Yeah, there's not a lot that's actionable here... mostly boils down to "try a lot of stuff yourself and find out what LLMs are good and bad at." Rs in strawberry, generating some specific text in Nano Banana, what knowledge it knows, etc. Don't do those specific things because obviously (?) models are bad at them.

Still helpful!

Tricky though because this generation of LLMs involve random sampling, so unlike computer code and libraries it's non-deterministic and inherently unreliable. Not sure if autoregressive random token sampling will ever be the winning paradigm.

Cory Doctorow perhaps? At first glance I thought the OP was quoting him.

This was literally a plot element in "Big Brother" - the protagonists use modded xboxes to create a mesh network to avoid government surveillance.

XSLT is really powerful and it is declarative, like CSS, but can both push and pull.

It's a loss, if you ask me, to remove it from client-side, but it's one I worked through years ago.

It's still really useful on the server side for document transformation.

Imagine a WASM XSLT interpreter wouldn't be to hard to compile?

TFA mentions polyfills and libraries.

Your response is like seeing the cops going to the wrong house to kick in your neighbors door, breaking their ornaments in their entry way, and then saying to yourself, "Good. I hate yellow, and would never have any of that tacky shit in my house."

As your first sentence of your comment indicates, the fact that it's supported and there for people to use doesn't (and hasn't) result in you being forced to use it in your projects.

Yes but software, and especially browser, complexity has balooned enormously over the years. And while XSLT probably plays a tiny part in that, it's likely embedded in every Electron app that could do in 1MB what it takes 500 MB to do, makes it incrementally harder to build and maintain a competing browser, etc., etc. It's not zero cost.

I do tend to support backwards compatibility over constant updates and breakage, and needless hoops to jump through as e.g. Apple often puts its developers through. But having grown up and worked in the overexuberant XML-for-everything, semantic-web 1000-page specification, OOP AbstractFactoryTemplateManagerFactory era, I'm glad to put some of that behind us.

If that makes me some kind of gestappo, so be it.

Point to the part of your comment that has any-fucking-thing to do with the topic at hand (i.e. engages with the actual substance of the comment that it's posted as a reply to). Your comment starts with "Yes but", as if it to present it as a rebuttal or rejoinder to something that was said, but then proceeds into total non-sequitur. It's an unrestrained attempt at a change of subject and makes for a not-very-hard-to-spot type of misdirection.

Your neighbors' ugly yellow tchotchkes have in no way forced you—nor will they ever force you—to ornament your house with XSLT printouts.

Alright, you're extremely rude and combative so I'll probably tap out here.

But consider if the "yellow tchotchkes" draw some power from my house, produce some stinky blue smoke that occasionally wafts over, requires a government-paid maintenance person to occasionally stop by and work on, that I partly pay for with my taxes.

That's my point.

> Alright, you're extremely rude

In contrast to poisoning the discussion with subtle conversational antimatter while wearing a veneer of amiability. My comments in this thread are not insidiously off-topic non-replies presented as somehow relevant in apposition to the ones that precede them.

> consider if the "yellow tchotchkes" draw some power from my house, produce some stinky blue smoke that occasionally wafts over, requires a government-paid maintenance person to occasionally stop by and work on, that I partly pay for with my taxes

Anyone making the "overwork the analogy" move automatically loses, always. Even ignoring that, nothing in this sentence even makes any sense wrt XSLT in the browser or the role of browser makers as stewards of stable Web standards. It's devoid of any cogent point and communicates no insight on the topic at hand.

Remove crappy JS APIs and other web-tech first before deprecating XSLT - which is a true-blue public standard. For folks who don't enable JS and XML data, XSLT is a life-saver.

If we're talking about removing things for security security, the ticking time bomb that is WebUSB seems top of the list to me of things that are dangerous, not actually standards (it is Chrome only), and yet a bunch of websites think it's a big, good reason to be Chrome-only.

But XSLT can be replicated with JavaScript and the reverse is, sadly, untrue.

So if only one needed to go, it seems obvious which it should be.

Perhaps, but isn't the contemporary tech stack orders of magnitude more complicated? Doesn't feel like a strong motivating argument.

Love Carmack, but hard disagree on this and a lot of similar functional programming dogma. I find this type of thing very helpful:

    classList = ['highlighted', 'primary']
    if discount:
        classList.append('on-sale')
    classList = ' '.join(classList)

And not having to think about e.g. `const` vs `let` frees up needless cognitive load, which is why I think python (rightly) chose to not make it an option.

Some potential alternatives to consider:

1.

    classList = ['highlighted', 'primary']
        .concatif(discount, 'on-sale')
        .join(' ')

2.

    classList = ' '.join(['highlighted', 'primary'] + (['on-sale'] if discount else []))

3.

    mut classList = ['highlighted', 'primary']
    if discount:
        classList.append('on-sale')
    classList = ' '.join(classList)

    freeze classList

4.

    def get_class_list(discount):
        mut classList = ['highlighted', 'primary']
        if discount:
            classList.append('on-sale')
        classList = ' '.join(classList)
        return classList

    classList = get_class_list(discount)

Fennel (Lisp):

    (table.concat [:highlighted :primary (if discount :on-sale)] " ")

Hmm, feel like the new title is pretty lifeless. I wouldn't have clicked this (very good IMHO) article with the current title.

"Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics" would represent it better - it's addressing people (like me) who sometimes fancy themselves above it.

Ok, I've done that above except I replaced stop with don't. ("Stop" is a linkbait trope.)

Every time I hear about modern JS/TS frameworks, I'm amazed at the unnecessary complexity.

In python / bottle.py this would just be a print statement to stderr in before_request() or before_response(). One additional LOC.

Also be careful not to reach for system design when you only need software design: https://lukerissacher.com/blog/optimizing_your_web_app

Everybody here is coldly evaluating the financial profit comparison. How about being a decent human being, and not enabling hundreds of criminals to hurt millions of people because your net income is potentially better?

People are fixated, across this thread, on a black market of organized criminals buying vulnerabilities, but for the most part criminals aren't the real alternative market buyers for high-end vulnerabilities, and while people on message boards may incline towards viewing IC and LEO agencies as themselves criminal, I think you'll find a pretty substantial fraction of normal people find supplying IC/LEO agencies as more than just decent; praiseworthy, even.

That thorny ethical issue aside, I'm fond of pointing out that the IC's main alternative to CNE intelligence collection is human intelligence, and the cost of HUMINT simply in employee benefits dwarfs any near-term possible cost of exploit enablement packages; 7 figures is a pittance (remember: most major western governments are essentially benefits management organizations with standing armies).

Even given the seemingly vast sums earned by organized crime, government buyers are positioned to decisively outbid crime over the medium term. It's really early days for these markets.

Not commenting about the ic/leo part specifically, but there is a pretty abundant body of work on what "normal" people are willing to do, as long as they find a way to rationalize it away. The banality of evil is well documented.

In that light, what others would do is rarely a reliable indicator that you shouldn’t think twice about your actions, lest you regret later, once the thinking has happened.

I have no idea what any of this has to do with anything I just wrote, I'm sorry.

I was commenting on your point that a pretty substantial fraction of normal people find some actions decent, and even praiseworthy.

My point is that this fact shouldn’t belong in a discussion about ethics, given how often widely held moral positions have come to be a source of regret.

People are evaluating this from a cold perspective to see if the system is working as designed or not.

Hopefully decency reduces the necessary price a little.