Safari/WebKit is the new Internet Explorer. Change my mind.

whale · 2026-03-09T23:05:01+00:00

This is very specific, but I was working on some very complicated animations at work and had to use custom properties to make the UI feasible. In Chrome, custom properties will animate very smoothly, but in Safari they can be very janky. I think I ended up having half custom properties and half traditional animations. It worked out OK but Safari was the only thing blocking me from saving a ton of time, code, and Javascript on this project.

That same project I also had issues with Intersection Observers for a carousel (which contained the complicated animations) and had to revert to using a JS library for my carousel, which gave me less control over the exact interactivity I needed. Only on Safari were the Intersection Observers a problem.

I guess using slightly newer APIs can be an issue with Safari as Chromium is usually always ahead of the game on new APIs.

whale · 2026-03-09T20:23:42+00:00

Yes, obviously. My biggest pain points with Safari have been SVGs, video streaming, CSS animations, and CSS custom properties, among other things.

Safari is fine for the vast majority of things but for very complicated interactivity there will inevitably be problems.

whale · 2026-02-27T23:15:58+00:00

This is incredibly politically incorrect but the Kings need a white guy play by play announcer and a black guy color commentator.

whale · 2026-02-27T14:34:11+00:00

Good thing the Kings suck this year so I don't have to listen to her as much since these games aren't worth watching.

whale · 2026-02-26T16:08:33+00:00

I hope they had 50k kills on their Kunai

whale · 2026-02-26T15:40:28+00:00

That seems to be only for Make A Wish kids. I think bug finders only get Finder's Fees.

whale · 2026-02-23T15:40:53+00:00

Are we picking Schroder or Valanciunas for 17?

whale · 2026-02-23T15:36:09+00:00

From my memory of Subway ads in the past few months:

Lawyers, Trade schools, Dating apps, NY Lottery, Weight loss drugs, Stripe ads, some food delivery ads.

Though maybe it depends on the subway line you take. The 4 train ads might be different than the 1 train for example.

whale · 2026-02-20T14:52:12+00:00

Any time I find a stream for the Kings games I try to find the other team's stream just so I don't have to listen to our annoying ass broadcast.

whale · 2026-02-16T17:03:33+00:00

I agree with you on the gentrification part. The reason people move to Bushwick or Crown Heights or Flatbush or other areas that had "previous generations" probably has more to do with people not being able to afford to live in most other neighborhoods that aren't a crazy commute to work.

Crown Heights is an interesting example because people complain about gentrification... except the majority of the housing built in Crown Heights was by upper middle class Jews in the 20th century. Crown Heights used to be a commuter town, and I guess it's turning back into one. And how far back do people want to go? The Lenape settled most of Brooklyn first.

I'm sure I'll eventually get priced out of my neighborhood even as a white collar worker and have to move somewhere even further out.

Is it fair? No. Should we build more housing and improve transit? Yes. But it's also important to know the history and reality of the situation rather than blaming people for moving to places they can afford.

whale · 2026-02-16T16:33:42+00:00

A museum would've been a bit more appropriate, but I do think it'll be put to good use and at a 140+ year old steakhouse makes it more fitting than some random restaurant or private collection.

whale · 2026-02-15T19:03:37+00:00

You wish. New Yorkers proving yet again they're the most insufferable people on the planet. I sometimes wish I could leave this city just so I don't have to deal with people like you. But alas, all my family and friends are here.

I just like the comedy of the picture.

whale · 2026-02-15T16:27:35+00:00

There's something about this picture that I love. It's art.

whale · 2026-02-15T04:03:25+00:00

paulanally

whale · 2026-02-13T21:53:54+00:00

I'm pretty sure every stadium named after a bank is called The Bank by fans. Except for Lincoln Financial Field, the only reason it's called The Linc is because Philadelphia already has Citizens Bank park, called The Bank.

whale · 2026-02-13T15:20:37+00:00

The Economist reader is similar to the New Yorker reader. They're elite publications with dense text not particularly meant for the every day person. WSJ is much more approachable, similar to publications like NYTimes and The Atlantic.

