Phil Hagelberg
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8 June
25 April
From one piece in which more paths are charted towards code independence 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
As the software industry is largely driven by trends and fashion, React's "cool factor" led to a mass amnesia regarding how to make normal, well-designed web apps made of HTML with a sprinkling of scripting on top and everything became one big tangled, brittle mass of Javascript that completely keeled over when scripting wasn't available.
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korrents.com
Dominant companies shape not just their users' choices but the imagination of people actively trying to resist them.Their words
When a company dominates the market, they capture not only their own users but even the imaginations of people actively resisting them.
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Their words
We shouldn't replace Github with one site at all; we need the strength and resilience that only comes with diversity
8 April 2025
From one piece in which web pages are served but also fetched 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Installing Lua libraries via apt-get tends to produce more stable results than installing via luarocks.Their words
Installing via apt-get instead of luarocks will tend to get you more stable results.
in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us
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korrents.com
A library that skips certificate verification by default is unsafe and should not be trusted.Their words
However, luasec does not perform any certificate verification by default! This makes its out-of-the-box behavior very unsafe, and I have to recommend against using it for anything.
in which web pages are served but also fetchedtechnomancy.us
31 December 2024
13 September 2024
From one piece in which social media can be put in your own hands 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Mastodon's web client is a heavy React app that breaks without scripting and loads slowly on old hardware.Their words
when you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.
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Their words
If running a server is hard, fewer people are going to do it, and the power is going to be concentrated in the hands of a technical elite.
31 December 2023
From one piece in which an escape route is discovered 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In a subtle but very real sense, every Lua function is an anonymous function.
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Their words
most macros don't actually do anything other than pure transformation of their arguments. It's almost always safe to run them during static analysis, except you don't know for sure
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korrents.com
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.Their words
Languages with metaprogramming tend to put up fundamental hurdles to static analysis
22 November 2022
From one piece in which legibility comes at a price 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Being easy to find online exposes people, especially those in marginalized groups, to a high risk of targeted abuse.Their words
ask any member of a marginalized group and they'll tell you that being easy to find can have a high cost when it exposes you to targeted abuse.
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Their words
the real goal was to make their users more legible, primarily for advertising purposes, but also to law enforcement and other authorities.
25 July 2022
From one piece in which the word column has several meanings, none of them architectural 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Programming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.
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Their words
In my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
8 February 2022
From one piece in which five different paths lead to methods 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Relying on metatables for method lookup tends to produce surprising, unpredictable behavior.Their words
This is a common problem with using metatables; they can lead to surprising, unpredictable behavior.
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Their words
But I do want to stress that each of these five approaches are all just trade-offs, and none of them are universally wrong.
12 September 2021
6 September 2021
22 July 2021
22 March 2021
1 October 2020
27 July 2020
17 July 2020
22 May 2020
8 March 2020
22 August 2019
3 January 2019
28 May 2018
Nothing matches.
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