The older ones among us remember when XML took over the world and everyone was supposed to use strict XHTML. It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML. It brought HTML back from a data language to a markup language. Every Markdown parser is similarly fault-tolerant as HTML parsers.
However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. This way, web does not run on tolerance.
I think you mean HTML5, which exhaustively specified how to do parsing in a fault-tolerant, normalizing way. HTML 4 (and 4.01) predated XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 attempted to take things in a stricter direction, introducing a "Strict" DTD that did things like drop the <font> tag, in pursuit of separating structure and presentation.
Funny enough my impression of JS (the kind you'd write in 2007 more than the type you see now, mind you) is that it's remarkably tolerant; many idioms and operations which would cause, in other languages, runtime errors or compile errors, would just get steamrolled over in JS because of just how much built-in flexibility the uber-weak type system (plus liberal use of the prototype pattern in the stdlib) allows for.
- Wanna subtract a string from a number? That's not a type error, that's a `NaN` -- which is just a perfectly-valid IEEE 754 float, after all, and we all float down here.
- Hell -- arithmetic between arbitrary data types? Chances are you get `[object Object]` (either as a string literal or an *actual* object), which you can still operate on.
- Accessing an object field but you typoed the field name? No worries, that's just `undefined`, and you can always operate on `undefined` values.
Frankly, while I haven't had a frontend focus in about 15 years, I struggle to think of any situation where calling a stdlib function or standard language feature would result in an actual exception rather than just an off behaviour that'll accumulate over time the more of them you stack on eachother. I guess calling an undefined variable is a ReferenceError, but beyond that...
(This comment shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of this school of language design)
It is also (nearly) impossible to completely crash a web page. There isn't a main loop that can panic out. No matter where an exception gets thrown, the overall application keeps going and responding to events.
Can't access a network resource? API returns an unexpected error? Library crashes? Browser extension breaks something? Doesn't matter. The user can still view and scroll the page, and the rest of it will probably keep working, too.
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
The amount of articles on HN that render perfectly, then vanish a second later and are replaced by this error message is insane. Yes, I'm using an old unmaintained Android HN reader with a questionable webview. No, that's not an excuse to delete a perfectly rendered from right in front of my eyes.
> However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored.
This is good though as it provides a means for progressive enhancement using new features only when they are available and falling back on previous rules if they are not. It's very different from the syntax error -> RIP page nonsense of XHTML.
In the CSS half, in the JS half it's really no different. Of course that's fine because "best effort logic" doesn't provide nearly as much value as "best effort layout".
Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again.
And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very definition of fault tolerance.
All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.
Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS.
With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup.
MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!
I don't know if my experience is any guide but for me, coming from C++, I hated JS (~2008 is when my job required it). I kept trying to use it as C++. Over time I learned to love it. I stopped trying to make it C++ (or Java/C#, etc...) and actually embraced it.
Now the tables have turned (to some degree). I can write programs in JS in 1-3 days that take weeks or months in C++/C#/Java
Some of this comes from the browser environment. I get portable 2d/3d/gpu graphics, portable audio, image loading, video playback, and complex text rendering and layout, portably and for free. Back in C++/C# land, every new project is a chore of setup and fighting with linkers and build options etc. I post some code in a github repo with github pages on, or in some JS playground like codepen, and instantly share it with all friends regardless of platform.
Another comes from the language itself. I can often generically wrap existing APIs in a few lines of codes, things that used to take days and/or large program refactors to do in C/C++.
And, the tools are pretty good, Chrome DevTools are as good or better than my experience in C/C++. Right now, when I try to debug in C++ in XCode, std::string shows nothing and containers are inscrutable. I'm sure that's fixable. The point is, I shouldn't have to fix basic stuff.
Now of course I'm using TypeScript for some projects and the types help but I'm often glad for the escape hatch for more generic code. It takes me 15 mins to write some generic system in JS and then 2-4hrs to figure out how to get TypeScript happy to type it. As an example, a function that creates a new TypedArray of the same type as some src array. Easy to write in JS. Harder to type in TS. That's effectively part of the same issues I have in C++, the part that stalls progress, that I don't have the escape hatch for generic solutions.
PS: Yes, it's not that hard to type a generic TypedArray function in TS. But it's certainly a learning curve, or was before LLMs, and I've had to type much more complex functions that required no typing in JS
> It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance.
I don't think this was a "strength" of html so much as a necessity to not break the internet. I certainly preferred the formal nature of xhtml to html 5. But, we're stuck with needing to render obviously formally-broken documents.
>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine.
It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, <p><p> becomes <p></p><p>). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language.
This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.
> that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup
And it's a cancerous engineering principle. People say NullPointerException is the one billion error, but (the misuse of) Postel's Law on web frontend is a multi-billion error. Once one mainstream browser decided to "tolerate" an error, websites would start relying on that behavior, making it a permanent feature of web.
If browsers were less tolerant the whole frontend development would be much smoother. The past decade of JavaScript framework farce would have probably never happened.
The proper way to deal with syntax is making better tools: linters, interpreters and compilers that spew clear error messages. Not trying to 'tolerant' errors.
Postel’s law allows a degree of forward compatibility. This was important before continuous software updates were practical. User-facing code is the best place to apply it: I want my text editor to highlight invalid source code on a best effort basis, whereas the compiler should promptly bail out.
The tolerance is now precisely specified in the HTML5 parsing algorithm, far from "try their best". This is good, because browsers fail in mostly the same ways as each other, humans do not need a CS degree to handwrite Web content, and your tools can still write perfectly valid HTML5.
Obviously now things are better than IE5/6 era, but I can't help but think people without CS degree have to hand tweaking HTML because people who with ones failed to design proper tools and abstraction for them.
More than that, HTML5 specifies how browsers handle "broken" HTML. There's a super-precise algorithm that dictates what to do for unclosed tags, how to fix up the DOM for incorrect nesting, specific fallbacks/behavior for invalid attributes, and so much more. I would say this algorithm, along with its element/attribute-specific components, are where most of the HTML5 effort was applied, and continues to be such for newer Web APIs.
Browsers "trying their best" was like half of the Browser Wars, and what HTML5 was largely created to address. The other half being nonstandard ActiveX crap and IE-specific JavaScript.
Well that took a surprising turn. (1) Friendly dunking on someone named todepond. (2) Interesting ideas about xhtml... looks like I'm going to learn something here. (3) Ideological conflict.
Is there a backstory here? Or is this just random venting?
Anyways, I reject the idea that loose programming is more "tolerant" in any sociological manner.
But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.
> technical issues and social issues really don't mix
I don’t think that’s true in the least. I think it’s true there are no technical solutions to social problems, but any and all technology comes from people forming societies and seeking solutions.
This comment feels the same as people saying “Stick to sports” about athletes talking politics. Everything is political. If you don’t think something is, it tends to be because one is insulated from the politics that affect it.
There's a clear line, and it is when it starts to involve other people. Example: reverse engineering the firmware on your thermostat so you can use it after Google shuts down - technical problem. Not releasing it because you're worried about DMCA and/or Google lawsuits - social problem.
I wonder whether people who disagree about this are talking at crossed purposes. I think there's politics in a narrower sense (concerning partisanship and state intervention) and politics in a wider sense (concerning power relations and decision making). To depoliticise things in the former sense (by depolarising and deregulating) isn't to depoliticise them at all in the latter sense. In society, arguably everything is economic, legal, psychological, etc. Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list.
I see. I disagree with them if they think everything really is political propaganda, but I think in a sense everything is political (in the wider sense) in its causes and consequences, so perhaps it might as well be propaganda, even if those involved don't think of it that way.
To return to your previous comment that "everything is political" is a tedious worldview, maybe there's a possible compromise. We could accept the idea that "non-political" everyday things have a (small) political significance, while never (or rarely) engaging with that political significance in any specific instance.
> To return to your previous comment that "everything is political" is a tedious worldview
It is tedious specifically because of the "in the wider sense" you put in parens
It is an overly broad definition of political to the point of uselessness and absurdity
Edit; for example, consider the case of a child throwing a ball for their dog.
The child is not political. The dog is not political. Yes, you can say that there's politics in letting people own pets like dogs. There are politics in having a public space where children are allowed to play fetch with their dogs. There are politics involved in the parents deciding to have children in the first place, or where they choose to live and work.
Two races: white and "political"
Two genders: Male and "political"
Two hair styles for women: long and "political"
Two sexualities: straight and "political"
Two body types: normative and "political"
Not an intolerance of bad content, but an intolerance of bad behaviour.
Technical issues are often social issues: bad process, bad incentives, bad faith. Moderation is a social issue that people constantly fail to solve with technology, because there are rarely technological solutions to social problems. At best you can mitigate the issue with technology.
The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization.
I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today.
I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now LGBT, moderate, atheist. I did my undergrad in molecular bio and computer science. Without the internet, I really don't think that would have happened.
Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along.
There was mud-slinging, to be sure, but nothing like what we see today. The platforms today willingly feed on this hate. We reward outrage and division. We ban posts and people we disagree with and then rub it in their faces.
Freedom from censorship used to be a liberal idea. Conservative culture dominated in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's. Conservatives were the chief agents of censorship. (There were tv shows about God and Jesus on prime time TV back then! "Touched By An Angel", FFS.)
It literally "wasn't okay" until Ellen and "Will and Grace" started breaking down barriers. Until that point, it was the more liberal minded folks on the internet that espoused freedom from censorship, sharing of different perspectives, acceptance, and understanding. (Interestingly, the ACLU at that time supported both sides of the political aisle! No favoritism - our rights matter regardless of politics or beliefs.)
After Obama's win, liberal culture and values started taking over. The internet was reaching widespread adoption throughout not only America, but the rest of the world.
It was shortly after this point that "Tumblr culture" started giving platform to more extreme and less tolerant liberal ideas. The people that used to uphold the values of freedom from censorship started being overshadowed by the ones that instead weaponized censorship against political enemies at the platform level. The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives.
