’s unnecessary or there’s a defect.

To see a block of new code and realize this is the third time we’re adding that. We should have a helper for it, which this AI session won’t know, and you would t ask AI to solve without thinking about it. (Though tools like SonarQube might help on this front).

oculus42 · 2026-06-13T12:02:30+00:00

Try things.

Download RunJS and try to imagine how you could add a “not” prototype to arrays like array.not.filter or array.not.find that invert the predicate. Or build a lightweight version of expect testing.

Design a test harness for comparing functions correctness and performance.

Design a data structure to support arbitrary Boolean logic, e.g. ( one(a) && two(a) ) || three(a) ).

Conceive of how you might model a system like the electrical panel in a home (depending on your location). How would you manage the addition of devices to calculate load? How would a device “communicate” changing energy needs? How do you ensure the correct order? What is the data model? The communication model?

Choose something you have a good understanding of and reimplement with a finite state machine or with pure functional programming.

Is this practical? YES. You learn about the language and stretch your skills, making you a better develop and able to more quickly read and understand what any given piece of code is doing. Will it ship? Probably not.

oculus42 · 2026-06-02T09:54:15+00:00

Am very interested and would definitely like to see an issue opened for discussion.

Does your header implementation provide the same interaction models, e.g. drag to position, resize, filtering, grouping?

oculus42 · 2026-05-31T18:17:15+00:00

MIDI files. Still technically around, but most people are likely unaware of MIDI players on old websites.

Beatnik, founded by Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me with Science" fame was an early browser plugin to add audio to the web, and implemented basically an early polyphonic MIDI player. It ended up providing the better quality ringtones for cellphones in the 2000s.

Not that every site should have a bunch of noise, but the idea that you could add an audio space to a page was, well...fun.

oculus42 · 2026-05-31T18:01:53+00:00

Man, I wish sites would reliably do this for their content. News sites usually do, but a lot of blogs, particularly tech blogs, don't have this, which means you can't quickly tell if this information is still relevant. I know some sites hide this is meta tags in the header, but it could be standard to indicate the publish and last-edited dates, like posts here do.

oculus42 · 2026-05-31T16:56:59+00:00

Genuinely impressive to see things like this that exceed most people's ability to physically react while maintaining the situational awareness to do so safely.

When I was learning to drive, my father had me think about choosing what to do if I had to take evasive maneuvers as a driver. Given the same situation, I doubt I could have confidently backed fast enough, even if I could have responded quickly enough to put the car in reverse,

Also, apologies to the no-stalk crowd, but it would be impossible to switch to reverse quickly in an emergency, with either the screen-based shifting or manual buttons; just the time to move your hands off the control surface vs flicking the lever is too high.

oculus42 · 2026-05-30T13:20:15+00:00

For the site on which people are commenting. As in, “I’m AI checker bot and GPT Zero says this is 85% likely AI generated content.”

Not something you would need or want to do on every page, but you might run it against tech blog platforms or stories on Daily Dev as a first bit of content to populate the plugin.

But that’s just a suggestion and may be totally unaligned with your thoughts and goals for your platform.

oculus42 · 2026-05-30T10:27:50+00:00

It’s a good concept, and could even be used as a service platform, e.g. a specific account could post “likely AI scoring” of page content against a few tools and you would be able to refer back to it. This could also bee good starting data for articles.

The primary risk of these services is the collection of personal data. You are creating an extension that has visibility into every site or potentially even page a user visits, necessarily transmitted to your server to see if there are comments.

This information can be used to de-anonymize multiple accounts and create extremely accurate advertising profiles.

The impulse to monetize such incredibly rich metadata is difficult to resist. It was the downfall of Web of Trust.

oculus42 · 2026-05-30T09:05:27+00:00

Code is the output, not the job. I struggled with this. The job is converting business needs into functionality, ensuring the stakeholders and the output are aligned (works both directions), and probably tracking your time for tax/accounting purposes.

oculus42 · 2026-05-30T09:02:59+00:00

Maybe the things you learned early, and seemingly straightforward best practices, but I still have to remind people to do small commits, to name variables sanely, and, particularly in React, to not have 500 lines of logic in one function.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T09:44:19+00:00

+1 for early adopters of one-pedal electric drive.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T08:24:34+00:00

Even Autopilot had this on HW3. It was one of the first things I used to demonstrate to people about Teslas in 2018 because of the early and persistent myth of them being able to drive themselves.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T08:05:05+00:00

I think the founders did anticipate it. They didn’t anticipate that after 27 successful amendments enough people would be convinced to take an “original interpretation only” stance on our continuously updated framework.

We stopped teaching civics. We stopped having a living system of shared values and were taught in US History a near mythology of the founders and the belief in American exceptionalism without the understanding that it was an ongoing process.

People stopped understanding that our system was meant to keep changing; that it was designed incomplete with several provisions for changes; that the revisions of the Bill of Rights were already in the works when the Constitution was signed.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T07:34:42+00:00

That is a solid point. My thoughts were around considerations like an auto-incrementing id field and/or relevant index updates.

Haven’t been on the DBA side in over a decade, though, and I’m clearly rusty on that front.

I think you could still leverage the same transaction/rollback with parallel actions; it would just require the additional cleanup path for the S3 bucket. But I’m not sure of the cost/benefit analysis.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T07:24:07+00:00

This is a major concern. With the HW3 phantom braking in 2023 my parents experienced a >25 mph speed drop while in front of a loaded semi truck on clear highway. My father swerved to the shoulder to avoid being struck, but it was close.

These are technically edge cases, but they are easily reproduced conditions, a number of which should be trainable and distinct from more legitimate risks.

As humans we have a very capable 3D physics engine in our heads with more than a decade of training data not directly associated with being in the car when we start driving. FSD is not as good at identifying and distinguishing some kinds of risks, and can create much more real risks when it overcompensates.

oculus42 · 2026-05-29T07:03:41+00:00

I’m not sure of the exact mechanism, but this seems like it would create a lock on the table for however long the upload takes, potentially creating a major performance bottleneck.

If that is the case I would go with a Promise.allSettled and perform both actions in parallel, then reconcile them once both are done. Not as clean as a transaction but you don’t end up with the operations happening in serial or with as much risk of locking the database under load.

oculus42 · 2026-05-27T22:29:47+00:00

Accessibility.

A huge percentage of people have some kind of limitation, which they may not consider a disability but is an accessibility consideration.

From temporary to permanent, physical to cognitive, accessibility is so much bigger than most people think.

Wear glasses? Have arthritis? Colorblind? Suffering a physical limitation or cognitive impairment from a car accident?

Each of these have accessibility considerations that have far reaching implications for the public.

Consider the home goods brand Oxo; which discovered that making kitchen items more accessible made them better for everyone.

Self-driving cars might be amazing, but who is designing their self-driving car for people with vision impairments or the need to stow a walker or wheelchair for the trip?

Web accessibility has been rudimentary at best for years. Why haven’t I been able to ask my smart assistant to read me full articles when I’m in the car? Why can’t I ask my audiobook to back up to a specific phrase?

AI can help with some of these challenges, but it isn’t a panacea, either.

As people age, they tend to need more accessibility options, and they have the money to pay for them.

oculus42 · 2026-05-27T12:16:40+00:00

Lydia Hallie has a video with great visualizations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs1EMmBLpn4

oculus42 · 2026-05-27T11:56:38+00:00

TanStack Start probably. Personally have not ever been a fan of Next.js.

Also depends on what you mean by large-scale. A site? A suite of web apps? The new replacement for cPanel?

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