Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

  • 3 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Source? Like obviously none of us on this platform appreciate manifest v3, but it’s obvious that’s a corporate push, and exactly the thing this new organization might help mitigate.

    On the other hand, the Chromium team has been pumping out all kinds of day-to-day platform improvements for the last 5 years at least. I’m thinking of CSS ergonomics and more robust HTML that make web devs less JS-dependent. The kinds of down-in-the-weeds work that gave us CSS grid, all the useful new CSS pseudoselectors, the command attribute for buttons, etc. etc.

    I’m not a web maximalist, and I would love to see a simpler web/browser prosper, but I just don’t think it’s realistic.


  • I think anyone is welcome to try this, but the core ethos of the web is backwards compatibility. To my unending irritation, even non-standard behaviors/APIs like WebUSB have become critical for sites to function.

    The last time we actually dropped a feature, it was Flash, and that took a decade and there is still tons of effectively dead/permanently lost content because of it.

    Creating a browser that only implements a subset of the standards is fine for very niche usecases but I don’t expect it to ever overtake the major browsers. We’ll see how Ladybird fares as it’s compatibility increases.


  • Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it as someone who has left Chromium behind personally, Chromium is kind of the only choice. I think people outside the browser implementation world underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the modern browser stack and what goes into maintaining compatibility with web standards, much less advancing them.

    We’ve reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions’ share of feature testing and development, because Chromium receives the lions’ share of funding.

    Igalia, an OSS consultancy that does a lot of fairly-funded independent browser development, has lots of material about this. For example, the recent chat between Igalia members and someone from Open Web Advocacy about what to do if the anitrust ruling against Google jeopardize’s Chromium’s funding, and the options are pretty dire.

    Edit: After reading the article, I think this is a really good sign. Bringing together the immediate stakeholders in Chromium’s development and funding bodes well for the possibility of stewarding Chromium in a less Google-dependent, profit-motivated, ad-centric direction. There’s unfortunately a lot of uncertainty about how this will all shake out, but it’s possible that Chromium could become a truly independent project and move back in the direction of user value instead of user-hostile shareholder value.













  • One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it’s funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don’t think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.


  • Since I am not a woman, transgender or otherwise, I won’t comment on the differences or similarities of their experiences. That said, excluding transgender women from a woman-oriented space does not seem helpful or thoughtful to me, just transphobic.

    Also, distinguishing between women and females is not something I’m familiar with and don’t feel good about it. It’s certainly self-evident that afab women and transgender women have on average different lives experiences especially during their formative years in which an interest in tech and CS is likely to be either cultivated or discouraged. Nonetheless, given the significant prejudice against transgender people, I imagine few women would begrudge them participation in this community.



  • This is such a brain dead take. The conference exists to support a group that has been and is actively discriminated against and harassed in the tech industry. All the men crashing the event care not at all about the conference, its mission, and its participants - they’re just desperate to find a job. And while I absolutely sympathize with people suffering unemployment, it’s really shitty (and sadly so typical and indicative of the problem) to flood a space designed for women and non-binary people, completely disregarding them in the race to get ahead.




  • Have been using it since early Alpha days, and I like it a lot but it definitely is still lacking some of the polish of more established tools like Notion.

    1. Does it work offline? Yes, it does. Your changes are saved locally and synced at the next opportunity. Obviously this can occasionally cause conflicts but in practice I’ve never had issues.
    2. Does it have databases like Notion? Not exactly. I was never a Notion power user so I can’t say how well they compare, but Anytype lets you define your own custom objects with custom relations (sort of like database columns) and link any objects together, as well as creating Sets of objects of the same type and Collections of objects of any kind. So I think in principle it can replicate all the features of Notion databases but in practice you’d want to change how you think about it to fit Anytype’s model more easily.
    3. Nothing like that yet, although they just open-sourced all their code and the devs are very active on the official forums receiving feature requests.

  • I think you’re confused on a couple of points.

    1. The laptop just released was the 16 INCH framework, not the 16th generation. It is only the second model of Framework laptop, coming after the 13 inch. They have released parts for 3 generations 11-13) of Intel motherboards for the 13 inch laptop.
    2. Framework is a fairly new company. They’ve only been around for a handful of years. I believe the very first 13 inch laptops shipped in 2021 (plus or minus a year).

    So their track record so far with delivering on their promise of upgrades and repairs is short, but so far it has been stellar.