joepie91

No, your cryptocurrency cannot work

Whenever the topic of Bitcoin's energy usage comes up, there's always a flood of hastily-constructed comments by people claiming that their favourite cryptocurrency isn't like Bitcoin, that their favourite cryptocurrency is energy-efficient and scalable and whatnot.

They're wrong, and are quite possibly trying to scam you. Let's look at why.

What is a cryptocurrency anyway?

There are plenty of intricate and complex articles trying to convince you that cryptocurrencies are the future. They usually heavily use jargon and vague terms, make vague promises, and generally give you a sense that there must be something there, but you always come away from them more confused than you were before.

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

js-choi

Concise Unicode character names in JavaScript

J. S. Choi, 2022

⚠️ Warning: This article is not finished. The code will not yet run without errors.

All programmers must manipulate text; JavaScript programmers are no exception. Text manipulation often refers to specific characters, usually by their code points in hexadecimal – or by embedding the characters directly in source code.

devsnek

/**
  Simple(ish) example of discord gateway
  This code will get to ready, and then remain connected with heartbeats
  see https://discordapi.com/topics/gateway for more info
  zlib compression is implemented as it will be required in gateway v7 (so get used to it now)
*/

const WebSocket = require('ws'); // npmjs.org/ws
const zlib = require('zlib-sync'); // npmjs.org/zlib-sync
const erlpack = require('erlpack'); // github.com/discordapp/erlpack

joepie91

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

• A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
• A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
• There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.