The first Trump presidency flipped the pendulum back. Media censorship used against liberals. The second Trump presidency got censorship at the platform level and garnered tech company alignment.
We just need to stop.
Stop the algorithmic ranking of content. Stop the extreme polarization. Stop the tit-for-tat banning of people. The indoctrination into hating the "other side".
I appreciate that we won't easily come together and find unity. But at the same time, why use that as an excuse to stop trying? When people and ideas can freely be exchanged without folks attacking one another, there can be friendship even amongst disagreement.
If we keep building tools to censor "the other side" they will eventually be used against us.
We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.
LITERALLY THIS. I hope I can stress more point on it but we need to stop extreme polarization and the social media and how its centralized and controlled by a few too.
> We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.
You just have to convince the masses that 1984 is something that serves them when it doesn't and sell that I suppose to seize power yourself bribed by lobbying too.
I think that censorship grew because the internet did.
When the crowd grows bigger, it becomes a market. Then you get people who are only here out of self interest, and you need rules to deal with them.
When the crowd gets too big, the conversation is too loud and fast to be polite, and the loudmouths take over. Only hot takes anger people enough to speak above the miasma.
I don’t think it’s a red versus blue issue because there exist people outside of the United States. About 8 billion of them.
> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along
Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.
It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.
> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives
This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.
No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.
Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet
> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant
Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.
The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.
This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.
Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.
Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.
It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.
What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.
> 4chan
I remember an internet before 4chan.
Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.
Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?
I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.
In crypto the people who cannot grok the maths behind are incapable of being free agents in any way. They need the masters and oppression. The same goes for any community.
What a bizarre bait and switch. Starts talking about browsers allowing malformed HTML and uses that to draw conclusions about allowing certain types of people.
It's a poor metaphor. Real tolerance necessitates intolerance - see Marcuse. What is a browser going to do, send malformed HTTP requests and name-and-shame any server who refuses to respond? Servers vs. browsers is not the same type of relationship as people vs. people.
Not to mention that the author's metaphor is implying that certain types of people are malformed.
This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in.
I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'
You do care, otherwise you would not even have thought about it twice, let alone comment.
The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”) you actively contribute to and participate in the systemic discrimination.
It’s a choice, and I find it important to leave you the choice, as I do not believe forcing anything on you will actually make you see, but it is true nonetheless that you cannot escape your responsibility: The ability to respond. “You can not not communicate.” Not responding and deciding to remain ignorant about it is also a response, and a highly privileged one.
It would be easy to at least passively support anyone’s attempt at trying to reduce systemic discrimination, but speaking out against it turns it even more into a political act supporting discrimination than doing nothing and by that delegating it to others.
I have a hard time following this line of reasoning. I don't think GP's point is to "ignore systemic discrimination". Rather, it is to ignore those things on which people are discriminated. How can you discriminate against, say, race, if you don't pay attention to the person's race?
Specifically, for tech, if you happen upon a code written by someone called "didgetmaster" on github, and the author makes no comment about who they are as a person, how does this contribute to discrimination? Isn't this the whole point of anonymous resumes and such to fight discrimination against minorities for employment?
The issue arises when people disagree on what reality is.
When most Americans are running on pure ideology and a (quite unearned imho) sense of moral certainty and superiority, they assume their worldview is the objectively correct one, and everyone who disagrees with them is "a bigot."
Both sides of our divide have some psychotic people who do things like murdering people. But absent actually harmful acts like that, disagreeing with you doesn't make someone intolerant. It could be that your framing is wrong, or that there isn't one black-and-white objective universal right way of framing an issue.
> The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”)
This is not a very good argument, it would make the words "political" and "systemic" simply meaningless. First of all, it's implicitly assuming that the only way of effectively addressing the issue of systemic discrimination against X is to actively care about whether X is involved in the stuff we personally use. But "personal" and "systemic" issues and approaches are mutually contrary; that's what "systemic" means. Also if every social action is "political" by definition, what's even the point of resorting to the word "political" to begin with? It's not saying anything of relevance.
To illustrate, say you live inside a fenced-off city. You say you don’t discriminate, anyone is welcome to come and talk to and trade with you. Somebody points out that there are people outside the city, behind the fence, that aren’t able to come talk to you. You are free to act or not act on that, but speaking out against the one that merely points it out and tries to change it means you take an active position to support the current discriminatory situation, rather than a passive, opportunistic one that supports whatever the political situation happens to be.
All positions are valid positions to take. They do however reflect an active choice and an active act. All of them are political. All of them come from a position of privilege, being inside the city, not outside.
No-one is "speaking out against" the one who is pointing out any wider discrimination, beyond whatever aribtrary circle you choose to draw.
What is being "spoken out against" is the idea that taking the moral (or political) action within whatever circle you feel able or willing to support is insufficient, or even discriminatory in itself. After all, this is exactly how this conversation started. Good for you if you want to change the world - let's not forget 3rd party discrimination against other 3rd parties! For many of us, it's one of numerous pressing problems to be addressed. If you wish to bring privilege into it, having the freedom to make fighting any and all discrimination a primary concern is a sign of privilege that few have.
I am raised in hindu religion and we have a saying here basically meaning, treat others the way you wish to be treated yourself and I am sure that literally every main religion and philosophy can kind of share the sentiment and create a tolerant society overall.
Shame that those same religions and people in power forget this core part I suppose. I think that the forgetfulness might be on purpose but I basically hope we can treat literally everyone others the way we wish to be treated ourselves, with dignity and respect.
Of course, some people who are clearly bad shouldn't be treated this way but I hope you can get what I mean by the general sentiment of this idea I guess.
Wow, I had just observed that this seemed very common in religions I didn't know I was this accurate as that was called the golden rule!
Now hearing it, I remember hearing something similar but thanks for refreshing and thanks for letting me know
Now that we are talking about golden rule, I often wonder, if this is the case, then why not skip all the other aspects of religion which were meant in tribal times or have issues which still persist to put more emphasis on this "golden rule"
So your belief is that anyone who would claim to treat everyone the same falls into that camp?
That's quite the characterisation to make, and a bit difficult in the context of discrimination which is based on lumping people together based on one trait and making assumptions about everyone in that group.
> People who claimed they treat everyone the same turned out embracing openly fascist, misogynistic and racist movement last 3 years.
No, we just left the Democratic party once you guys stopped being serious. Judging people based on the color of their skin instead of by the content of their character is just as toxic and evil no matter what your claimed motivation is.
Most people don't really endorse Trump or endorse everything the radicals on the right are known for, but I can see that it appears that way to the people pushing DEI and race-and-gender-based everything -- because a clear plurality have indeed rejected the Democratic party, resulting in them losing even when running against a corrupt buffoon.
For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”.
That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites.
Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.
I didn't get a far as that because I just read through the massive list of enormous security problems caused by loose HTML parsing and that's the exact opposite of cultural accessibility. It requires arcane knowledge and rare skill then to be competent and safe. Tearing down those artificial barriers is how we let more people in!!
One of the interesting things about the internet is that almost anyone who runs a web browser on their phone is using a processor designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman, to run a language designed by Brendan Eich, a guy who donated money to oppose gay marriage and then lost the spot as head honcho of Mozilla because of it. I often think about this and wonder if the two of them ever met, or what would have happened if they did.
The internet doesn't run on "tolerance"; it runs on actual, real neutrality, which enforces tolerance by making anything else impossible. You cannot possibly stop gay people accessing your website any more than you can prevent homophobes or drug dealers or AI startups or North Koreans or fascists. You can ban behaviour but it's impossible to ban classes of people without real-life action.
I'll gladly take the opportunity to avoid directly supporting a racist/bigot, or anyone who seeks to silence/oppress/murder entire groups of people for simply existing. I don't care if they're selling me an application, or a laptop, or a car, or a cheeseburger. The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive.
I may not know who on the internet is a dog, but I'm glad those dogs are out there and if somebody is a proud supporter of puppy genocide I'd rather not encourage/enable their misguided crusade so that does factor into my choices.
It isn't something that can always be avoided, or even something that needs to be avoided entirely 100% of the time (I still read Lovecraft for example) but I do think it's worth some consideration.
But where do you draw the line? Not buying a game that was created by the Nazi party to promote antisemitism is one thing. Shunning a text editor because one of its creators once said something you disagreed with politically, is another.
I tend to draw the line along the impact of my choices. If I download an open source text editor made by a Nazi for my personal laptop it's probably fine. The software is free so I'm not handing money to a Nazi who could use it to harm others. It's on my personal device so there's very little risk that I'm signaling support for the Nazi or advertising for his text editor either. Still, text editors are everywhere and if I can find one that works just as well for my needs and doesn't depend on a racist for updates that's probably a good thing.
I also don't the sweat the small stuff. Hideki Kamiya has been accused of being a xenophobic ass and maybe he is, but people are entitled to their bad takes and internet drama isn't going to stop me from enjoying games he's worked on.
> The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive
Agreed but honestly sometimes I wonder about the funding sides of things, I love tinkering with software and making (right now LLM based but I know it can be a crutch, I use it to just "test" ideas tbh) but basically my question is, I wish to do more stuff on the web but as someone from a third world country, even 30k $/year are enough to me right now.
I am extremely frugal, most of it might just go into my savings/ETF world funds but basically I worry that if I cannot earn that amount, or even if I do, I am subjected to some very high risks which scare me as I have seen its costs first hands
I want to build software which some people might even work on full time but I just don't know how to make money out of it. If I can't make money out of it, I just open source some half assed implementation of it and literally noone knows about it.
I don't know too much about marketing and monetization perhaps. I don't know how to monetize, I hate ads and don't wish to push them, most of my servers/services I create can be abused so there is an issue the server provider might block me and I don't know if people are willing to pay for the software.
I am in a unique position but honestly what most people do is that they create growth right now, then sell it or smth or take VC funding etc which might include enshittening in the future for profit.
