I think you're understating the cost of having to ship your own standard library with every wasm application - the chunk of stdlib used by a real app is bigger than 10kb. ICU data files are in the tens of megabytes, TZDB is a chunk of data too.
Lots of people pretend they don't need ICU or TZDB but that means leaving non-english-speakers or people outside of the US in the cold without support, which isn't the case for JS applications.
I still think this is a major unsolved problem for WebAssembly and I've previously raised it. I understand why it's not solved though - specifying and freezing the bitstream for ICU databases is a big task, etc.
A lot of the stuff WebAssembly is obviously good at is stuff where you never need any of those tables—algorithms, computations, not UI stuff. I would like to see improvements like you to make it more generally useful, but there’s still plenty of scope for WASM even without running into these issues. Also I think you’re probably overestimating the size of the stuff you actually need to include. You tend to include specific tables rather than all the data. More typical figures are like “oh, you used regex with its default features… that’ll cost 500 kB”. And that’ll also be a pre-compression 500 kB. Though on the other hand you can also end up including multiple copies of things when you’re careful about optimising what each one has!
It's interesting that 'banning junk fees and hidden charges' is part of a leftist political agenda according to this article:
> Protecting consumers, including renters, appears be a large part of Mr. Mamdani’s early agenda as mayor. The actions of Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, appear so far to indicate a willingness to govern based on a leftist political agenda.
Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now? Or is the perspective of the NYT's coverage skewed because they don't like this guy? It's weird.
According to this same article, the efforts seem to be a continuation of existing work that was happening before he got elected:
> In June, Letitia James, the attorney general, announced a $600,000 settlement with Equinox Group over the difficulty of ending a membership. Last month, she joined a multistate coalition that filed suit against Uber regarding the difficulty of canceling subscriptions.
To give you a real answer, yes, the Overton window has shifted. Anything at all that is perceived as limiting what a business can charge or negotiate is considered leftist now. Banning junk fees is a limit on what businesses can charge/negotiate.
> Has the overton window just shifted so much that not wanting to get screwed by greedy con artists is communist now?
I've seen this dude described as an "islamo-communist" more than once in different countries' medias (not fringe medias). I presume "islamist" because muslim, and "communist" because he's left of the center-right. You can't really talk with these people anyways, they're too far gone
I have not seen any indication that Mamdani has advocated for violence to achieve his goal, so calling him a communist seems unfair, but I think he would also agree it is unfair to simply say he is "left of the center-right".
Mamdani seems very proud to be a socialist and you get a taste of it where he says "...the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment" and "..we have to continue to elect more socialists and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism", etc. He is very clear about his beliefs.
At the gym, which bombards us with propaganda on the telescreens, I saw him called a "jihadist communist". It was either Fox News or Newsmax. It's like they looked for the scariest word salad that would trigger their boomer audience.
I also doubt either channel can define communism or jihad correctly.
He’s not just left of center-right, he’s literally a “democratic socialist” which is far, far left. His tenant advocate literally has called for seizing of private property.
> he’s literally a “democratic socialist” which is far, far left
For an US perspective, yes. From an European perspective... him and Bernie are center-left, if not centrist. The Overton window is positioned much more towards the authoritarian right in the US than it is here - although the huge amounts of American and Russian funding towards far-right parties have been shifting the window here as well for about a decade.
Because Mamdani is not "far far left" unless you live in the American echo chamber which treats anything not right-wing as a leftist threat [1]. On a global stage, where actual political systems exist beyond America's basic, captured two-party system, the words "left" and "right" have established political meaning.
because Americans are incredibly stupid when it comes to understanding class politics so they just throw words like marxist and communist around without knowing what they mean (source: I am American)
Because in the US feeding kids for free in schools is seen as communism, but that's not what communism is. You can't say this dude is a communist or an islamist because words have a meaning and these meanings transcend American borders
Wait until you hear about what the GOP has allowed energy companies to do with eminent domain... and the expansion plans they have recently called for.
Please don’t classify me as some sort of GOP supporter just because I am clarifying the parent post as to Mamdani’s self-admitted political classification.
I didn't say you support the GOP. I am saying that the seizure of private property has long standing political support in the US from both sides of their political spectrum. It is hardly a "far-left" idea.
The ideology of Democratic Socialism has always been focused on helping low income and working poor people live better lives, and that manifests in action to put more money in their pocket. I suppose you more often hear about more indirect ways to do this (eg. trying to lower rent, create more subsidized low cost housing) but lowering fees puts more money in people's pocket and that is directly in the wheel house of Democratic Socialism.
