joepie91

ES Modules are terrible, actually

This post was adapted from an earlier Twitter thread.

It's incredible how many collective developer hours have been wasted on pushing through the turd that is ES Modules (often mistakenly called "ES6 Modules"). Causing a big ecosystem divide and massive tooling support issues, for... well, no reason, really. There are no actual advantages to it. At all.

It looks shiny and new and some libraries use it in their documentation without any explanation, so people assume that it's the new thing that must be used. And then I end up having to explain to them why, unlike CommonJS, it doesn't actually work everywhere yet, and may never do so. For example, you can't import ESM modules from a CommonJS file! (Update: I've released a module that works around this issue.)

And then there's Rollup, which apparently requires ESM to be u

joepie91

Normies just don't care about privacy

If you're a privacy enthusiast, you probably clicked a link to this post thinking it's going to vindicate you; that it's going to prove how you've been right all along, and "normies just don't care about privacy", despite your best efforts to make them care. That it's going to show how you're smarter, because you understand the threats to privacy and how to fight them.

Unfortunately, you're not right. You never were. Let's talk about why, and what you should do next.

So, first of all, let's dispense with the "normie" term. It's a pejorative term, a name to call someone when they don't have your exact set of skills and interests, a term to use when you want to imply that someone is clueless or otherwise below you. There's no good reason to use it, and it suggests that you're looking down on them. Just call them "people", like everybody else and like yourself - you don't need to turn them into a group of "others" to begin with.

Why does that matter? Well, would *y

old-adapdr

"""
This file contains helper functions for the built-in 
python (key, value) storage
"""

import dbm
from secrets import token_urlsafe
from logging import getLogger
from typing import Union, Tuple

IanColdwater

Mute these words in your settings here: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

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joepie91

Your blockchain must have all of the following properties:

• It's a merkle tree, or a construct with equivalent properties.
• There is no single point of trust or authority; nodes are operated by different parties.
• Multiple 'forks' of the blockchain may exist - that is, nodes may disagree on what the full sequence of blocks looks like.
• In the case of such a fork, there must exist a deterministic consensus algorithm of some sort to decide what the "real" blockchain looks like (ie. which fork is "correct").
• The consensus algorithm must be executable with only the information contained in the blockchain (or its forks), and no external input (eg. no decisionmaking from a centralized 'trust node').

If your blockchain is missing any of the above properties, it is not a blockchain, it is just a ledger.