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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • You make a compelling point, for sure. There are definitely features that fall into that category (eg page transitions), there are a lot of other things coming out these days that just make life easier.

    For example, in chrome (and in the spec) you can now animate between ‘height: [number]’ and ‘height:auto;’ just the other day, I had to write a python function to estimate the highest of a menu based on its length * the line height of the list items, so I could provide an exact height to animate to. It works, but it’s hacky and gross. It would be nice to have access to the solution.



  • You’re not wrong, but, like with critics of other “abolish such-n-such” statements, you’re missing a core part of it: replacing “such-n-such” with something better. Copyright has a few important purposes, and I don’t think anyone would want to eliminate it without covering those — and the need for creators to survive, and maybe even flourish, is chief among them.

    (Same thing with “defund the police” — the intention was to redirect that funding to crime prevention and “alternative policing” (eg send therapists to mental health emergencies instead of cops). That was arguably the biggest PR fail of the century.)

    Also, very very minor point, but as a librarian:

    content libraries

    I think “content collections” would be a better term, to preserve the free-to-share subtext of the word “library” — and “collection” has more of a hoarding context, which fits.


  • That’s true, but, obviously there’s a market share difference between those two. And the fact that it’s ALWAYS ff that lags behind, it’s not like there’s cool things that ff can do that chrome can’t.

    And, more importantly, there’s the browser I like (ff) which doesn’t do the thing, and the browsers I don’t like, which do.

    FWIW tho, i don’t think OP will actually apply to ALL chromium browsers. I’ve been using Vivaldi when I cheat on Firefox, and none of the anti-adblock changes Google’s been making have impacted Vivaldi, and I assume that pattern will continue.



  • Most people say things like “fuck copyright” because it’s currently set up to benefit employers, large companies, and wealthy people; creators are an obstacle in copyright law. Current copyright law hinders creativity and centralizes wealth. Fuck copyright.

    If copyright law was creator-centric, there would be a lot fewer people saying “fuck copyright”.

    Personally I’d probably still be against copyright, but only if there was some other way to take care of artists, like a UBI or something.






  • HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

    CSS is weird because it’s very “easy” so “real developers” kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn’t build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css’s vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind’s vocabulary.

    JavaScript on the other hand is a “real” programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it’s a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that “real developers” like – and, as most people’s first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided – but, unlike CSS, most developers can’t avoid it.

    There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won’t get into them now, since it doesn’t sound like you’re at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

    TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don’t let it hold you back.


  • Hi everyone, JP here. This person is making a reference to the Weird Al biopic, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

    Weird Al is an incredible person and has been through so much. I had no idea what a roller coaster his life has been! I always knew he was talented but i definitely didn’t know how strong he is.

    His autobiography will go down in history as one of the most powerful and compelling and honest stories ever told. If you haven’t seen it, you really, really should.

    ITT NO SPOILERS PLS



  • I guess my question is, why would anyone continue to “consume” – or create – real csam? If fake and real are both illegal, but one involves minimal risk and 0 children, the only reason to create real csam is for the cruelty – and while I’m sure there’s a market for that, it’s got to be a much smaller market. My guess is the vast majority of “consumers” of this content would opt for the fake stuff if it took some of the risk off the table.

    I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t ban ai generated csam, like, imagine being a politician and explaining that policy to your constituents. It’s just not happening. And i get the core point of that kind of legislation – the whole concept of csam needs the aura of prosecution to keep it from being normalized – and normalization would embolden worse crimes. But imagine if ai made real csam too much trouble to produce.

    AI generated csam could put real csam out of business. If possession of fake csam had a lesser penalty than the real thing, the real stuff would be much harder to share, much less monetize. I don’t think we have the data to confirm this but my guess is that most pedophiles aren’t sociopaths and recognize their desires are wrong, and if you gave them a way to deal with it that didn’t actually hurt chicken, that would be huge. And you could seriously throw the book at anyone still going after the real thing when ai content exists.

    Obviously that was supposed to be children not chicken but my phone preferred chicken and I’m leaving it.


  • Follow up question – I’m not OP but I’m another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

    I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of “light touch” and “doing a really good job”. (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

    For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites’s repo down and got into it.

    The CSS was a mess. I’ve done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (–foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a “.dark-mode” class in the body tag.

    But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

    If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range – some being more than 10-15% different from each other – so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn’t give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

    My PR wasn’t accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don’t mind that it wasn’t accepted, but i just don’t know why. I don’t want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.


  • While you’re not wrong, it’s important to retain a global perspective. There are “communist” leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn’t always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

    And then there’s pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I’m not 100% confident in this history, and there’s no way I’m going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn’t do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, “there’s some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let’s give them more guns.” And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

    What I’m getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be utopia.

    But that also doesn’t mean that communism can’t be good, or at least better.


  • Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.

    “You don’t understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can’t be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition.”

    Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps


    Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it’s simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.

    But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a “say” (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.

    In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.