Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

In a healthier world this problem might be sidestepped by having mutual recommendations from trusted peers, but due to the sheer amount of capital involved in software, that mechanism is completely broken in our world

I feel like almost the entire problem of framework churn and technical debt can be understood by a single explanation: framework design is closer to language design than it is to programming, and just like it's hard to design a good language without experience with the process involved, it's also hard to recognize whether someone else (a framework author) has done a good job if you don't have the skill yourself.

And so most frameworks are designed like software projects rather than language projects, do not work well as a result, and most users would not recognize this until it's too late because they're not used to the abstract modelling process that's needed to spot it early

Was just reading the court press release for the prosecution of the Tornado Cash developer, and aside from how I feel about Tornado Cash itself, the framing in that press release is infuriating; instead of focusing on actual harms done, it mentions them almost as a sidenote, and instead goes hard om emphasizing how the "serious lack of mechanisms for identification and prosecution" (so you know, anonymity) is the real problem and how that makes it a tool for criminals.

Once again, a government seems more concerned with its own unquestionable power than with the actual harms done to people.

Meow? #38c3

Someone calling a language like JS or Python "untyped" immediately tells me a lot about their beliefs regarding typing

Over the years there's been a couple of folks pushing Web Components very hard, and making one particular argument that has been grating on me: "tools like React are bad tools because they don't support Web Components".

The exact phrasing is usually different, but the implication is always there; Web Components are, well, The Standard(tm) and so anything that doesn't use them is reinventing the wheel and doing so badly.

And it seems like none of these people have ever asked themselves: *why* does it not use WC? WC have been around for a while now, and frameworks have not transitioned to them. Why not? Usually the answer is "because their model is not compatible with them".

And *this* is where things go sour. Because then the answer of WC proponents is usually "well they are badly designed then". And I'm sorry, what? Who made you emperor of design techniques?

If WC are supposedly a neutral standard, yet it cannot support existing widespread usage patterns, *that makes it a bad standard*. It means that your design is too opinionated, and that it's more like a framework than a primitive!

This particular line of reasoning is pretty much the #1 I do not like interacting with WC folks, because sooner or later it always turns into "laundering an opinionated framework design as a standard", and this is what kills agency. We need better building blocks, not an opinion cast down onto us from the heavens.

A lot of ADHD researchers could be saving a lot of time and "further research required" statements by, y'know, actually asking folks with ADHD what they need