Should I upload my 1000+ line IsEven function to VSCode Stories?

Also, SpaceX is declaring independence from Earth laws.

Nov 10, 2020

A quick note on the US elections

Okay, so, it looks like Trump lost. Which is a great thing! I’m happy about it, I promise. I’m kinda invested in the whole US politics thing, because I live in Australia which is basically just US lite, and if the US descends into full mask-off fascism then there will probably be people in cork hats and sandals goose stepping outside my house soon after. So it’s great that Trump lost.

The trouble is that Biden won, and he’s planning on giving an extra $300 million in funding to police, among all the other things. If you’re wondering what you can do next, now might be a good time to look into mutual aid projects and radical organizations in your area, if it’s safe for you to do so.

Wait, one more election thing

BuzzFeed News @BuzzFeedNews

Four Seasons Total Landscaping now exists in VR and furries have flocked to it

buzzfeednews.comVR Furries Are Now Running Around The Four Seasons Total LandscapingThe Philadelphia site of Rudy Giuliani’s speech is being put to another use.

coopertom @thecoopertom

Ha ha ha OMG! The grand debut of Four Seasons Total Landscaping was AMAZING! Thank you to everyone who showed up!

“THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD”

On the 16th of October, a company was registered on the UK Companies House website under the name \"><SCRIPT SRC=MJT.XSS.HT></SCRIPT> LTD. Naturally, this caused problems. I don’t know if the XSS activated on the Companies House website itself, but given that they feed data to a lot of other services, it was a situation that government officials could describe as “problematic”. Apparently they sent this email to some of their contacts:

zofrex @zofrex

"We are writing to inform you that company 12956509, incorporated on 16th October 2020 has a company name that is potentially problematic, consisting as it does, of characters that comprise a cross-site scripting (XSS) injection attempt with a call to an external script."

Their solution was to change the name of the registered company. Now it looks like this.

I hope that they also fixed the website to filter out malicious characters, but this is the same government that spent 12 million pounds on an Excel spreadsheet, so who’s to say.

SpaceX declares independence: Elon Musk's firm says they will not recognize Earth laws

Daily Mail US @DailyMail

SpaceX declares independence: Firm says they will not recognize Earth laws in planned Mars colony

trib.alElon Musk’s SpaceX will not recognize Earth laws in Mars colonyBuried in SpaceX’s Starlink beta consumer service terms is a clause that states the firm will not recognize Earth-based laws on Mars, declaring it a free planet that will adopt self-governing principles.

I’m not afraid to say that I don’t like most Earth laws. The 90% tax rate on hard liquor in Australia is holding me back from that oblivion which I so desire, and I think the whole police enforced private property thing is kinda bollocks. So if Mars was about to be a whiskey-fueled worker-owned utopia, I’d be feeling overall quite positive about the abandonment of Earth laws. Unfortunately, this is Musk we’re talking about, so we’re much more likely to see child slaves working in Mars mines.

Pouring one out for the child slaves. Just regular beer though, whiskey costs $80 over here.

A really good website

https://bongo.cat/

I’m not ashamed to say that I spent an entire 20 minutes playing with this.

Hands-Free Coding

I’ve been making an effort to learn more about accessibility recently, because my shame around not understanding it has finally overcome my laziness around having to learn something new. During this redemption arc, I came across a blog post where someone describes how they code despite their Cubital Tunnel Syndrome.

https://joshwcomeau.com/accessibility/hands-free-coding/

Check it out if you’ve got a spare moment. The way they use eye movements and verbal mappings to code is really neat!

I actually really like the VSCode stories

Ben Awad @benawad

Introducing VSCode Stories, the extension you've always wanted but been too afraid to ask for

If you’ve been a tech person online, you’ve probably heard of VSCode stories by now. Basically, it lets you record a gif of your code and upload it for other people with the extension to see. At first I thought it was somewhat pointless, because I already hate looking at my own code, let alone other people’s code, but I think there’s a lot of potential here. StackOverflow is toxic as hell, and if VSCode allowed people to leave comments on users’ stories, I think it’d actually be a fun way to help each other out.

Originally I was considering expanding my IsEven function to be 1000 lines and uploading a gif of that to VSCode Stories, but then I learned that Ben Awad only put $200 of credit on his Azure account for this and I figured I would probably go over that.

If you’re interested in how it works, Ben Awad made a video about it. The best part is that he keeps alternating between pronouncing gif with a g and a j. It’s basically a 7 minute long shitpost.