Viewing profile — thagsimmons

Reading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral…

C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how forma…

I had never heard of her, but decided to take a look at her content to try to tease together some part of her story. I sensed from the coverage that something was being elided here…

We chose sqlx for a SQLite based project because it provides a reasonable async interface, and our experience has not been great. Development momentum has been poor, PRs and issue …

I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people a…

The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately appar…

Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrai…

Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China…

My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional r…

This is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question. It depends on the developer workstation, which file they're currently working on, etc. That said, we're talking about i…

While there was some stink around his departure, he's not one of the contributors I'm concerned about here. I'm thinking more of people working on deep technical issues around the …

I don't want to list specific contributors here. We often have no information on why people left the project - there might be all sorts of personal factors. I will say that my broa…

This is absolutely a pain point for us, working on a very large Rust project. In particular, incremental compile times are absolutely critical for developer comfort, and by far the…

This sounds great, but I don't think Rust has the complement of highly skilled core developers needed to tackle something this ambitious. I'm a close observer of the Rust project, …

I'm very interested in this area, but I've never been able to get a handle on what's going on in this particular project. There's no coherent explanation of the technical aspects, …

The more interesting question is how long it will be until we have open, freely available models that are competitive with closed models. It's now clear that everything is going to…

I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLon…

Obviously people need to make up their own mind, but I do hope that they'd read what Singal actually writes and not base their opinion on a mean-spirited, vengeful hit-piece like t…

In the interest of fairness, here is Singal's response to that page: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/glaad-took-false-previous... For what it's worth, I'm 100% with Singal here.…

Almost nobody who reads this but doesn't already know who Jesse Singal is will bother to do the mountains of reading needed to figure out the reality, so I feel that I need to prov…

This is too simplistic a critique. One species colonizing everything is perfectly compatible with the model in the broad. The complication is that we ourselves exist, are not colon…

Very few things are impossible to work around. In this case, you can detect that the service worker is no longer controlling the page, and do something about it: re-register the wo…

I don't think this is significantly different from what I said ("if your functionality justifies it..."). That is, evaluate service workers in the same way that you would any other…

Again, this is much too sweeping and categorical. The forced reload problem with service workers is well known and easy to work around. The Firefox private browsing example is neit…

This is too negative - it's fine to require service workers if it's justified. Service workers work in private browsing mode in Safari, Chrome and Brave, and is only unimplemented …