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

  • 8 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • Microsoft produces a plethora of good learning materials if you’re struggling with the basics or specific concepts. I recommend their C# for Beginners course to get a good overview of real C#.

    Once you have a good handle on the basics, I would echo others’ advice that having some kind of project or goal to work towards is the surest path to learning, because you have external motivation to use what you’re learning and look up things as you need them. Is there some reason you chose C# specifically as your next language, maybe for game dev, web dev, or Windows apps?










  • I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.

    Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.



  • My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.

    For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.


  • As with all things, there’s a trade off: how much do you value the [convenience/ecosystem/insert other thing that proprietary system offers you] compared to the ongoing cost - monetarily but also in terms of privacy, market manipulation, environmental impact, etc. of supporting and relying on the proprietary system.

    You can’t do your work without connecting to Exchange because Microsoft has leveraged decades of monopolistic gains to make Outlook the default option for any “serious” business, and has invested even further in making inconvenient (or soon impossible) to connect to Exchange from outside their sanctioned walled gardens. Demanding that Linux solve that for you is akin to demanding that the person commuting on bike undo a century of automotive-centric urban expansion in the US so that they don’t interrupt your commute. It’s not their fault they can’t solve the problem and it doesn’t help anyone to get mad at them for doing their best to behave rationally in a system stacked to only serve the 1%’s corporate interests.





  • I switched from Zsh to Nushell almost two years ago and I have never looked back. If you need POSIX compliance, Nushell is a no go. But it sounds like your real problem was just that Zsh was familiar whereas fish was not. Nushell strikes the perfect balance of offering the commands you’re used to but letting everything just make intuitive sense. Plus, its help command is so far above and beyond other shells. I rarely need to open the Nushell docs (even though they’re really good), and I never have to go the community (even though it’s awesome), because I can figure pretty much everything out just from interacting help within the terminal.