That comic doesn't appear to be dated but I'm sure it's been at least 5 years, so that checks out.
It's from 2014, over a decade old.
Relevant to that comic specifically: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/mi725t/yeardate_a_com...
Readit Newsesprehn commented on Boa: A standard-conforming embeddable JavaScript engine written in Rust github.com/boa-dev/boa... · Posted by u/maxloh
This project is pretty cool, but reading through the pages my biggest takeaway was how fast libjs is. Amazing work over on Ladybird.
I wonder what they're doing that's so different than Boa.
esprehn commented on Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states nextgov.com/digital-gover... · Posted by u/jhatax
The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
esprehn commented on Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews seangoedecke.com/good-cod... · Posted by u/zdw
There are times where it is reasonable, especially for bug fixes where there is a test to explicitly check that the bug is fixed. In that case, I might check out the code, revert the fix, and ensure that the test fails. There have been a few times I did that and the test still succeeded, so I can confirm that the test is not testing the right thing (in a very mature project, complexity or test settings can obscure what your test is actually doing, especially if it is an E2E test).
That can be an automated CI check that runs the new tests with the non-test files reverted though.
esprehn commented on Dangerous advice for software engineers seangoedecke.com/dangerou... · Posted by u/gxhao
In my experience orgs need a mix of both rule followers and rule breakers to function.
I really like Dimitri Glazkov's "Sailors and Pirates" framing of this:
esprehn commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo
Fwiw the XSLT implementation in Blink and WebKit is extremely inefficient. For example converting the entire document into a string, to parse it to a format that's compatible with libxslt, to then produce a string and parse it back into a node structure again. I suspect a user space library could be similarly as effective.
Ex. https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/65b2fb1c3c4d0e85ca3902...
Mozilla has an in-house implementation at least:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/tree/5f99d536df02...
It seems like the answer to the compat issue might be the MathML approach. An outside vendor would need to contribute an implementation to every browser. Possibly taking the very inefficient route since that's easy to port.
esprehn commented on "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" github.com/whatwg/html/pu... · Posted by u/troupo
This seems like the kind of thing that won't require any resources to maintain, other than possible bugfixes (which 3rd parties can provide). It only requires parsing and DOM manipulation, so it doesn't really require any features of JS or WASM that would be deprecated in the future, and the XSLT standard that is supported by browsers is frozen - they won't ever have to dedicate resources to adding any additional features.
That is an interesting approach, you could suggest it? In general using JS to implement web APIs is very difficult, but using WASM might work especially for the way XSLTProcessor works today.
Am I the only one who doesn’t know what EDC is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_carry