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Hi Kris. Thank you for reaching out in this way. I am sorry about what I said, and especially so about how I said it.

My undoubtedly harsh words intended to disqualify a line of thinking that I saw as logically dishonest and ethically dubious. Regardless, I overreached and turned it into a personal attack, which was not what I intended.

I've had enough of this terrible fucking website, and the terrible fucking people in it, even if there are also plenty of wonderful, insightful people in it, worth participating in conversation with.

The latter, to answer the previously stated question, are why I have participated here, even if it means having to share a space with people who do not feel the slightest tinge of doubt, self-awareness or embarrassment whilst crowning themselves "actual intellectuals".

This website brings the worst on me, and it brings the worst in others. Everyone here acts like they're so fucking smart, saying the most inane shit to each other, pretending each comment is a philosophy treaty, and patting each other on the back for it. I'm sure we're all really nice people when you meet us in person, even if we're unbearable shitheads in here.

And in trying to counter the hypocrisy, the self-reinforcing bubble of fake intellectualism, I too became part of it and turned into one of the unbearable shitheads. What a waste of time.

> I'm an actual intellectual

It is literally impossible to make fun of this website. It is, truly, beyond parody. I think that I'm being hyperbolic in saying shit like "everyone in this website believes they're the smartest person alive", and five minutes later I get a reply with a dimly-lit picture of a Mensa certificate. Every single time.

That doesn't mean that the people working to _improve_ PHP are doing anything wrong. Sisyphean, perhaps.

That's very interesting. I currently live in Barcelona, and most people would be very surprised to see Rodalies held up as any sort of platonic ideal of anything. Though it is true that it could be a great transit network, given the necessary investment in its maintenance and improvement. Perhaps in two or three more decades.

There's no rule that says that something can't be both practical and good.

And it's not like it's no longer possible to write quote-unquote "bad" PHP -- if nothing else, PHP is backwards-compatible to a fault.

Agreed. I'd say the source of the problem is the lack of real third places. I like to call this "the abolition of society", but I'm a bit dramatic.

While the internet is certainly addictive, I'd assume that most people who, like me, waste their lives online, do so primarily because no real alternative is available.

> We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc.

Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.

I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.

My impression is that Node.js has to be dragged kicking and screaming into any modern JavaScript development practices, and each time, they try to support as little of it as possible as they can get away with.

They have only last year actually rolled out a release that uses ESM modules by default, when the bulk of the community has adopted TypeScript and moved on to using ESM imports (even if they are importing CJS modules under the hood)

They were really late to async/await, and even more so to promises. The chaotic situation where each dependency bundled its own promise library remained in Node.js years after browsers shipped built-in promises. And it still hasn't trickled down to their standard library, most of which is still callback-based and needs to be "promisified" manually. Even their support for fetch, which is eight years old at this point, is still marked as experimental.

Not all tourists are Americans. I would expect the average person scammed by these ATMs is an European citizen from a different country.

I agree the map kinda sucks, because most of the island of Mallorca is a tourist trap at this point. But you can see how the interior's population centers, like Inca, Sa Pobla and Manacor, have none.

For a better example, as one of the replies to the tweet suggests, check using Google Maps around Barcelona. You can see sixteen of them crowded around Sagrada Familia, for example, and barely any in the mostly-residential neighbourhoods further north.

I agree, but that's a very generous description of what Mozilla is doing. I'd say they're less "developing a competitive browser" and more "keeping an uncompetitive browser on life support to continue to profit off it".

I'd argue that the EFF is the main organization fighting for the open web.

Some minor product manager in Cupertino, two quarters from now: "As we can see in this graph, thanks to the improvements to Feedback Assistant over the past couple years, we've reduced our products' bug rate to nearly zero percent!"