Lady @Lady@cat.family

my take on the undertale quiz is that i’m not in college anymore

@Dex a better way to do this would have been to base64-encode the binary data and use tag characters. tag characters are underspecified in unicode and do not have strong conformance requirements (they are only used for a small number of emoji flags currently), but like variation selectors they are default-ignorable and do not impact most plaintext operations. however, Unicode’s (correct) stance would remain that this is largely inappropriate and plain text is not a good medium for text with these kinds of metadata requirements

@Dex https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2026/26042-embedded-metadata-in-plain-text.pdf

@gaditb an ISO style keyboard? it looks like this; note the tall return key and extra key next to left shift. it is a very popular keyboard style in Europe

i would love to be interested in all of the cool handheld tech that different people are experimenting with these days but unfortunately not one of them has been able to clear the hurdle of supporting an ISO‐style keyboard configurable in software with up to twelve levels

@gaditb This all sounds very critical so I want to close by saying that I am not trying to harsh their vibe and actually want them to keep doing what they are doing. At the same time, I don’t think they do or can serve as a useful model for working programmers who are trying to build community and share knowledge with other working programmers in the limited time they have on or off the job. Nor do I think it necessarily makes a very good demonstration of the process of conversing with stakeholders and refining issues based on their needs, which is the bulk of the task of software engineering. It is mostly theory and manifesto, with the manifesto sometimes taking the form of code.

@gaditb On the purely technical standpoint, I was annoyed but not surprised at Sneakerweb’s enshrining of `index.html´ as the directory root to the exclusion of alternatives like `index.xhtml´ or `index.xml´. It is of course the opinion of WHATWG that the XML syntax of HTML is a legacy format which should not be used, and it is a common opinion that HTML is friendlier to novices that XHTML, so this is an understandable piece of ignorance. However, you have to ask yourself whether the goal of Sneakerweb is just to accommodate indie handcrafted websites with bright stickers and cute pieces of string, or also more formal and durable repositories of value like, say, ebooks. Even a cursory exploration into EPUB would reveal that it is just a Zip file of XHTML, and from this logically one can assume that most ebook publishing workflows are probably XML‐based, so failing to account for XML in your software gives the distinct impression that you do not fully understand the problem space you are trying to solve.

You can only get so far trying to invent programs for publishing without talking to any publishers, programs for library science without talking to any librarians, et cetera. The impression I get from worm-blossom is that they exist primarily in a bubble of technologists with no real stakeholders, and they come up with solutions which sound interesting and trendy to technologists but lack the problem statements, requirements gathering, and necessary compromises that are inherent to solutions for stakeholders. A pithy way of putting this would be to say they are architecting but not engineering. It is frankly probably impossible to do any real engineering with a team of two or three people, so this is not exactly a criticism, but it does call the longevity and applicability of their solutions into doubt.

@gaditb Analysis along the cultural-technical front reinforces these feelings of privilege. The first implementation of Willow was written in TypeScript; the current implementation is written in Rust. Small teams choose programming languages based on the comfort levels of their members; this TypeScript‐to‐Rust pipeline suggests a certain background and history which, if not directly a participant in the startup culture of the 2010’s, was at least attending the same conferences as them and sharing code, methodologies, and worldviews. It is rude, of course, to overindex on these choices when these are two of the most popular programming languages in use today, but these things do send signals about who someone is and who they associate with. TypeScript was a core part of Microsoft’s strategy to capture a share of the developer market (a share which they are now trying to cash in on with Copilot). Rust is now a primary target for AI investment and vibecoding. It is, if nothing else, kind of embarrassing to constantly find yourself making the same technological choices and sharing the same spaces as these kinds of people.

@gaditb Regarding communications: I think their website is cute. It is something they have put a lot of care and heart into and I think it shows.

It also very obviously is something that takes a lot of time. And I feel it is important to point out unless you are grant‐funded or have tenure (a very very small minority), time is not a luxury that most working programmers have. Most people writing open‐source code for their jobs are programmers at understaffed public (or at least public‐interest) institutions with portfolios that vastly outsize their workforce, and people who write open‐source code in their free time are typically scrounging for a few hours outside of work that they have to balance with their families, their welbeing, and their other interests. This blog exists in a different world from those programmers. It is not a blog written by a labourer with too little time and too many responsibilities trying to convey the barest essentials of their work and practice to another labourer with too little time and too many responsibilities. This is not a criticism, exactly, but it is necessary to acknowledge the ressentiment that this evokes. Culturally, worm-blossom exists in a space that is something like the Ivory Tower of programming.

@gaditb ah, well, you might need to be more specific on genre of thought. technological? rhetorical? social?

it is very sad going through the `static-site-generator´ tag on Codeberg and every single project is some script for doing expensive operations to a directory of Markdown files. programmers really are the worst, least imaginative people out there

can you read the books in the book organizing game

and here is my static site generator https://codeberg.org/Lady/Shushe