FeoBlog Upgrades

Well, I started this morning fixing a minor bug in FeoBlog. But then the GitHub Action build failed which sent me down a day-long rabbit hole that ended up with me upgrading from ActixWeb v3 to v4.

It's a bit disappointing because Rust is in theory not supposed to break backward compatibility. But I guess some bits of their API leaked and then got used by libraries I was using.

Not really what I had planned for my Sunday but glad to be on newer versions of things, I guess? 😅

Me: You should remain professional and avoid burning bridges.

Facebook recruiter: Hi! Want to use ML to moderate virtual social spaces?

Me: On second thought, …

Fresh Looks Cool!

When Node became popular, I never understood the hype around server-side JavaScript, other than that it took what had before then been mostly client-side and making it usable on the server.

But the pitfalls of writing large systems on the server without type checking seemed too great. And I wasn't that fond of JavaScript at the time.

By the time I got around to playing with Node more seriously, TypeScript was a thing. In FeoBlog I wanted to write a browser-based client that would both be a nice UI and a great demo of the client/server capabilities of the system. I chose Svelte as my UI toolkit, and I very much enjoy the features it offers. However, bundling JavaScript for the browser is still a pain to get working. And if you ship everything as a Single-Page Application, you lose out on indexing, and old/underpowered browsers.

FeoBlog actually has remnants of an early server-side template system which it falls back on for that purpose, but you lose out on a lot of features, and it's lost parity with the new Svelte UI. It would be nice if I could write code once and have it render on the server OR the client.

So now I'm starting to see the appeal of server-side JS. But... I don't really want to run Node. Thankfully there's Deno, which I've already enjoyed writing some scripts for.

AND, there's a cool new web framework called Fresh. It's got the same super-fast dev cycle that I've enjoyed with Deno, and the result is code that can render things on the server OR client.

If you want to see a(n incidental) demo of Fresh, take a look at Deno Deploy: Crazy Fast Cloud Functions - Architecture Speedun, which is where I first discovered it.

Looking forward to see where this goes!

I do not have a kind view of anyone who brags about not voting. And anyone trying to convince you not to vote has motives you should definitely question.

… But watching the Democrats just roll over on every damned thing is really making it feel like a pointless ritual. Democracy Theater.

• Continued and renewed efforts at voter suppression
• Packing the supreme court
• The timid handling of Jan. 6th insurrectionists. (Including a supreme court justice and former president!)
• Now, their reaction to Roe v. Wade is
  • "Still not time to end the filibuster"
  • "Need more police protection for these poor SCOTUS judges!"
  • "Let's talk about something else."

They're guaranteed the vote of anyone like me who is against what Republicans are doing, so won't throw away their vote on a further-left party. But as a result they keep moving right to try to pick up more "middle" voters.

Feeling a bit frustrated and hopeless about the future for the U.S.

Just to be clear, though: I'll still be voting.

Uhh, WaPo… is this an ad for Trump? "Inaction" as democracy "came under attack"? He was and is continuing to attack democracy by continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the election. He spoke at the rally that ended up invading the capitol while the election was being finalized! And told them to do it! WTF kind of reframing is this?

This is as bad as the bootlicking "shots were fired and someone died at an altercation involving police" trope.

I've been writing Java since before Generics and still ran into this landmine:

Coworker (reviewing my code): container.contains(null) can throw a NullPointerException.

Me: I don't think so, the docs say:

Returns true if this collection contains the specified element. More formally, returns true if and only if this collection contains at least one element e such that (o==null ? e==null : o.equals(e)).

And this code works as I expect:

import java.util.*;

public class Contains {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // Interestingly, List.of requires all its elements be non-null. Weird.
        // var list1 = List.of("foo", "bar", "baz");
        // var list2 = List.of("foo", "bar", null);

        var list1 = makeCollection("foo", "bar", "baz");
        var list2 = makeCollection("foo", "bar", null);
        
        check(list1);
        check(list2);
    }

    private static Collection<String> makeCollection(String... args) {
        // return Arrays.asList(args);
        return new HashSet<String>(Arrays.asList(args));
    }

    private static void check (Collection<String> list) {
        System.out.println(list.contains(null));
    }
}

Coworker: read a bit further. Docs also say:

Throws […] NullPointerException - if the specified element is null and this collection does not permit null elements (optional)

… sure enough. In my case I'm actually using a Set.of(predefined, elements), and that particular implementation will throw if passed a null.

UGHHh. NULLS.

FWIW, Kotlin handles this much more nicely:

fun main() {
    val c1 = setOf("foo", "bar")
    val c2 = setOf("foo", null)

    
    val value: String? = null
    println(c1.contains(value))
    println(c2.contains(value))
}

… though you can only depend on that sane behavior when using its setOf() constructor. If you might ever be passed a non-null-safe Java Collection you're back to needing to protect yourself against NPEs.

Roe v. Wade

So the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade and basically let religious fundamentalists control women's bodies.

I feel the need to write something about it.

But then the next thought is: Oh, I should take some time, really organize my thoughts, find links to sources, etc, etc. That way lies me never writing anything. "Perfect is the enemy of good [enough]", etc.

So instead, here's my stream-of-thought braindump.

First, this is terrible. It's terrible for women. Especially in states that want to ban abortion. (And even with RvW many had already effectively banned it by making it practically unavailable.) Especially poor women who don't have the means and connections to leave for more liberal states.

If the court is saying there is no right to privacy, next you'll have states start outlawing contraception.

Then they'll pass laws saying it's illegal to travel to another state to get an abortion. (I think some already exist for minors?)

Without a right to privacy, anti-sodomy laws are back on the table, and also gay marriage bans.

Without a right to privacy, the government can regulate all sorts of personal details about your life with … what limits?

The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.

Yeah, because that worked out so well for slavery, and interracial marriage, and segregation, and gay marriage. And, oh, what's that? Abortion.

It's just such a big "fuck you". "If you want rights, you should merely convince the majority to stop taking them from you."

And, as I've seen others point out, that's a double "fuck you" in the context of the court recently gutting the Voting Rights Act and states ramping up voter suppression and gerrymandering.

The political process is broken and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

$OurProduct is a love letter to $audience. ❤️

Look, if you're describing something as a "love letter" and then charging money for it, that's "solicitation".

Cool flower

Saw this one while out yesterday. Anybody know what kind of flower it is?

Uh-oh. "Svelte" has taken over as the language with the most lines of code in FeoBlog.

It's funny. I started FeoBlog because I wanted the data structure to be the way that distributed social networks work. But in order to make using that appealing, you've got to have a nice UI. And it turns out there's a lot involved in working toward one of those. Who knew?