Like I just want to build, and a sustainable/profitable business with a profitable business model but the web just lacks this ability and I think I try to see it from my lens where I am frugal so I expect everyone is so its :/
The internet is interesting if people participate from different nations but that means that I just feel like what I might do will always be risky and I always need a job to fall back upon I guess.
Maybe an compromise I think I will do is work in very adjacent industries and contact them directly and work for 30-40k$ so I can get paid "enough" for my country and basically be good to go I guess.
The thing I get worried about is that if any such business goes bad, I would be on the chopping block and that its inherently more riskier than any business here who will try to extract 10x more value out of me and be the middleman...
I wish to be a software engineer here out of my own passion but since literally everyone wants to be here, my talent literally means jackshit in colleges or their applications so Genius and innovation can come from anywhere but opportunities can have an inequality which I hope I can fix for myself and hopefully help others in solving too one day I guess Idk.
Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect?
Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?
Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].
He talks about "throw[ing of] slurs" and "denying rights to others", "wishing violence on people because of their heritage", and that type of thing. Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?
Do you think these people will be able to do good technical work if they're constantly beset by this kind of thing? Or do you think they will retreat to somewhere where they don't have to do with that?
And secretively hiding who you are is not a solution. No photographs. No video meets. No YouTube videos. Can never discus anything personal. No conferences.
> Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?
It depends whom you ask! There are certainly some people both off- and on-line who seem to think that uniformly slurring all white, male, cis-sexual, whatever folks as "oppressors" - and even occasionally suggesting, apparently as a serious political proposal, that "Whiteness" (whatever that means) is something that should be forcibly done away with - is an effective way of advocating for diversity.
Hmm yeah it's quite badly written. Either way, let's just say it's an example of a place where one can look stuff like this up.
"Ending whiteness" does not mean "killing all white people" or "eradicating all European cultures" or whatever the parent comment was implying. (Or am I reading too much into it?) Though perhaps you can find some moron calling for that on Twitter.
Are other phrases of the form "ending ____ness", where ____ is a racial qualifier, also acceptable, then? Someone using that term could similarly argue that they're not advocating for the eradication of ____ people - just the identity and behavior associated with ____ people.
Are you arguing that calling it "whiteness" is a bad branding move by the sociologists? In that case, I fully agree. There's other similar bad branding moves like "toxic masculinity" or "racism = power + prejudice". I wish they would change those words.
Or do you mean that sociologists who speak about "abolishing whiteness" secretly mean "abolishing the behavior and identity of white people"? No I wouldn't agree with that. I think they mean what they say, and when they tell you their definition of "whiteness", that's what they're referring to. Not some other thing.
>I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person
But that makes you a bigot and you know what happens to bigots so put on the shirt, label in your bio and change your speech or HR will have a field day with you. Welcome to the "tolerant" side.
The web is built on standards/RFCs (laws) + implementation and enforcement of those standards (executive). The citizens of the web are just as apathetic/short-sighted as your average voter and will embrace the walled garden (authoritarianism) if it fits their current narrative.
This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it.
>But the world is better for it.
It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge cases that all need to be handled the same way as opposed to following a standardized way of writing pages.
>The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.
The UX could be improved along with developer tools making it harder to mess up and easy to spot mistakes. For example many internet forums have similar requirements of needing to match formatting tags and those have work successfully despite being strict. I think the real issue was that XHTML was introduced too late. Trying to fix things in a decentralized ecosystem is an extremely big uphill battle. If you don't fix things at the very start things can grow out of one's control.
>The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture.
There is also beauty in that there is a standard that everyone can follow to ensure that pages written can work the same in all browsers.
>I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city.
The way people interact with each other in the real world is very different than the way browsers render pages. I do not think such a comparison makes any sense to make.
>How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights?
Just because someone was in the right place at the right time does not mean that they are of perfect moral character. It's similar to the quote to never meet your heros. The people you may look up to in regards to some achievement may not be the best of character and keeping a distance from them may be the best else your opinion of them may be tarnished.
>When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.
I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. These kinds of people could also drive away other potential talent too. Simply increasing the number as opposed to trying to build a positive, healthy, culture and growing it I don't think is the best idea.
>This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian.
It could be about these 2 choices. For example x86 processors were able to be extremely successful despite not being tolerant between big and little endian. By picking a single one and running with it, it's been able to help unify computing on little endian.
> >When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.
> I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with.
Tell me more about this subset you wouldn't like to work with.
I do not want to work with people who are obnoxious, mentally unstable, love stirring drama, self centered, controlling, etc.
These attributes can make it hard to work with others, or waste time that could have been spent actually building a good product for end users. Of course people are not robots, they have emotions and attitudes that are variable so some people will exhibit these qualities some of the time, but I believe it's important to build a culture that can withstand these rather than amplify them.
> I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with.
The subset most discouraged is likely those targeted by discrimination - women, minorities, gay people. Not a great look to say you'd rather not work with that subset.
This article is a prime example of false equivalence. The cool thing about false equivalence is that, when you throw the laws of logic out of the window, you can prove pretty much everything. Anyone can write a specular article proving that intolerance is actually good since very stricter programming languages (like Rust and its borrow checker) are inherently safer.
I agree, thank you for giving me the word to this and giving an explaination too
I just believe that there are ways to systemetically prove both of these things independently and I am not sure about the XHTML and other debate but here is my thoughts on "tolerance" itself
I don't think that there is an inherent purpose is life, we have to build one for ourselves, what is the most rare thing in the universe, its not any material or power or anything worth having but rather friendships and enjoyments and treating people as the ends and not means to something. (My own summary-ish from Everything is fcked by Mark manson, not the best writer but I was young when I read the book and so maybe I can recommend it)
Then reading about how to win friends and influence people, One of the key points I took from it is to be more agreeable and try to find common points you can work upon and set aside the differences and thus tolerance and there are 10
s of example from the book where I can share but basically debates help noone if they become petty, if we have disagreements they should be respectful in a way...
These are my views on how to treat everyone equally I guess which I might wish to be applied to myself too so thats why I apply it too others or try to in a way too
Personally I hate extremism from both sides since I feel that its bad but I can understand why people can get extremism from both sides and I try to give them chances to try to improve the situation from mediocre opinions if someone is too extremist from any side if I can be honest.
I think extremism in general is bad I guess tho. Fck social media for making everyone nowadays so extremist tho. The only people I am extremist towards is big tech when you realize that facebook targets young girls and sees if they delete their photos, they are insecure and shoves beauty ads on their face.
This behaviour is really sickening and I think we can all agree that.
When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS.
"The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
The transgenderist stance is that once a man announces he is a woman, then he was always a woman and always will be. Unless he detransitions of course. Then he was always a man and always will be. Same for when a woman declares that she is a man.
So a man who builds his entire career as a man, with all the privilege that brings, as Wilson did, can identify as a woman and these prior achievements now all become that of a woman. Even if this stretches plausibility, what with the sexism of the industry at the time. He can even receive accolades reserved for women, as if he had to work ten times as hard to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field.
This rewriting of history is also why, for example, film credits listing Ellen Page have been retrospectively updated to Elliot Page even though there was no Elliot Page at the time of filming.
Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode".
XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.
Maybe developers should be held to stricter standards than their users. I can demand developers to close tags they are expected to close. But users should be allowed to provide their document numbers as "12345" "123 45" or "12-34-5" if all these notations are used in their country.
>The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.
Standards are the One True Path. That's why they are standards. I see no disrespect in enforcing them. Even more - the ones not following them and forcing users to burn additional CPU cycles because browsers have to assume they may be parsing crap are the disrespectful ones. Come on, it's not that hard, especially with help of IDEs.
I think the Author diverges from the main point - that web standards and browsers' interpretation rules are loosely held (tolerance), towards indirectly attacking the current US administration which is allegedly trending towards intolerance and isolationism. Bit of a weird tangent (Though not inaccurate).
Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system.
It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.
This author needs to either be specific about who and what they're talking about or not bother. I don't have the context to understand their specific complaints and I'm not motivated to seek it out.
If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
> If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people?
You ever come across the word thoughtcrime? You think telling perhaps 50% or the population they "have no business being here" is inclusive? A large number of the classes who you pretend to be representing actually don't buy into oppression olympics.
You want to write a screed against the owner of X? Sure, go ahead. But your screed is against anyone who doesn't care about verifying a person's race, gender or sexual orientation.
You're presenting an extremist "you're with us or against us" view; some of us who aren't racist, sexist, misogynist, etc also don't want to have to pass your purity test.
Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone.
> You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people?
It's taken me a while to understand what I find so abhorrent about this frequent rhetorical device and I finally realized it's just plain ol' false equivalence.
Hating nazis for the harm they've caused is, in fact, just fine.
Hating someone because they were born jewish/black/gay/whatever, is not fine.
Pretending that people out here advocating for deportation/camps/imprisonment for the crimes of skin color or religion or whatever else is the same moral equivalence as those people just wanting to be left alone is leaving the realm of stupidity and verging on malice.
> Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone
It's, uh, "weird" that your problem isn't with the bigotry and bigots but with the people who point it out.
HTML4 era was full of parser hacks. Increasingly more and more parser hacks.
XHTML tried to solve that, and make HTML parsing more acessible to everyone. It's not about rigor, it's about making it simpler.
HTML5 goes in the other direction. It formalized all those hacks into very, very strict parsing rules. It's super strict and specific, to the point that only companies with large resources can realistically invest in a proper HTML5 engine.
So, the metaphor does not hold.
You actually don't need a technical-aspect analogue to advocate for better, more inclusive human behavior. It's much better if you don't rely on those. People should not need a spec as a mirror to understand that.
Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance…
Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with.
From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up.
Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.
I mean no offense but comparing fault tolerance to being tolerant with other people only works because it’s the same word that’s used for both meanings. But that has absolutely nothing to do.
