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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • The British plug has a lot of features that are supposed to make it very, very safe. It’d be interesting to see if there’s a study out there that tries to make apples-to-apples comparisons of electrical accidents in different countries. Do those features actually work out in practice?

    The US plug is bad, but does that actually translate into more accidents? Hard to say. If you can do the study above, then you can start making the argument for switching to something else.



  • Intel’s core product became big primarily due to decisions they had nothing to do with.

    Roll back the clock to IBM developing their first PC. They usually developed hardware in house, but they were late to the game and needed something fast. They choose to use off the shelf hardware, with the BIOS being the one thing that’s proprietary.

    For the CPU, they could have gone with Motorola or MOS or Texas Instruments. They choose Intel. Why? Because Intel fulfilled a memory contract on another project, so sure, use their 8088.

    Compaq then reverse engineers the BIOS and the whole thing pases legal muster. Now anybody can make a compatible, but they have to use the same CPU that IBM did.

    Microsoft does its thing with DOS and Windows. Everyone is writing software against that. Now everyone starts getting locked in.

    After that, all Intel has to do is keep x86 going well enough that nobody wants to make the effort to switch. Yes, AMD and Cyrix are out there, but at this point, they’re both the cheap alternative that isn’t as good.

    They fucked up the 64-bit transition. AMD did the version we all use now.

    Intel’s entire success is based on making good on a memory contract to IBM decades ago. That’s it. It hinges primarily on decisions they did not make themselves. Weren’t even in the room at the time.




  • I don’t have a fundamental problem with web apps having access to GPU resources. There’s obviously games that can benefit from that. Engines like Godot and Unreal can directly use a web stack as a build target. It makes sense there.

    In general, I don’t have a fundamental problem with any of this being there provided the attack surface area can be managed. Which it isn’t, but that’s another discussion.

    I have a problem with the tools being applied indiscriminately. I’d almost say that every site should start vanilla, and you’d have to specifically justify any use of JavaScript.


  • JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful

    Not even close. I wrote a management system for the keyfobs at my makerspace. I had some JavaScript in there previously for things like loading up logs with pagination over ajax calls or searching for members by name. I took all that out and made it straight server side HTML. It’s fast, takes minimal browser memory, and the back button works with zero fuss.

    Just try making an application that way sometime. Yes, you can find places for targeted use of JavaScript, but every web dev should at least try making a project without it.


  • As a web dev, I’ll say that yes, it is achievable. The problem isn’t what’s possible, but that we’ve trained new frontend devs in certain ways and given them certain tools. Those tools are being used in places they shouldn’t, and those same new frontend devs are failing to learn the fundamentals of HTTP and HTML.

    React, for example, is a JavaScript framework that’s become incredibly popular in recent years. It’s meant for “single page applications”. I once made a control panel for a vacuum former with it, where you could turn on zones of heating and get the temperature updated in real time. You’re not expected to navigate away from that page while you’re using it. I think this is a good place to use React, though you could make the argument that it should be a native GUI app. (I’ll say that it isn’t that important; this thing runs fine on a Raspberry Pi 3, which is the target platform).

    React is not a good option for an ecommerce site. You want to click on a product to check out its details. That means you’re going between very different views (pages) a lot. React increases complexity with no clear gain. An argument can be made for the address/payment/finalization steps. The money people like that because there’s a strong correlation between streamlining checkout and how often cash ends up in their hands.

    A lot of those sites use React, anyway, for everything. Why? Because we’ve trained a bunch of new frontend devs so much on it that they have no idea how to make a site without React. This overspecialization has been detrimental.


  • JavaScript is directly related to almost everything that makes browser tabs take up more RAM than a typical PC in 1998. There are ways to use it in targeted ways that improve responsiveness (objectively or subjectively). The web as it stands is so far beyond that justification that it’s almost laughable to even bring it up.

    I run a personal blog with zero JavaScript; just HTML, CSS, and some pictures. Firefox’s memory snapshot says it uses <3MB on the homepage. Amazon’s homepage is currently giving me 38MB, and this comment section with the Alexandrite frontend is giving me 30MB. Those two may even be at the low end of what’s out there.






  • Capitalism is creating a level of censorship that exceeded what the US government was ever able to do after the Warren court. Parts of this have been there for a long time. You can drop f-bombs on cable TV all you like; the FCC can’t do anything about it since it’s not over public airwaves. They generally don’t do that, because advertisers don’t like it. Capitalism set the rule, not the government.

    YouTube has put this idea into overdrive. You can’t make a straightforward, monetized video about the Holocaust anymore, because the language you would have to use would violate YouTube’s written and unwritten rules. Meanwhile, actual fucking Nazis have had little issue using YouTube to spread their bullshit.

    Credit card companies have had issues with porn sites in terms of fraud reporting. Not necessarily because of actual fraud–if the site you use is under CCbill, it’s fine–but because some guy’s spouse sees the card transactions, asks what this particular line is for, and he lies and says it’s probably fraud and he’ll call it in. Get more than a few of those, and the processor will always be flagged for review.

    They do outright stop some of the more fringe porn. Bree Mills (of Adulttime) has said that they get limited by the credit card industry far more than the government. All the faux-incest videos go out of their way to mention in dialog that everyone is a step family and over 18. You won’t find scat on Kink.com, again because their payment processor won’t allow it.

    That’s been the situation for a few decades, but it has gone beyond that in the last few years. They tried it on OnlyFans, and the company maneuvered things to show why that’s an incredibly bad idea, and then the card companies backed down. But they’re trying again elsewhere, and they’re starting to be successful. I severely doubt they had any significant fraud issues on Steam or itch.io, NSFW items or otherwise.

    Ultimately, this stuff is a tiny slice of their revenue. If they want to shut it all down on a moral crusade, they will barely notice the hit to their numbers.

    On a side note, I’d like the advocate that you should pay for porn if it’s within your means. You’ll often find better quality stuff at sites that properly run their sets with consent. If you like queer porn or unconventional body types, there are a lot of sites for that which just don’t show up on PornHub.


  • When you’ve been shown facts that contradict your argument, concede politely. People will respect you for it. In fact they’ll probably respect you more than if you go down endless chains of trying to save face.

    Remember, this should go both ways. There will be times when people concede to you, and other times when you need to concede.

    I don’t think it needs to take very many people doing this to create a snowball effect where it becomes the common way to debate.