So if this seems like Mamdani is doing something weird here, I think it's more that the twisted media framing of the left has pushed people to have a vision of it that is dissonant from its real ideology and goals.
> Protecting consumers, including renters, appears be a large part of Mr. Mamdani’s early agenda as mayor. The actions of Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, appear so far to indicate a willingness to govern based on a leftist political agenda.
Using the term "leftist" to describe something Nixon would do is absolutely a sign the Overton Window has shifted.
And what exactly is your point? You stated one side of the history but not the other. One can only conclude that you're implying "not communist" is good, when in fact that's just nonsense.
Is this one of the costs of 'the year of the linux desktop' - mac and windows users migrating to linux and getting confused by 'selecting text puts it in the clipboard without confirmation' and 'middle click pastes the clipboard contents'?
fwiw I find the workflow advantages of it questionable, since I often want to select some text and ctrl+v to replace it with the clipboard.
This doesn't make a lot of sense. It would make the DMCA completely useless if enough people decide to pirate your work because you wouldn't be able to afford to issue the takedowns.
Depending on your OS Firefox will select from multiple rendering backends based on your GPU, driver etc.
On Windows it may or may not be using DirectWrite for text rasterization as a general thing, and in some cases text might be rasterized using a different fallback path if DirectWrite can't handle the font, I think.
IIRC this was/is true for Chrome as well, where in some cases it software rasterizes text using Skia instead of calling through to the OS's font implementation.
IIRC, Chrome now uses CoreText/DirectWrite for system fonts on macOS/Windows, and Skrifa (FreeType rewritten in Rust) outlines rasterized with Skia for everything else (system fonts on Linux, web fonts on all platforms).
I believe Firefox leans on the system raserizers a little more heavily (using them for everything they support), and also still uses FreeType on Linux.
IMO if they had allowed Firefox onto the App Store (Mozilla have had working ports more than once AFAIK) it might have helped it hold onto market share - I think Apple is partly responsible for the Chrome monoculture.
If that were the case then why isn’t Firefox on mobile on Android more successful? Apple blocking other browser engines in iOS is the only thing preventing a complete hegemony of the web by Google/Blink.
I could be entirely off base, but I would expect Android to be more likely to have more users that would go out of their way to use a non-default web browser, given that it seems to be favored by people who like customizing things. The relative openness of the platform invites a different demographic.
On the other hand, the default on Android is Chrome so there may be less motivation to change since it's the 'default' platform to target. But if Apple opened up iOS to other browsers, the likely outcome would not be Firefox gaining market share but Chrome completely taking over.
I do not like that iOS doesn't allow for alternative engines but I appreciate that it's basically the only thing that even somewhat reigns Google in.
Historically every time new keywords are added, they try to make them contextual so that existing code won't break. 'await' and 'yield' are both examples where a new keyword was added without (generally) breaking existing code - they're only keywords in specific contexts and the way you use them ensures that existing code won't parse ambiguously, AFAIK.
Though, contextual keywords are a thing going back to the original design of C# 1.0 even. The nearest and most obvious example to the topic at hand is that `value` is only reserved in situations such as a property setter, and always has been. You don't need `var @value = …` in the vast majority of C# code and can just write `var value = …` just about anywhere but inside a `set { }` block.
Part of why C# has been so successful in introducing new contextual keywords is that they've been there all along. I think C# 1.0 was ahead of the game on that, and it's interesting how much contextual keywords have started being a bigger tool in language design since C# (all of ES3 of ES4 and some of ES5 were predicated on keywords are always keywords and ES6/ES2015 is where you first start to the shift in JS to a broader contextual keyword approach which seems equal parts inspired by C# as not).
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
One of my #1 things about reading people's writing is that while everybody is allowed to make mistakes, making this kind of easily-verifiable falsehood a central plank of an argument is discrediting. I honestly don't know why people keep reading him. There are better thinkers and writers who will also tell you that women and people of color are subhuman, he's not the only outlet for that point of view if that's what you're looking to read.
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
Lots of people pretend they don't need ICU or TZDB but that means leaving non-english-speakers or people outside of the US in the cold without support, which isn't the case for JS applications.
I still think this is a major unsolved problem for WebAssembly and I've previously raised it. I understand why it's not solved though - specifying and freezing the bitstream for ICU databases is a big task, etc.
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