If it weren’t the case, you’d argue that people pushing XHTML were intolerant bastards.
What the web runs on is freedom, the freedom to express and disseminate any information one pleases with impunity. That prominent figureheads embrace the hateful ideologies that you speak of is merely a tide of the current times, and will change as soon as they become unpopular, just as they had quit embracing this "tolerance" which was in full force a few years prior. Because they are not about a hate of people, but hate of freedom: hate is merely a pretense, a convenient vehicle through which freedoms can be taken. I think freedom is the most important thing worth fighting for, and you had my support up until now. But then you go on to say that those outside your own window of ideology have no place here. It's much the same methods that the people you complain of employ: to be disingenuous about what you really want-- it's your inability to force your will upon others that you're frustrated with. You have missed the forest for the trees, and the context has already been created for you: you are projecting a battle for the rights of certain groups onto a battle against the rights of all, and you've been turned against yourself. Freedom is something, if you believe in it, you must believe in in its entirety: not almost-freedom, or a convenient sliver of freedom that fits into your own ideological window. You lack the qualifications to exercise tolerance.
The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it.
In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone).
The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.
Good point dude, a few super online people writing forum posts about changing the default name of the main git branch is exactly equivalent to launching gestapo style terror raids on the population at large while ignoring the consitution and due process.
What left-wing extremism was that, exactly? Extreme upholding of human rights and equality? Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings? Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation? Extreme letting people live their damn life in whatever way they want as long as it doesn't harm others? Yeah, who wouldn't want to push back on that, sounds terrible eh?
So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad? You are expected to be nice to people when you meet them? You should consider the feelings of other human beings before you act? You had to rename a git branch because most of the people on your team agreed it's kinda lame to use a reference to slavery in a technical term? I've always wondered what people think the "extreme left" is and why they even remotely think it's somehow just as bad as the fascistic bullshit that sadistic, fear-driven socipaths keep working towards.
Obviously those policies don't apply when dealing with people who don't adhere to those policies - I figured I didn't have to spell that out because it's been covered a very long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> Does that include Jihadists and child molester/groomer?
by and large the right-wing administration currently running the white house works with and makes business deals with Islamic Fundamentalist countries and is headed by a child molester [1]. this does not seem to be an issue of "the left", for its many flaws
To credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion.
The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.
You'll notice that the author (me) didn't actually credit the invention of the computer to Turing's sexuality.
But it is an undeniable fact that he was gay.
If the British government had banned him from working at Bletchly Park because of that, would the computer still have been developed? Certainly he wasn't the only one working on it, but historians and computer scientists seem to agree that he was a key figure.
The health of a technical community depends on its ability to attract contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds.
We agree that the result of the work is what is important. I'm arguing that Stephen Hawking can't participate unless you install wheelchair ramps.
> Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us.
I think this is true for all cases, the author gives us example of trans co creator of arm architecture and alan turing and how their contributions in the web mattered
But I think quite frankly, even if that might not be the case, there STILL ISNT any reason why we should discriminate and I feel like some part of the intepretation I got was that we should be tolerant to all communities currently still persecuted because some part of them contributed to us...
But what about communities that did not support you because they weren't in the shape of? I feel like we should be tolerant to them.
I tend to stay less political nowadays but just look at the case of sudan. Its state is atrocious. I am not sure if sudan contributed quite heavily on the web or not so pardon me but even if they might not have, We should still be tolerant and like stop the atrocities happening there in my opinion.
Basically the point I am trying to make might be obvious but with or without the creations of alan turing, and co creator of arm, We should still be tolerant to each other as long as they are tolerant to us, thus a tolerant society.
I think what we as a society need is to look at if we are infighting with each other over petty differences created by spews of lies by people in power to stay in power so that we infight. The british used conquer and divide on India and africa which I am not going to lie, still impacts these countries.
I am pretty sure that people do divide and conquer on their own people too, Power and the Powerful don't discriminate in this sense.
TLDR: We should be tolerant of each other as a whole even if there might not be any web contributions simply because being kind is mostly good I guess but also we should be intolerant to the true intolerant of society which try to create this divide from (both sides) imo and just try to remove any type of extremism and actually focus on class issues too.
This whole article has, to be ragebait - surely? It's such a inane piece of writing, the world needs to give less time to anyone that genuinely holds these views. They're entitled to hold them, but they're still wrong.
>It had an intolerant ideology.
Without going into the various reasons why its trash, conforming to a spec is not intolerance, it's success. Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! You can't discriminate against different thicknesses, all thicknesses are equally valuable!"
p.s. If you meant your comment as an amusing meta play on intolerance, then I'm sorry for misreading. That would of course be much better, but after a bit of wavering I concluded that you actually meant what you were saying here.
Thank you. These are right out of my mouth. I mean I'd have made a similar comment if I didn't worry the strong words would get me flagged.
The whole article is weird af. How are tolerating XHTML syntax error and tolerating different sexualities remotely comparable? The metaphor stretches itself so thin that you can see the fallacies beneath.
> Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!!
The Brooklyn bridge is a singular piece of infrastructure that millions depend on. I think it makes for a bad analogy.
A better analogy would be something more like websites, where people can tinker and create and contribute without much consequence. For example, the local community garden's board saying, "Requiring a precise and strictly uniform planting layout and soil composition is intolerance!" Well... that'd be quite reasonable?
It's bad because it makes it harder to implement a browser so the "spec" just becomes whatever the leading implementation supports.
When I clicked on the article, I thought it was going to be about how the web gives a space for all voices even the marginalized or minorities to be seen/heard. Not this nonsense.
As pointed out my comment was not as constructive as it could have been, apologies for that.
It was a bad morning. I do appreciate being called on it.
However my less dramatic point, that precice protocols and exact requirements is what makes technical projects successful, is what I could have conveyed.
Cherry picking examples from science, technology or other fields to support an ideology isn't going to attract external supporters to that ideology but to make the bias stronger for the people who already believe in that ideology. Also, I rather read more "hacker news" and less ideological ramblings.
web apps require a [java|ecma]script whatng cartel web engine, more and more only the gogol one (blink) will "correctly" work (abuse of dominant position).
web sites are noscript/basic (x)html ("forms" and the <audio> <video> elements). Usually a "semantic" 2D table with proper ids for navigation.
The older ones among us remember when XML took over the world and everyone was supposed to use strict XHTML. It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance. HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML. It brought HTML back from a data language to a markup language. Every Markdown parser is similarly fault-tolerant as HTML parsers.
However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored. An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop. This way, web does not run on tolerance.
> HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML
I think you mean HTML5, which exhaustively specified how to do parsing in a fault-tolerant, normalizing way. HTML 4 (and 4.01) predated XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 attempted to take things in a stricter direction, introducing a "Strict" DTD that did things like drop the <font> tag, in pursuit of separating structure and presentation.
> CSS [is] not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored.
That is error-tolerant, in basically the same way HTML is.
> An unhandled JavaScript exception is a hard stop.
A more appropriate example here is that a JS syntax error stops the entire script from running. That’s the XML parser approach.
Funny enough my impression of JS (the kind you'd write in 2007 more than the type you see now, mind you) is that it's remarkably tolerant; many idioms and operations which would cause, in other languages, runtime errors or compile errors, would just get steamrolled over in JS because of just how much built-in flexibility the uber-weak type system (plus liberal use of the prototype pattern in the stdlib) allows for.
- Wanna subtract a string from a number? That's not a type error, that's a `NaN` -- which is just a perfectly-valid IEEE 754 float, after all, and we all float down here.
- Accessing an object field but you typoed the field name? No worries, that's just `undefined`, and you can always operate on `undefined` values.Frankly, while I haven't had a frontend focus in about 15 years, I struggle to think of any situation where calling a stdlib function or standard language feature would result in an actual exception rather than just an off behaviour that'll accumulate over time the more of them you stack on eachother. I guess calling an undefined variable is a ReferenceError, but beyond that...
(This comment shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of this school of language design)
It is also (nearly) impossible to completely crash a web page. There isn't a main loop that can panic out. No matter where an exception gets thrown, the overall application keeps going and responding to events.
Can't access a network resource? API returns an unexpected error? Library crashes? Browser extension breaks something? Doesn't matter. The user can still view and scroll the page, and the rest of it will probably keep working, too.
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
The amount of articles on HN that render perfectly, then vanish a second later and are replaced by this error message is insane. Yes, I'm using an old unmaintained Android HN reader with a questionable webview. No, that's not an excuse to delete a perfectly rendered from right in front of my eyes.
> However, CSS and JS are not error-tolerant. A syntax error in a CSS rule causes it to be ignored.
This is good though as it provides a means for progressive enhancement using new features only when they are available and falling back on previous rules if they are not. It's very different from the syntax error -> RIP page nonsense of XHTML.
In the CSS half, in the JS half it's really no different. Of course that's fine because "best effort logic" doesn't provide nearly as much value as "best effort layout".
Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again.
And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very definition of fault tolerance.
What else could you possibly want?
All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.
Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS.
With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup.
MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!
I don't know if my experience is any guide but for me, coming from C++, I hated JS (~2008 is when my job required it). I kept trying to use it as C++. Over time I learned to love it. I stopped trying to make it C++ (or Java/C#, etc...) and actually embraced it.
Now the tables have turned (to some degree). I can write programs in JS in 1-3 days that take weeks or months in C++/C#/Java
Some of this comes from the browser environment. I get portable 2d/3d/gpu graphics, portable audio, image loading, video playback, and complex text rendering and layout, portably and for free. Back in C++/C# land, every new project is a chore of setup and fighting with linkers and build options etc. I post some code in a github repo with github pages on, or in some JS playground like codepen, and instantly share it with all friends regardless of platform.
Another comes from the language itself. I can often generically wrap existing APIs in a few lines of codes, things that used to take days and/or large program refactors to do in C/C++.
