“Use a different language” is a common defense of javascript, but kind of a weird one.

Yeah. My last job, a PR with commented out code typically wouldn’t get approved. Either leave it in version history, or stick it on a branch

Meta should be broken up and its leadership barred from working in tech (or politics)

This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

Another finger on the monkey’s paw curls closed :(

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I do sometimes joke that in order to hold office you must be able to win a game of Civilization with 2 different victory types.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.

I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.

This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.

But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.

You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names

I don’t think I know anyone who’s cheated. But I also hang out with a lot of polyamorous people, where cheating is possible but I feel like is less common.

Huh. I don’t think I know anyone who cheats so I guess I got lucky. Your post is plausible

Anyone entering through web development. If you’re self taught or did a “coding boot camp”, it might be the only language you’ve used. A lot of places use it for backend stuff now, too

I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.