I completely agree with the general assessment, but then there are always pesky exceptions. In this case the list entered a JavaScript frontend from the yaml header of machine generated content pages for the website framework Hugo. And, of course, after finding the bug, it is clear that things could have been done differently and the issue easily avoided, but I also don’t think this was a completely unreasonable design. Since Hugo actually suppots JSON headers (not just via the yaml parser, but thanks for that tip!), that was a quick fix. But I’m also somewhat amazed that it was possible for the strung-together fairly standard set of Python libraries (primarily pyyaml) to not get the strings properly quoted.

Just the other day I had a list show up as [“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, false, “g”, “h”, “i”].

The issue was that, without me being overly aware of it, the data was going through a data -> yaml -> data step.

Yes, the data -> yaml filter was broken for not putting general strings in quotes. But IMO the yaml design invites these odd “rare” bugs.

I used to like yaml, but was happy to see Toml taking the niche of human-readable-JSON, but felt the format for nested key-value was a weird choice. However, I’ve always felt we could just have extended JSON a bit (allow line breaks, comments, if the outermost data type is an object, the curly brackets may be omitted).

I guess they failed the captcha

Community did it first: youtu.be/z906aLyP5fg

Time travel as a sudden jump seems one of the least plausible implementations, since we have no idea how to do such jumps even in just space or forward in time; and allowing for it would break a lot of physics.

More plausible alternatives include a space-time bridge, meaning both sides can follow Earth’s reference frame; or the Primer-type where one can reverse time in an isolated box, but it means you can only travel backwards along the Box’ trajectory and you have to wait around for some time while you move backwards in time along that trajectory.

Why would it not make sense to rather better limit access to ammunition and gunpowder? There must be ways to cobble together parts into a gun-like object through other means than 3D printing, but nothing will fire without ammunition, and that seems a bit more difficult for someone to pull of themselves? Or is that incorrect?

Unfortunately for the second scenario is that it also gives someone else a log of everything you 3D print, protrusions or not. And even if it isn’t guns, you’d may not want that.

I think you have pinpointed the core issue.

Right-wing republican policies and ideas lends themselves to simple (but often wrong) models of explanation; “it is the fault of the immigrants; the poor; abortion is always immoral”, etc. You get candidates that radiate confident leadership spewing simple talking points they to a letter degree believe in.

Left-wing, especially progressive, ideas are often rooted in insight into the incomplete understanding we have of the underlying complexities. People who navigate these ideas won’t be as confident: “the cause is a bit of this and a bit of that; we don’t really know, but research points at” etc. To confidently sell policies based on these ideas to voters requires a level of cognitive dissonance, and also opens for criticism on being indecisive.

My theory is that all this is the fault of the cookie law. Before that, the design philosophy was that you could not break the flow of a visitor by pop-ups etc., because they would go somewhere else before even looking at your content.

When all the big websites suddenly implemented increasingly annoying cooking consent dialogs, the flow was already broken everywhere. And so now the floodgates had opened for all kinds “subscribe to our newsletter”, “get a welcome 10% rebate” etc., because users no longer has the expectation of an unbroken flow.

And, my god was that law stupid. What we needed was carefully balanced non-negotiable limits on what websites were allowed to do in terms of tracking users; what we got was every website implementing a site-dependent UI for functionality already present in every web browser (“turn off cookies”). The rules got different when GDPR arrived later, both for the better and for the worse. But the flow-breaking pop-ups we will probably never get rid of now that the public has learned to live with them.

End of rant.