And, the tools are pretty good, Chrome DevTools are as good or better than my experience in C/C++. Right now, when I try to debug in C++ in XCode, std::string shows nothing and containers are inscrutable. I'm sure that's fixable. The point is, I shouldn't have to fix basic stuff.
Now of course I'm using TypeScript for some projects and the types help but I'm often glad for the escape hatch for more generic code. It takes me 15 mins to write some generic system in JS and then 2-4hrs to figure out how to get TypeScript happy to type it. As an example, a function that creates a new TypedArray of the same type as some src array. Easy to write in JS. Harder to type in TS. That's effectively part of the same issues I have in C++, the part that stalls progress, that I don't have the escape hatch for generic solutions.
PS: Yes, it's not that hard to type a generic TypedArray function in TS. But it's certainly a learning curve, or was before LLMs, and I've had to type much more complex functions that required no typing in JS
> It turned out that the strength of the HTML ecosystem was its fault tolerance.
I don't think this was a "strength" of html so much as a necessity to not break the internet. I certainly preferred the formal nature of xhtml to html 5. But, we're stuck with needing to render obviously formally-broken documents.
So it's not a strength it's a necessity?
I'm not sure these words mean what you think they do...
Yes, I would describe this as a liability. It costs more to implement basic html interpretation with zero benefit
>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine.
It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, <p><p> becomes <p></p><p>). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language.
(Okay, https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.... shows a few minor errors, bet you couldn’t spot them.)
This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.
> that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup
And it's a cancerous engineering principle. People say NullPointerException is the one billion error, but (the misuse of) Postel's Law on web frontend is a multi-billion error. Once one mainstream browser decided to "tolerate" an error, websites would start relying on that behavior, making it a permanent feature of web.
If browsers were less tolerant the whole frontend development would be much smoother. The past decade of JavaScript framework farce would have probably never happened.
The proper way to deal with syntax is making better tools: linters, interpreters and compilers that spew clear error messages. Not trying to 'tolerant' errors.
Postel’s law allows a degree of forward compatibility. This was important before continuous software updates were practical. User-facing code is the best place to apply it: I want my text editor to highlight invalid source code on a best effort basis, whereas the compiler should promptly bail out.
The tolerance is now precisely specified in the HTML5 parsing algorithm, far from "try their best". This is good, because browsers fail in mostly the same ways as each other, humans do not need a CS degree to handwrite Web content, and your tools can still write perfectly valid HTML5.
Obviously now things are better than IE5/6 era, but I can't help but think people without CS degree have to hand tweaking HTML because people who with ones failed to design proper tools and abstraction for them.
Typing valid XML does not require even 1% of a CS degre level of skill, come on.
You're overdoing it.
More than that, HTML5 specifies how browsers handle "broken" HTML. There's a super-precise algorithm that dictates what to do for unclosed tags, how to fix up the DOM for incorrect nesting, specific fallbacks/behavior for invalid attributes, and so much more. I would say this algorithm, along with its element/attribute-specific components, are where most of the HTML5 effort was applied, and continues to be such for newer Web APIs.
Browsers "trying their best" was like half of the Browser Wars, and what HTML5 was largely created to address. The other half being nonstandard ActiveX crap and IE-specific JavaScript.
Well that took a surprising turn. (1) Friendly dunking on someone named todepond. (2) Interesting ideas about xhtml... looks like I'm going to learn something here. (3) Ideological conflict.
Is there a backstory here? Or is this just random venting?
Anyways, I reject the idea that loose programming is more "tolerant" in any sociological manner.
But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.
> technical issues and social issues really don't mix
I don’t think that’s true in the least. I think it’s true there are no technical solutions to social problems, but any and all technology comes from people forming societies and seeking solutions.
This comment feels the same as people saying “Stick to sports” about athletes talking politics. Everything is political. If you don’t think something is, it tends to be because one is insulated from the politics that affect it.
There's a clear line, and it is when it starts to involve other people. Example: reverse engineering the firmware on your thermostat so you can use it after Google shuts down - technical problem. Not releasing it because you're worried about DMCA and/or Google lawsuits - social problem.
> Everything is political
This is such a tedious worldview
Maybe everything is political, but it doesn't have to be that way
I wonder whether people who disagree about this are talking at crossed purposes. I think there's politics in a narrower sense (concerning partisanship and state intervention) and politics in a wider sense (concerning power relations and decision making). To depoliticise things in the former sense (by depolarising and deregulating) isn't to depoliticise them at all in the latter sense. In society, arguably everything is economic, legal, psychological, etc. Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list.
> Presumably, what people mean when they say "everything is political" is that politics in the wider sense is both important and on this list
What they mean in my experience is "everything must be viewed as political propaganda"
I see. I disagree with them if they think everything really is political propaganda, but I think in a sense everything is political (in the wider sense) in its causes and consequences, so perhaps it might as well be propaganda, even if those involved don't think of it that way.
To return to your previous comment that "everything is political" is a tedious worldview, maybe there's a possible compromise. We could accept the idea that "non-political" everyday things have a (small) political significance, while never (or rarely) engaging with that political significance in any specific instance.
> To return to your previous comment that "everything is political" is a tedious worldview
It is tedious specifically because of the "in the wider sense" you put in parens
It is an overly broad definition of political to the point of uselessness and absurdity
Edit; for example, consider the case of a child throwing a ball for their dog.
The child is not political. The dog is not political. Yes, you can say that there's politics in letting people own pets like dogs. There are politics in having a public space where children are allowed to play fetch with their dogs. There are politics involved in the parents deciding to have children in the first place, or where they choose to live and work.
Yes, "everything is political" is true.
It's also just tedious
"there are only:
Two races: white and "political" Two genders: Male and "political" Two hair styles for women: long and "political" Two sexualities: straight and "political" Two body types: normative and "political"
https://twitter.com/emmahvossen/status/1138841342921060354?l...
Any interaction between three or more people is inherently political.
Not an intolerance of bad content, but an intolerance of bad behaviour.
Technical issues are often social issues: bad process, bad incentives, bad faith. Moderation is a social issue that people constantly fail to solve with technology, because there are rarely technological solutions to social problems. At best you can mitigate the issue with technology.
Moderation isn't used for filtering out the most tolerant individuals. (Look up the paradox of tolerance sometime.)
The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization.
I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today.
I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now LGBT, moderate, atheist. I did my undergrad in molecular bio and computer science. Without the internet, I really don't think that would have happened.
Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along.
There was mud-slinging, to be sure, but nothing like what we see today. The platforms today willingly feed on this hate. We reward outrage and division. We ban posts and people we disagree with and then rub it in their faces.
Freedom from censorship used to be a liberal idea. Conservative culture dominated in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's. Conservatives were the chief agents of censorship. (There were tv shows about God and Jesus on prime time TV back then! "Touched By An Angel", FFS.)
It literally "wasn't okay" until Ellen and "Will and Grace" started breaking down barriers. Until that point, it was the more liberal minded folks on the internet that espoused freedom from censorship, sharing of different perspectives, acceptance, and understanding. (Interestingly, the ACLU at that time supported both sides of the political aisle! No favoritism - our rights matter regardless of politics or beliefs.)
After Obama's win, liberal culture and values started taking over. The internet was reaching widespread adoption throughout not only America, but the rest of the world.
It was shortly after this point that "Tumblr culture" started giving platform to more extreme and less tolerant liberal ideas. The people that used to uphold the values of freedom from censorship started being overshadowed by the ones that instead weaponized censorship against political enemies at the platform level. The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives.
The first Trump presidency flipped the pendulum back. Media censorship used against liberals. The second Trump presidency got censorship at the platform level and garnered tech company alignment.
We just need to stop.
Stop the algorithmic ranking of content. Stop the extreme polarization. Stop the tit-for-tat banning of people. The indoctrination into hating the "other side".
I appreciate that we won't easily come together and find unity. But at the same time, why use that as an excuse to stop trying? When people and ideas can freely be exchanged without folks attacking one another, there can be friendship even amongst disagreement.
If we keep building tools to censor "the other side" they will eventually be used against us.
We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.
> Stop the extreme polarization
LITERALLY THIS. I hope I can stress more point on it but we need to stop extreme polarization and the social media and how its centralized and controlled by a few too.
> We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.
You just have to convince the masses that 1984 is something that serves them when it doesn't and sell that I suppose to seize power yourself bribed by lobbying too.
I think that censorship grew because the internet did.
When the crowd grows bigger, it becomes a market. Then you get people who are only here out of self interest, and you need rules to deal with them.
When the crowd gets too big, the conversation is too loud and fast to be polite, and the loudmouths take over. Only hot takes anger people enough to speak above the miasma.
I don’t think it’s a red versus blue issue because there exist people outside of the United States. About 8 billion of them.
> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along
Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.
It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.
> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives
This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.
No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.
Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet
> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant
Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.
The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.
This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.
Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.
Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.
It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.
What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.
> 4chan
I remember an internet before 4chan.
Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.
Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?
I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.
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In crypto the people who cannot grok the maths behind are incapable of being free agents in any way. They need the masters and oppression. The same goes for any community.
What a bizarre bait and switch. Starts talking about browsers allowing malformed HTML and uses that to draw conclusions about allowing certain types of people.
My god, and we thought those english teachers were idiots when they insisted we should learn things like reading comprehension and metaphors.
I understand what the author is trying to say, and I agree with the second half of the text, but the link between both halves is tenuous at best.
It's a poor metaphor. Real tolerance necessitates intolerance - see Marcuse. What is a browser going to do, send malformed HTTP requests and name-and-shame any server who refuses to respond? Servers vs. browsers is not the same type of relationship as people vs. people.
Not to mention that the author's metaphor is implying that certain types of people are malformed.
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So these certain types of people should not be allowed? Or what are you trying to say here?
They are saying the logical structure is ill-formed.
This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in.
I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'
> I couldn't care less
You do care, otherwise you would not even have thought about it twice, let alone comment.
The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”) you actively contribute to and participate in the systemic discrimination.
