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@tabatkins.com (bsky)
@tabatkins
🟦 .com šŸ’– Gender, like genre, is an ill-defined concept invented to sell you things. "they" šŸ’– Editor of ~50% of CSS specs
Revacholxanthir.comJoined February 2008

@tabatkins.com (bsky)’s posts

Look, I understand anyone trying out the "I don't really understand but I don't want to get yelled at, so I'll just call myself neutral" position. But it's a scam. The whole thing, top to bottom. Every promoter is either a scammer or a mark actively getting scammed.
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web3 discourse is fascinating. Insiders have little patience for non-believers, skeptics are quick to dismiss the category as a scam. But there are a LOT of curious, quiet people in between. Kudos to anyone taking the time to explain what’s happening in a nuanced & accessible way
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Looks like Firefox is firing essentially *all* of its major feature devs. Calling it now, they're switching to Blink within the next year. Good lord, this sucks.
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People only familiar with autistics from, like, television or something are always so WILD. My dude, I've gotten the exact same order from Subway for twenty years and my wife knows to pre-vet some material textures for me. Trust me on this.
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Blockchain was created as a libertarian fantasy of money without government, a Gold 2.0. It was immediately used almost exclusively for crime. It is singularly responsible for the rise of ransomware (it's so much safer for the ransomers to receive cryptocoins).
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HTTP 262 JAVASCRIPT UNNECESSARILY REQUIRED; the content is available but you'd better have a good CPU and 15 seconds of free time before the first pixel gets painted
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It is the responsibility of all right-thinking people not to sit on the sidelines and go "all these constant scams are bad, but there might be some legit stuff in there", but rather to loudly call out that it's all a scam, and the tech is *barely* interesting anyway.
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Yup, Reader being killed, and in such a callous and bone-headed way, really broke an important part of people conception of Google. It wasn't even widely used, in the grand scheme, but it was widely used by the type of people that set tech trends.
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Google killing Reader will go down in business textbooks as one of the worst business decisions regarding a money-losing product ever. ā€œThis concern — that Google might just give up [...] was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece.ā€ twitter.com/tha_rami/statu…
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Like, what... is the point... of generating infinite variations of your kid's art style. Kids' drawings are good *because your kid drew them*; they're not objectively good to look at. I don't want to see other kids' drawings, generally.
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Like I said, the entire thing is a scam. It's a bubble inflated by people rediscovering pyramid schemes (on the blockchain), reinventing MLMs (on the blockchain), and in some cases just plain running age-old scams for fun and profit (on the blockchain). The rest of us are marks.
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NFTs got explosively big this year because they were convenient for scammers and money launderers, as a way to move large amounts of money around without the IRS paying attention yet (as they'd begun cracking down more heavily on the money-laundering art trade earlier this year).
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A blockchain is a database - an expensive, slow, public, append-only database. 99% of use-cases you hear about "on the blockchain" just want a database. The recent Reddit announcement is a canonical example - only Reddit cares about your Reddit upvotes; they control it *anyway*.
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That is, your website isn't stored on any blockchain, because that's ridiculous. A *link* to your website is, and your "web3 browser" just learns how to follow links to the real internet. The blockchain becomes a shitty second version of DNS on top of the internet, instead.
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Oh, but it's "decentralized", the one advantage it has over traditional databases run by some company. Except it's also *unusable*, so centralized exchanges actually run everything. See that dumb monkey "theft" last week, where the exchange burned the NFT. Govt via corps, again.
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This is, after all, precisely what *every single NFT* is. None of the images are stored "on the blockchain"; that would be ridiculously expensive. What's on the blockchain is, if you're lucky, a JSON blob with a link in it; if unlucky, it's a link *to* a JSON blob with a link.
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mfers writing the matrix multiplication page like "multiplying matrices is an instance of a pelham symbol conjugated over an inverse lie group" and just linking those terms without further explanation
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When I say "CSS is full of global scope", I mean that it acts like this: what if, when you said `x += 1` in JS, it incremented *every single variable named x in the whole program? And if you wanted to increment a *particular* x you had to carefully target it with a longer expr?
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And finally we come to "web3", the idea that websites can be stored on a blockchain. So, all previous versions exist forever, and it costs non-trivial money to deploy a new version. The obvious workaround everyone will use is to just add indirection.
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Man it gets kinda tiring when people willfully misinterpret "it's bad for a major OS to monopolize its platform and not allow competing software to exist; Windows did that and we all rightly hated them for it" as "Safari should die and Chrome should be the only browser".
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Google: "Due to market conditions, we have to lay off 7% of our employees. Our hands are tied, please understand." Also Google: [gives 70 BILLION of company cash directly to investors via stock buybacks] Fuck the corporate sociopaths that have infested our company.
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Just saw a friend complaining about web3 garbage, when someone earnestly replied "kinda ignorant, I work in web3 so guess it can't be fake lol". When asked what web3 stuff they worked on, the answer was "software letting you do microloans against index funds".
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registerLayout("table-like", class { static inputProperties = ["--ļ¼ˆā•ÆĀ°ā–”Ā°ļ¼‰ā•Æ"]; async layout(ch, e, c, props) { if(props.get("--ļ¼ˆā•ÆĀ°ā–”Ā°ļ¼‰ā•Æ").value == "︵┻━┻") { // layout upside-down } else { // layout normally } } }
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Often, it's basically the same question as "why does lead paint taste sweet?" Because our tongues don't detect sugar, they detect a certain triangular molecule surface that is common among sugars and uncommon elsewhere, but lead oxides do have a similar shapre.