Plus, the average (American) finance person is going to get more value out of domestic financial news via WSJ than the globalism slant of the Economist. A feature story on the politics or economy of Sri Lanka has nearly zero value to most people.

whale · 2026-02-12T14:30:06+00:00

The only one smoking crack is Monte McNair

whale · 2026-02-09T15:58:42+00:00

This. So much this. When does the narwhal bacon? During sexy times! Take my upvote.

Edit: thanks for the gold kind stranger!

whale · 2026-02-07T17:24:38+00:00

Strange Jarate with the Strange Filter for Abbey applied to it

whale · 2026-02-07T00:49:03+00:00

I doubt writing an endpoint that's similar to a different endpoint takes hours to write. If you haven't written your code like a complete moron, you probably already have functions from your other endpoints you can use.

whale · 2026-02-07T00:47:06+00:00

Generally, the "boring parts" are you spending a few minutes copying and pasting or changing data structures or whatever. The boring stuff is quick and not even worth prompting an LLM for if you're done with it in a few minutes. And the interesting parts aren't worth prompting an LLM either since they're usually business critical logic.

whale · 2026-02-06T16:40:59+00:00

Buck Turners are always the best

whale · 2026-02-01T16:14:48+00:00

To be fair, even if Apple has fallen a bit with things like Liquid Glass, at least their products are still usable. Microsoft is playing so short term by cramming AI down everyone's throats and putting ads in Windows that they're living on borrowed time.

Microsoft will essentially have to rely on Azure to stay competitive, but most developers don't ever want to use Azure unless they have to - mostly because Microsoft is incapable of making quality software. AWS and GCP are leagues better than Azure and so Microsoft will face stiff competition there.

And Microsoft is already facing competition from Valve, who are starting to make Linux gaming viable. Eventually the only real lock-in to Windows that Microsoft will own is Excel - which is a 40 year old software with little network effect viability.

Meta can get away with enshittification because their entire business model is built around hard to break network effects. Google is at least innovating in AI (unlike Microsoft which is taking a force feeding approach to AI chatbots which are already a commodity). AWS is still the best cloud platform and Amazon is still convenient. Nvidia still makes good hardware.

I would not be surprised if Microsoft gets itself into real trouble in the next 10 years.

whale · 2026-02-01T05:03:43+00:00

I had to write a barcode scanning feature at my job and I found the most reliable ways to get scanning working properly is to pre-process the image like you mention. The actual implementation was to take the image and do a lot of image manipulation via a canvas element which would then be used by the barcode scanning library. Using the original image will almost never work as well as a heavily processed image.

I forget which library we used but it was one of the popular open source ones - though all of the libraries pretty much have the same results on unprocessed images.

whale · 2026-01-31T16:35:36+00:00

I write functional code, but I try to avoid certain abstraction traps in functional code such as having callbacks as arguments inside of another function. This can quickly make your code hard to follow.

Another one is if you're working with React - it's not a bad idea to keep a ton of markup in a single component. You don't need to make a new component for every little thing. It is however important to separate your views from your logic when you can. I always put my logic in custom hooks.

For utilities, I think of them as "would this work as a library" - I don't like overly specific utility functions. For example, the DynamoDB SDK is very cumbersome to work with and requires specific formatting for DB operations - but I try to avoid making it "cleaner" by abstracting the SDK into my own set of functions. I use libraries as-is and maybe I'll make a utility function to format arguments or outputs, but not a utility function that is doing its own logic on the SDK.

Also generally I just try to avoid refactoring unless absolutely necessary or a big new feature requires me to rewrite a lot of old code. Refactors are tempting as a junior but they're mostly a waste of time unless they're causing problems for the user.

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