It’s a choice, and I find it important to leave you the choice, as I do not believe forcing anything on you will actually make you see, but it is true nonetheless that you cannot escape your responsibility: The ability to respond. “You can not not communicate.” Not responding and deciding to remain ignorant about it is also a response, and a highly privileged one.
It would be easy to at least passively support anyone’s attempt at trying to reduce systemic discrimination, but speaking out against it turns it even more into a political act supporting discrimination than doing nothing and by that delegating it to others.
I have a hard time following this line of reasoning. I don't think GP's point is to "ignore systemic discrimination". Rather, it is to ignore those things on which people are discriminated. How can you discriminate against, say, race, if you don't pay attention to the person's race?
Specifically, for tech, if you happen upon a code written by someone called "didgetmaster" on github, and the author makes no comment about who they are as a person, how does this contribute to discrimination? Isn't this the whole point of anonymous resumes and such to fight discrimination against minorities for employment?
You are technically right if the goal is to stop ANY kind of discrimination. But is that the goal?
I don't know, and I admit I was operating under that assumption.
But is that not the goal? Is there some kind of discrimination which is "good", and should go on?
I think you're raising the paradox of tolerance.
Should I accept technically perfect PRs if they contain comments and messages with hate speak?
There is no paradox of tolerance. This is a social contract, once you break it you are not entitled to it, simple. Also speech, not speak.
The issue arises when people disagree on what reality is.
When most Americans are running on pure ideology and a (quite unearned imho) sense of moral certainty and superiority, they assume their worldview is the objectively correct one, and everyone who disagrees with them is "a bigot."
Both sides of our divide have some psychotic people who do things like murdering people. But absent actually harmful acts like that, disagreeing with you doesn't make someone intolerant. It could be that your framing is wrong, or that there isn't one black-and-white objective universal right way of framing an issue.
> The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”)
This is not a very good argument, it would make the words "political" and "systemic" simply meaningless. First of all, it's implicitly assuming that the only way of effectively addressing the issue of systemic discrimination against X is to actively care about whether X is involved in the stuff we personally use. But "personal" and "systemic" issues and approaches are mutually contrary; that's what "systemic" means. Also if every social action is "political" by definition, what's even the point of resorting to the word "political" to begin with? It's not saying anything of relevance.
As a person, treating everyone the same is an excellent response (and even a political one, if you wish) to counteract a system of discrimination.
Agreed.
To illustrate, say you live inside a fenced-off city. You say you don’t discriminate, anyone is welcome to come and talk to and trade with you. Somebody points out that there are people outside the city, behind the fence, that aren’t able to come talk to you. You are free to act or not act on that, but speaking out against the one that merely points it out and tries to change it means you take an active position to support the current discriminatory situation, rather than a passive, opportunistic one that supports whatever the political situation happens to be.
All positions are valid positions to take. They do however reflect an active choice and an active act. All of them are political. All of them come from a position of privilege, being inside the city, not outside.
No-one is "speaking out against" the one who is pointing out any wider discrimination, beyond whatever aribtrary circle you choose to draw.
What is being "spoken out against" is the idea that taking the moral (or political) action within whatever circle you feel able or willing to support is insufficient, or even discriminatory in itself. After all, this is exactly how this conversation started. Good for you if you want to change the world - let's not forget 3rd party discrimination against other 3rd parties! For many of us, it's one of numerous pressing problems to be addressed. If you wish to bring privilege into it, having the freedom to make fighting any and all discrimination a primary concern is a sign of privilege that few have.
I am raised in hindu religion and we have a saying here basically meaning, treat others the way you wish to be treated yourself and I am sure that literally every main religion and philosophy can kind of share the sentiment and create a tolerant society overall.
Shame that those same religions and people in power forget this core part I suppose. I think that the forgetfulness might be on purpose but I basically hope we can treat literally everyone others the way we wish to be treated ourselves, with dignity and respect.
Of course, some people who are clearly bad shouldn't be treated this way but I hope you can get what I mean by the general sentiment of this idea I guess.
> treat others the way you wish to be treated yourself
This is often called The Golden Rule because it is one of the most common tenets of every religion and ethical framework ever made
Wow, I had just observed that this seemed very common in religions I didn't know I was this accurate as that was called the golden rule!
Now hearing it, I remember hearing something similar but thanks for refreshing and thanks for letting me know
Now that we are talking about golden rule, I often wonder, if this is the case, then why not skip all the other aspects of religion which were meant in tribal times or have issues which still persist to put more emphasis on this "golden rule"
Is this what humanitarianism is (sort of?)
People who claimed they treat everyone the same turned out embracing openly fascist, misogynistic and racist movement last 3 years.
I just do not believe it anymore when it is used exclusively to shut up people who want to say an unfairness exists.
So your belief is that anyone who would claim to treat everyone the same falls into that camp?
That's quite the characterisation to make, and a bit difficult in the context of discrimination which is based on lumping people together based on one trait and making assumptions about everyone in that group.
> People who claimed they treat everyone the same turned out embracing openly fascist, misogynistic and racist movement last 3 years.
No, we just left the Democratic party once you guys stopped being serious. Judging people based on the color of their skin instead of by the content of their character is just as toxic and evil no matter what your claimed motivation is.
Most people don't really endorse Trump or endorse everything the radicals on the right are known for, but I can see that it appears that way to the people pushing DEI and race-and-gender-based everything -- because a clear plurality have indeed rejected the Democratic party, resulting in them losing even when running against a corrupt buffoon.
I said I don't care about the backgrounds of the creators of tech that I use.
I do care when other people in tech insist that I should care, and that I should make decisions based on the identity of certain individuals.
So systemic discrimination is an individual problem?
Silence is violence?
what he meant was he "does not care to be told about it"
Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”.
There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.
For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”.
That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites.
Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.
Two paths diverged in a wood. You took one and the Whole Point took the other here.
I didn't get a far as that because I just read through the massive list of enormous security problems caused by loose HTML parsing and that's the exact opposite of cultural accessibility. It requires arcane knowledge and rare skill then to be competent and safe. Tearing down those artificial barriers is how we let more people in!!
One of the interesting things about the internet is that almost anyone who runs a web browser on their phone is using a processor designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman, to run a language designed by Brendan Eich, a guy who donated money to oppose gay marriage and then lost the spot as head honcho of Mozilla because of it. I often think about this and wonder if the two of them ever met, or what would have happened if they did.
The internet doesn't run on "tolerance"; it runs on actual, real neutrality, which enforces tolerance by making anything else impossible. You cannot possibly stop gay people accessing your website any more than you can prevent homophobes or drug dealers or AI startups or North Koreans or fascists. You can ban behaviour but it's impossible to ban classes of people without real-life action.
This will all go out the window if and when we need a state issued ID to access the internet.
>On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'
Unless you force people to acknowledge your are a dog.
Ah I knew it was about people when I saw the LGBT flag as a background.
I'll gladly take the opportunity to avoid directly supporting a racist/bigot, or anyone who seeks to silence/oppress/murder entire groups of people for simply existing. I don't care if they're selling me an application, or a laptop, or a car, or a cheeseburger. The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive.
I may not know who on the internet is a dog, but I'm glad those dogs are out there and if somebody is a proud supporter of puppy genocide I'd rather not encourage/enable their misguided crusade so that does factor into my choices.
It isn't something that can always be avoided, or even something that needs to be avoided entirely 100% of the time (I still read Lovecraft for example) but I do think it's worth some consideration.
But where do you draw the line? Not buying a game that was created by the Nazi party to promote antisemitism is one thing. Shunning a text editor because one of its creators once said something you disagreed with politically, is another.
Is it?
Capitalism is about choice. If my local greengrocer is rude to me, I can choose to take my business elsewhere.
If the author of a text editor doesn't share my sentiments on whether to ban tobacco adverts, I can choose not to use their software.
People can make the choices which make them happy. I'm happy to use a slightly worse text editor if it means I am not supporting someone I don't like.
I tend to draw the line along the impact of my choices. If I download an open source text editor made by a Nazi for my personal laptop it's probably fine. The software is free so I'm not handing money to a Nazi who could use it to harm others. It's on my personal device so there's very little risk that I'm signaling support for the Nazi or advertising for his text editor either. Still, text editors are everywhere and if I can find one that works just as well for my needs and doesn't depend on a racist for updates that's probably a good thing.
I also don't the sweat the small stuff. Hideki Kamiya has been accused of being a xenophobic ass and maybe he is, but people are entitled to their bad takes and internet drama isn't going to stop me from enjoying games he's worked on.
> The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive
Agreed but honestly sometimes I wonder about the funding sides of things, I love tinkering with software and making (right now LLM based but I know it can be a crutch, I use it to just "test" ideas tbh) but basically my question is, I wish to do more stuff on the web but as someone from a third world country, even 30k $/year are enough to me right now.
I am extremely frugal, most of it might just go into my savings/ETF world funds but basically I worry that if I cannot earn that amount, or even if I do, I am subjected to some very high risks which scare me as I have seen its costs first hands
I want to build software which some people might even work on full time but I just don't know how to make money out of it. If I can't make money out of it, I just open source some half assed implementation of it and literally noone knows about it.
I don't know too much about marketing and monetization perhaps. I don't know how to monetize, I hate ads and don't wish to push them, most of my servers/services I create can be abused so there is an issue the server provider might block me and I don't know if people are willing to pay for the software.
I am in a unique position but honestly what most people do is that they create growth right now, then sell it or smth or take VC funding etc which might include enshittening in the future for profit.
Like I just want to build, and a sustainable/profitable business with a profitable business model but the web just lacks this ability and I think I try to see it from my lens where I am frugal so I expect everyone is so its :/
The internet is interesting if people participate from different nations but that means that I just feel like what I might do will always be risky and I always need a job to fall back upon I guess.
Maybe an compromise I think I will do is work in very adjacent industries and contact them directly and work for 30-40k$ so I can get paid "enough" for my country and basically be good to go I guess.
