Frezik

Love the Fox banner. “Threatening consequences”. The consequences being that he’ll leave.

That’s right, the worst thing that can happen to a person is to not be in Trump’s presence.

And South Park isn’t shy about showing his tiny dick. Nobody else can get away with that.

I have. All of them have to hold back something because their format doesn’t allow it. South Park is a format that’s designed to be crude, and that’s what Trump deserves.

South Park has been the only major media voice giving this Administration the respect that it’s due. It’s the only one uncensored enough that it can.

This and the ballroom are Trump trying to leave a permanent mark on the White House behind. If nothing else, he’ll die of natural causes within the next decade, and he knows his name will be cursed from then on. If you have to call it “The Donald J Trump Ballroom”, then he still has something.

The group that recently went after Steam is from Australia. This isn’t just an American issue.

It has nothing to do with SEO. We do server side rendering because it’s the simplest thing that works.

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.

You’d be speeding, too, if you had to get home to make the ziti.

If burning oil and coal can be considered weather modification and geoengineering, then yes.

Sorta. Maybe best to ignore advertising quotes.

Producing beef outputs a lot more greenhouse gases than pork, and chicken is less than either one. Fruit and vegetables are less than any of them.

None of these are better than the others for how they treat the animals. Unnecessary brutality all around. It would not cost that much to treat them with some level of ethics, and if that small cost reduces how much meat people eat, that’s probably a good thing.

Forklift certs last for 3 years, but the test isn’t much. You take a quiz (can be all done online), and then someone at your workplace who is a certified instructor gives you some pointers.

I wouldn’t base car licensing around that. It’s almost nothing.

So I’m aware there is a right-libertarian argument at work here that frames all taxes, always, as “stealing”. However, there’s an argument here that can be used along more democratic socialist lines.

Taxation in representative democracy is legitimate when the democracy itself lives up to the terms. We have come to some kind of consensus as a society on the level of taxation and where that money should go. When we do that, and we say the road is “our road”, we mean that in a literal way. A part of the fruits of our labor were diverted to build that road, and we get a say in how it works.

The US is not a democracy that lives up to the term. “Taxation is theft” is correct in this context.