Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.
me on the way to the voting booth getting approached with party leaflets #ausvotes2025
Heute vor 100 Jahren im Institut im Kolloquium Mathematischen Gesellschaft #Göttingen:
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H. #Kneser: Reduktion Abelscher Integrale. [...]
K. #Grandjot: Transzend…
On peut toujours trouver ridicule d’acheter un livre en se basant sur sa couverture ou sa typographie. Mais c’est pourtant ce qui m’est arrivé avec Le Backpacker Killer en naviguant dans les rayons d’une librairie en Belgique...
🌊 Lire la chronique sur le Sillon https://sillon-fictionnel.club/post/le
Happy , today I deployed a #Forgejo instance to manage my private code projects. I won't be using #Github anymore for my stuff, only to contribute to 3rd party projects.
I still have some pending work to configure the CI workers, but I'll leave that for next week.
Along the way I've learnt some stuff about #OpenTofu and networking. Enough to know that I still prefer to be on the dev side of the "devops" .
Tout le monde n’a pas eu la chance de voir l’exposition Invader Space Station, installée dans le parking et l’ancien siège historique du journal Libération, situé rue Béranger Š Paris...
👾 Lire la suite sur le Sillon https://sillon-fictionnel.club/post/invader/
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Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:
techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.