The thing I get worried about is that if any such business goes bad, I would be on the chopping block and that its inherently more riskier than any business here who will try to extract 10x more value out of me and be the middleman...
I wish to be a software engineer here out of my own passion but since literally everyone wants to be here, my talent literally means jackshit in colleges or their applications so Genius and innovation can come from anywhere but opportunities can have an inequality which I hope I can fix for myself and hopefully help others in solving too one day I guess Idk.
Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect?
Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?
> I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use.
That's exactly the message that some people tried to push during the heyday of wokeism but the rest wouldn't listen.
Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].
He talks about "throw[ing of] slurs" and "denying rights to others", "wishing violence on people because of their heritage", and that type of thing. Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?
Do you think these people will be able to do good technical work if they're constantly beset by this kind of thing? Or do you think they will retreat to somewhere where they don't have to do with that?
And secretively hiding who you are is not a solution. No photographs. No video meets. No YouTube videos. Can never discus anything personal. No conferences.
> Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now?
It depends whom you ask! There are certainly some people both off- and on-line who seem to think that uniformly slurring all white, male, cis-sexual, whatever folks as "oppressors" - and even occasionally suggesting, apparently as a serious political proposal, that "Whiteness" (whatever that means) is something that should be forcibly done away with - is an effective way of advocating for diversity.
> "Whiteness" (whatever that means)
Maybe you could look it up instead of dismissing it out of hand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory
Feel free to disagree afterwards, but the words do have meaning. And not knowing them is not an argument against it.
Holy smokes that is quite a page
Hmm yeah it's quite badly written. Either way, let's just say it's an example of a place where one can look stuff like this up.
"Ending whiteness" does not mean "killing all white people" or "eradicating all European cultures" or whatever the parent comment was implying. (Or am I reading too much into it?) Though perhaps you can find some moron calling for that on Twitter.
Are other phrases of the form "ending ____ness", where ____ is a racial qualifier, also acceptable, then? Someone using that term could similarly argue that they're not advocating for the eradication of ____ people - just the identity and behavior associated with ____ people.
Are you arguing that calling it "whiteness" is a bad branding move by the sociologists? In that case, I fully agree. There's other similar bad branding moves like "toxic masculinity" or "racism = power + prejudice". I wish they would change those words.
Or do you mean that sociologists who speak about "abolishing whiteness" secretly mean "abolishing the behavior and identity of white people"? No I wouldn't agree with that. I think they mean what they say, and when they tell you their definition of "whiteness", that's what they're referring to. Not some other thing.
It's flatly racist. I'm not sure what other meaning you could get from these words.
I suspect this is a pretty fringe position. I read quite a bit of center to left coded media, and I haven't seen it.
I will say that I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or tiktok though, so I might be missing a cultural moment.
I have seen people point out that the concept of "whiteness" has shifted over time, and doesn't really have an immutable meaning.
DEI trainers/programs (like you get at work) are informed by CRT (the stuff above).
>I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person
But that makes you a bigot and you know what happens to bigots so put on the shirt, label in your bio and change your speech or HR will have a field day with you. Welcome to the "tolerant" side.
The web is built on standards/RFCs (laws) + implementation and enforcement of those standards (executive). The citizens of the web are just as apathetic/short-sighted as your average voter and will embrace the walled garden (authoritarianism) if it fits their current narrative.
My tolerance for online ads is zero. Do I break the web?
Maybe you are hateful and intolerant to ads!
So he better stops because as we know hate is always bad and often even illegal. Love the ads now!
>But the web works because browsers are tolerant.
This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it.
>But the world is better for it.
It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge cases that all need to be handled the same way as opposed to following a standardized way of writing pages.
>The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.
The UX could be improved along with developer tools making it harder to mess up and easy to spot mistakes. For example many internet forums have similar requirements of needing to match formatting tags and those have work successfully despite being strict. I think the real issue was that XHTML was introduced too late. Trying to fix things in a decentralized ecosystem is an extremely big uphill battle. If you don't fix things at the very start things can grow out of one's control.
>The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture.
There is also beauty in that there is a standard that everyone can follow to ensure that pages written can work the same in all browsers.
>I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city.
The way people interact with each other in the real world is very different than the way browsers render pages. I do not think such a comparison makes any sense to make.
>How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights?
Just because someone was in the right place at the right time does not mean that they are of perfect moral character. It's similar to the quote to never meet your heros. The people you may look up to in regards to some achievement may not be the best of character and keeping a distance from them may be the best else your opinion of them may be tarnished.
>When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.
I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. These kinds of people could also drive away other potential talent too. Simply increasing the number as opposed to trying to build a positive, healthy, culture and growing it I don't think is the best idea.
>This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian.
It could be about these 2 choices. For example x86 processors were able to be extremely successful despite not being tolerant between big and little endian. By picking a single one and running with it, it's been able to help unify computing on little endian.
> >When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.
> I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with.
Tell me more about this subset you wouldn't like to work with.
I do not want to work with people who are obnoxious, mentally unstable, love stirring drama, self centered, controlling, etc.
These attributes can make it hard to work with others, or waste time that could have been spent actually building a good product for end users. Of course people are not robots, they have emotions and attitudes that are variable so some people will exhibit these qualities some of the time, but I believe it's important to build a culture that can withstand these rather than amplify them.
It's weird that you associate those qualities with the minorities currently being discriminiated against.
The scenario was not about people being discriminated against. It was about the way people handle and react to the language of others.
> I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with.
The subset most discouraged is likely those targeted by discrimination - women, minorities, gay people. Not a great look to say you'd rather not work with that subset.
Who, exactly, is this guy angry at?
> History shows us that all progress comes from the meeting of diverse people, with different ideas, and different backgrounds.
Maybe don't discard people as "hateful" just because you don't agree with their ideas then.
This article is a prime example of false equivalence. The cool thing about false equivalence is that, when you throw the laws of logic out of the window, you can prove pretty much everything. Anyone can write a specular article proving that intolerance is actually good since very stricter programming languages (like Rust and its borrow checker) are inherently safer.
I agree, thank you for giving me the word to this and giving an explaination too
I just believe that there are ways to systemetically prove both of these things independently and I am not sure about the XHTML and other debate but here is my thoughts on "tolerance" itself
I don't think that there is an inherent purpose is life, we have to build one for ourselves, what is the most rare thing in the universe, its not any material or power or anything worth having but rather friendships and enjoyments and treating people as the ends and not means to something. (My own summary-ish from Everything is fcked by Mark manson, not the best writer but I was young when I read the book and so maybe I can recommend it)
Then reading about how to win friends and influence people, One of the key points I took from it is to be more agreeable and try to find common points you can work upon and set aside the differences and thus tolerance and there are 10 s of example from the book where I can share but basically debates help noone if they become petty, if we have disagreements they should be respectful in a way...
These are my views on how to treat everyone equally I guess which I might wish to be applied to myself too so thats why I apply it too others or try to in a way too
Personally I hate extremism from both sides since I feel that its bad but I can understand why people can get extremism from both sides and I try to give them chances to try to improve the situation from mediocre opinions if someone is too extremist from any side if I can be honest.
I think extremism in general is bad I guess tho. Fck social media for making everyone nowadays so extremist tho. The only people I am extremist towards is big tech when you realize that facebook targets young girls and sees if they delete their photos, they are insecure and shoves beauty ads on their face.
This behaviour is really sickening and I think we can all agree that.
XML exists so infinity migration should be allowed?
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When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS.
"The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.
Interesting point: was she "trans" before she transitioned, or only afterwards?
Lots of queer folks are pretending to be straight. Or do they only become queer when they emerge from the closet?
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
That makes sense, thanks :)
The author (me) is one of literally dozens of people who doesn't live in the USA. We don't all obsess over a foreign politician.
As for Sophie Wilson, I suggest you speak to your trans friends about whether they were trans before they publicly transitioned.
If you don't have any trans friends, perhaps reflect on why that is.
Man you realize your real name is attached to your incredibly obnoxious snarky replies right?
The transgenderist stance is that once a man announces he is a woman, then he was always a woman and always will be. Unless he detransitions of course. Then he was always a man and always will be. Same for when a woman declares that she is a man.
So a man who builds his entire career as a man, with all the privilege that brings, as Wilson did, can identify as a woman and these prior achievements now all become that of a woman. Even if this stretches plausibility, what with the sexism of the industry at the time. He can even receive accolades reserved for women, as if he had to work ten times as hard to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field.
This rewriting of history is also why, for example, film credits listing Ellen Page have been retrospectively updated to Elliot Page even though there was no Elliot Page at the time of filming.
Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode".
XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.
Maybe developers should be held to stricter standards than their users. I can demand developers to close tags they are expected to close. But users should be allowed to provide their document numbers as "12345" "123 45" or "12-34-5" if all these notations are used in their country.
>The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.
Standards are the One True Path. That's why they are standards. I see no disrespect in enforcing them. Even more - the ones not following them and forcing users to burn additional CPU cycles because browsers have to assume they may be parsing crap are the disrespectful ones. Come on, it's not that hard, especially with help of IDEs.
I think the Author diverges from the main point - that web standards and browsers' interpretation rules are loosely held (tolerance), towards indirectly attacking the current US administration which is allegedly trending towards intolerance and isolationism. Bit of a weird tangent (Though not inaccurate).
Allegedly...? They're quite explicit about it.
It's literally a metaphor about the benefits of tolerance.
Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system.
But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg
It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.
This author needs to either be specific about who and what they're talking about or not bother. I don't have the context to understand their specific complaints and I'm not motivated to seek it out.
The author (me) wasn't writing for you.
If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
> If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything
You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people?
You ever come across the word thoughtcrime? You think telling perhaps 50% or the population they "have no business being here" is inclusive? A large number of the classes who you pretend to be representing actually don't buy into oppression olympics.