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Easy explainer: a "blockchain" is a linked list with an append-only restriction, and appending is made incredibly expensive but super parallelizable, so when things work well a big group of people can work together and it's too expensive for a small evil group to compete.
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The fact that a company can literally buy *any DVD they want* and rent it to me, but the same company has to negotiate ever-shifting now-it's-available-now-it's-not licenses to let me stream the same thing, is a great illustration of exactly how broken our copyright system is.
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Replying to @eevee
it's incredible but there's actually a huge advantage over the mail-a-dvd model: it's a physical thing you own, so no licensing involved
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TIL: `git add --intent-to-add [file]` adds an empty version of the file path to the staging area, so the contents of the new file will show up in `git diff`, get grabbed by `git add -p` and `git commit -a`, etc.
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My mind still regularly boggles at the revelation (from ) that "miles" and "feet" are from completely separate unit systems, only collapsed in the modern age because we munged all the length-related units together. It's *so obvious* once it's pointed out!
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Something that Discord gets right and every other WYSIWYG chat/editor should learn from: When you do things like *this is italics*, the edit field shows it in italics (good), and *keeps the asterisks around*, so you can easily remove them or edit around them.
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Incredible metaphor. Dude *put in the hours* to get good, no easy mode. Privilege was in how they were *able to* put in those hours, while everyone else had to deal with the friction of paying for their games, and having an excuse to visit the arcade in the first place.
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How can I explain privilege? šŸ¤” My dad owned an arcade. When I came in the manager flipped a switch so I had unlimited Ms Pac-Man lives I thought this was normal. I had no idea other kids had to pay ĀÆ\_(惄)_/ĀÆ I got fairly good at the game, better than most That's privilege
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I'm sorry to report that in this and the pigeon one, the pelican is almost certainly *actually* eating them, not "almost" eating them. Pelicans are monsters and will gladly swallow other birds whole and kicking.
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"too big to fail" works when the failure is something you can just command away, like lack of money. It is meaningless nonsense when applied to a microservice architecture falling over with no one around around who can get the whole flock restarted and ramped up.
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Note: don't do what the example shows. The example has same specificity as a * rule there, not good. That example is what :matches() is for. Use :is() to add more conditions to a match, without disturbing its specificity. Niche, but necessary sometimes!
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:is() is the same as :matches(), only it has ZERO specificity, and can be combined with :not() css-tricks.com/almanac/select (No browser support yet, but will be useful!)
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I think Grid is the thing I'm most proud of creating in my career so far. It does the most good for the most people of probably anything I'll ever create. We'll see how Houdini stuff shakes out. V proud of Bikeshed as well, but its scope is more limited.
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Jesus fucking Christ, this was awful. Merged with no review, barely a community announcement (a blog post), and that's in top of this just being, fundamentally, a godawful fucking idea that anyone who knows his LLMs work would have been able to predict.
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Tbh I can see how someone might've thought adding AI explanations to a resource like MDN is a good idea but oh boy did it backfire, both due to lack of testing for LLM hallucinations and apparently not even consulting MDN stakeholders before shipping. github.com/mdn/yari/issue
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Everyone shut up about Safari, the *real* reason to hate Apple is their phones were designer-chic and caused Google to switch away from the blobmoji, the most perfect emoji set to have ever graced this sinful earth
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Replying to @gutmunchies @UN and 2 others
The blobs were the optimal solution to body expressions that went beyond a yellow smiley face. The chair of the Emoji SubCommittee has often mentioned them: twitter.com/jenniferdaniel
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Fuck, I know I knew this, but it wasn't a really conscious "trick". I'll keep this higher in my mind now. Alt: Percentages are reversible. 8% of 25 and 25% of 8 are the same thing, but one's way easier to calculate.
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I'm getting Marie-Hélène sketched by a different artist right now (!) and gosh I love seeing different interpretations and artist's styles applied to the same subject.
Line art of a Marie-Hélène bust commission. As usual she's got a witch hat and a cigarette, and this time she's wearing a warm comfy coat with a puffy fur lining.
Flat colors of the previous art. She's not hard, the outfit colors are all blacks/grays, and she's got her trademark glowy orange earrings too.
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Everyone has a few things that everyone thinks they're wrong about but actually secretly Completely Right. Mine is STOP USING CLOSING TAGS FOR THE HTML ELEMENTS WITH AUTOCLOSING BEHAVIOR, JUST LET THEM CLOSE THEMSELVES NATURALLY IT'S BETTER THIS WAY TRUST ME
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Another day, another person needing to be told that the "lady sues McDonalds because hot coffee was hot" is industry propaganda. (They were way overheating their coffee; she got 3rd-degree burns; they fought tooth-and-nail to avoid giving her *anything* for medical bills.)
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Nat's calligraphic numbering system burrowed into my brain last night, and I figured I could automate it this morning. What I didn't expect was how *ridiculously easy* it was to format, actually. It's just some flexbox and border radius!
Screenshot from the website of "Nat Notation". Numbers are just juxtaposed and contained circles, representing the prime factorization of the number.
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Replying to @tabatkins and @tesseralis
Okay I'm still playing with the code, but here's a less-calligraphic (but easier to code) attempt at the system. Haven't put in the negative tail yet; still trying to figure out how I want to represent it, plus create the scoring system to decide. xanthir.com/etc/nat/
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Quick note: you can't "mute a twitter thread". This is an oddly persistent myth. Someone *mentioned* in a thread can "mute the conversation" which prevents them from seeing notifs, but that's it. You can't say "mute this thread if you don't want spoilers", that's impossible.
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