Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

And that makes it all the more irritating when you're one of the few people who *has* actually looked into it, because you end up spending all your time and energy arguing with what essentially boils down to religious beliefs strongly held

Like, the vast vast majority of developers is basically just going off vibes and whatever assumptions/beliefs are considered the social default for their particular programming community, almost nobody has actually looked at what's going on or why

Even if only half the people loudly complaining about software performance and efficiency actually did the work of "understanding where the performance issues come from", things would be so much better right now

(Another way to look at this, is that "just write efficient code" is an attempt to solve a collective problem with an individualist solution, and I hopefully don't need to explain why that is doomed to fail)

Potentially controversial opinion: I think that "making software more efficient" is the wrong thing to focus on right now.

There's a significant kernel of truth to the idea that "it's easy to make good code performant, but it's hard to make performant code good" - and so before going all-in on optimizing code as the primary objective, we should make sure that we're optimizing the right thing.

And right now, we're not. We're very much not.

There are significant problems to be solved in how we address software development, and the power dynamics embedded into it - the most obvious example would be the still-widespread fear of dependencies, which actively interferes with making software work better for people, and results in an endless treadmill of broken shit.

And guess what, there *are* significant efficiency benefits to be gained here - everybody using the same well-optimized implementation is going to be much better than everybody using their own homegrown half-optimized "clever" implementation.

But by putting all the focus on software efficiency and performance as the #1 priority, we risk removing all the oxygen in the room for figuring out better ways to deal with dependencies and many of the other industry-wide problems I haven't even mentioned here yet, and ending up in a *worse* place (even efficiency-wise!) than where we *could* be if we started with other problems first.

TL;DR: software efficiency and performance is important, but if you treat it as a goal to chase directly, you will end up with broken and faux-simple software that isn't even as efficient as it could be. Fix the big problems with software first, *then* think about how to optimize the remainder.

It's still bizarre how my brain synchronizes with whatever music I'm listening to, even when I'm doing something completely different

Looks like they basically rewrote the whole event handling system to make Suspense work

TIL

- Please stop publishing your library as minified bundles, I beg of you

Reading the React codebase and, some observations:
- The code quality is pretty okay
- *Fuck* the build system
- Most of this logic should be in reusable stand-alone packages, not in core React
- Why is there a Facebook compatibility mode embedded into the codebase

> (0.5278031243612911).toString(36)
'0.j016klztvb'

frustrated-i-guess.png

(And it will probably come as a surprise to nobody on here that an anarchist view of the matter presents a concrete solution to every single one of these problems)