You want to write a screed against the owner of X? Sure, go ahead. But your screed is against anyone who doesn't care about verifying a person's race, gender or sexual orientation.
You're presenting an extremist "you're with us or against us" view; some of us who aren't racist, sexist, misogynist, etc also don't want to have to pass your purity test.
Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone.
> You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people?
It's taken me a while to understand what I find so abhorrent about this frequent rhetorical device and I finally realized it's just plain ol' false equivalence.
Hating nazis for the harm they've caused is, in fact, just fine.
Hating someone because they were born jewish/black/gay/whatever, is not fine.
Pretending that people out here advocating for deportation/camps/imprisonment for the crimes of skin color or religion or whatever else is the same moral equivalence as those people just wanting to be left alone is leaving the realm of stupidity and verging on malice.
> Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone
It's, uh, "weird" that your problem isn't with the bigotry and bigots but with the people who point it out.
You strike me as a deeply unpleasant person.
I too celebrate my own ignorance and trumpet my lack of curiosity. At last I have found my home!
Dude.
HTML4 era was full of parser hacks. Increasingly more and more parser hacks.
XHTML tried to solve that, and make HTML parsing more acessible to everyone. It's not about rigor, it's about making it simpler.
HTML5 goes in the other direction. It formalized all those hacks into very, very strict parsing rules. It's super strict and specific, to the point that only companies with large resources can realistically invest in a proper HTML5 engine.
So, the metaphor does not hold.
You actually don't need a technical-aspect analogue to advocate for better, more inclusive human behavior. It's much better if you don't rely on those. People should not need a spec as a mirror to understand that.
Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance…
Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with.
From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up.
Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.
I mean no offense but comparing fault tolerance to being tolerant with other people only works because it’s the same word that’s used for both meanings. But that has absolutely nothing to do.
If it weren’t the case, you’d argue that people pushing XHTML were intolerant bastards.
What the web runs on is freedom, the freedom to express and disseminate any information one pleases with impunity. That prominent figureheads embrace the hateful ideologies that you speak of is merely a tide of the current times, and will change as soon as they become unpopular, just as they had quit embracing this "tolerance" which was in full force a few years prior. Because they are not about a hate of people, but hate of freedom: hate is merely a pretense, a convenient vehicle through which freedoms can be taken. I think freedom is the most important thing worth fighting for, and you had my support up until now. But then you go on to say that those outside your own window of ideology have no place here. It's much the same methods that the people you complain of employ: to be disingenuous about what you really want-- it's your inability to force your will upon others that you're frustrated with. You have missed the forest for the trees, and the context has already been created for you: you are projecting a battle for the rights of certain groups onto a battle against the rights of all, and you've been turned against yourself. Freedom is something, if you believe in it, you must believe in in its entirety: not almost-freedom, or a convenient sliver of freedom that fits into your own ideological window. You lack the qualifications to exercise tolerance.
The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it.
In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone).
The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.
Good point dude, a few super online people writing forum posts about changing the default name of the main git branch is exactly equivalent to launching gestapo style terror raids on the population at large while ignoring the consitution and due process.
Tomato - tomahto am I right?
What left-wing extremism was that, exactly? Extreme upholding of human rights and equality? Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings? Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation? Extreme letting people live their damn life in whatever way they want as long as it doesn't harm others? Yeah, who wouldn't want to push back on that, sounds terrible eh?
So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad? You are expected to be nice to people when you meet them? You should consider the feelings of other human beings before you act? You had to rename a git branch because most of the people on your team agreed it's kinda lame to use a reference to slavery in a technical term? I've always wondered what people think the "extreme left" is and why they even remotely think it's somehow just as bad as the fascistic bullshit that sadistic, fear-driven socipaths keep working towards.
>Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings?
I hope not towards people that disagree with you or are labeled with an ism since they are monster.
>Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation?
Does that include Jihadists and child molester/groomer?
>So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad?
That is left as an exercise for the reader if you manage to answer truthfully.
Obviously those policies don't apply when dealing with people who don't adhere to those policies - I figured I didn't have to spell that out because it's been covered a very long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> Does that include Jihadists and child molester/groomer?
by and large the right-wing administration currently running the white house works with and makes business deals with Islamic Fundamentalist countries and is headed by a child molester [1]. this does not seem to be an issue of "the left", for its many flaws
1: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU08/20250227/117951/HHRG...
The idea that the US has experienced anything even close to moderate left-wing policies is - from the perspective of an outsider - laughable.
I'd love to know what extreme positions you think US politicians have enforced and what the moderate position is.
Just imagine if financial software would run on tolerance. Or medical software. Or software controlling planes, trains or nuclear power plants.
To credit a technical advance to a person's identity is to commit the 'Correlation is not Causation' fallacy. While diversity in a technical pool is interesting, the technical merit of the contribution must stand alone, independent of the contributor's personal characteristics. Shifting the focus from 'Does it work?' to 'Who wrote it?' is fundamentally anti-meritocratic and undermines the value of the technical discussion.
The health of a technical community like this one depends on its ability to separate the merit of the work from the moral character of the contributor. This is a necessary separation to preserve the integrity of the technical commons. For instance, a paper on a secure hash algorithm should be judged only on its mathematical proof, regardless of the author's personal life. Any attempt to link the two injects ad hominem fallacy into a technical evaluation.
You'll notice that the author (me) didn't actually credit the invention of the computer to Turing's sexuality.
But it is an undeniable fact that he was gay.
If the British government had banned him from working at Bletchly Park because of that, would the computer still have been developed? Certainly he wasn't the only one working on it, but historians and computer scientists seem to agree that he was a key figure.
The health of a technical community depends on its ability to attract contributors from a wide variety of backgrounds.
We agree that the result of the work is what is important. I'm arguing that Stephen Hawking can't participate unless you install wheelchair ramps.
> Denying rights to others is poison. Wishing violence on people because of their heritage is harmful to all of us.
I think this is true for all cases, the author gives us example of trans co creator of arm architecture and alan turing and how their contributions in the web mattered
But I think quite frankly, even if that might not be the case, there STILL ISNT any reason why we should discriminate and I feel like some part of the intepretation I got was that we should be tolerant to all communities currently still persecuted because some part of them contributed to us...
But what about communities that did not support you because they weren't in the shape of? I feel like we should be tolerant to them.
I tend to stay less political nowadays but just look at the case of sudan. Its state is atrocious. I am not sure if sudan contributed quite heavily on the web or not so pardon me but even if they might not have, We should still be tolerant and like stop the atrocities happening there in my opinion.
Basically the point I am trying to make might be obvious but with or without the creations of alan turing, and co creator of arm, We should still be tolerant to each other as long as they are tolerant to us, thus a tolerant society.
I like referring to the paradox of tolerance as its a key of literally every problem in my opinion and this time tho its actually as clear as day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I think what we as a society need is to look at if we are infighting with each other over petty differences created by spews of lies by people in power to stay in power so that we infight. The british used conquer and divide on India and africa which I am not going to lie, still impacts these countries.
I am pretty sure that people do divide and conquer on their own people too, Power and the Powerful don't discriminate in this sense.
TLDR: We should be tolerant of each other as a whole even if there might not be any web contributions simply because being kind is mostly good I guess but also we should be intolerant to the true intolerant of society which try to create this divide from (both sides) imo and just try to remove any type of extremism and actually focus on class issues too.
This whole article has, to be ragebait - surely? It's such a inane piece of writing, the world needs to give less time to anyone that genuinely holds these views. They're entitled to hold them, but they're still wrong.
>It had an intolerant ideology.
Without going into the various reasons why its trash, conforming to a spec is not intolerance, it's success. Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!! You can't discriminate against different thicknesses, all thicknesses are equally valuable!"
What a useless position to hold.
This comment breaks HN's guidelines in many ways. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We're trying for something quite different here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. If you meant your comment as an amusing meta play on intolerance, then I'm sorry for misreading. That would of course be much better, but after a bit of wavering I concluded that you actually meant what you were saying here.
Apologies, guidelines noted. Upom reread of my comment, it was less constructive than intended.
Thank you. These are right out of my mouth. I mean I'd have made a similar comment if I didn't worry the strong words would get me flagged.
The whole article is weird af. How are tolerating XHTML syntax error and tolerating different sexualities remotely comparable? The metaphor stretches itself so thin that you can see the fallacies beneath.
> Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiring exactly 1 inch plate is intolerance!!
The Brooklyn bridge is a singular piece of infrastructure that millions depend on. I think it makes for a bad analogy.
A better analogy would be something more like websites, where people can tinker and create and contribute without much consequence. For example, the local community garden's board saying, "Requiring a precise and strictly uniform planting layout and soil composition is intolerance!" Well... that'd be quite reasonable?
It's bad because it makes it harder to implement a browser so the "spec" just becomes whatever the leading implementation supports.
When I clicked on the article, I thought it was going to be about how the web gives a space for all voices even the marginalized or minorities to be seen/heard. Not this nonsense.
Thank you very much for your constructive criticism on my writing. I appreciate the candid feedback.
I must take one small issue though. Every engineering project I've worked on has very definitely specified a tolerance. Something may be X cm ± Y mm.
Tolerance is essential to engineering.
As pointed out my comment was not as constructive as it could have been, apologies for that.
It was a bad morning. I do appreciate being called on it.
However my less dramatic point, that precice protocols and exact requirements is what makes technical projects successful, is what I could have conveyed.
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Cherry picking examples from science, technology or other fields to support an ideology isn't going to attract external supporters to that ideology but to make the bias stronger for the people who already believe in that ideology. Also, I rather read more "hacker news" and less ideological ramblings.
There are 2 webs.
web apps and web sites.
web apps require a [java|ecma]script whatng cartel web engine, more and more only the gogol one (blink) will "correctly" work (abuse of dominant position).
web sites are noscript/basic (x)html ("forms" and the <audio> <video> elements). Usually a "semantic" 2D table with proper ids for navigation.