Static type checking greatly affects code design. That’s why converting from JS to TS doesn’t give you full benefits of the type system – the code doesn’t lean into types to model invariants.
For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.
I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.
New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.
On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.
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