tefkah (u/tefkah) - Readit News

tefkah commented on alpr.watch alpr.watch/... · Posted by u/theamk

fainpul · 4 days ago

For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.

The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".

tefkah · 4 days ago

damn that’s a good idea

tefkah commented on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023) info.arxiv.org/about/acce... · Posted by u/el3ctron

teddy-smith · 14 days ago

It's extremely easy to convert HTML/CSS to a PDF with the print to PDF feature of the browser.

All papers should be in HTML/CSS or Tex then just simply converted to PDF.

Why are we even talking about this?

tefkah · 14 days ago

What are you talking about? No one’s writing their paper in HTML.

The problem is having the submissions be in TeX and converting that to HTML, when the only output has been PDF for so long.

The problem isn’t converting HTML to PDF, it’s making available a giant portion of TeX/pdf only papers in HTML.

If you’re arguing that maybe TeX then shouldn’t be the source format for papers then I agree, but other than Typst (which also isn’t perfect about HTML output yet) there aren’t that many widely accepted/used authoring formats for physics/math papers, which is what ArXiV primarily hosts.

tefkah commented on What will enter the public domain in 2026? publicdomainreview.org/fe... · Posted by u/herbertl

walthamstow · 18 days ago

Is this a reference to a public domain zombie reboot that already happened, or just sounds like something Hollywood would do?

tefkah · 18 days ago

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pride_and_prejudice_and_zom...

tefkah commented on Markdown is holding you back newsletter.bphogan.com/ar... · Posted by u/zdw

hadlock · a month ago

I went to look up and see if this guy was in his early to mid 20s when I got to this point

> That <Command> tag isn't Markdown at all; it's a React component.

Turns out he's in his 40s, so he lived through ms word, front page and the JavaScript wars; this is almost certainly satire

tefkah · a month ago

i think that specific turn off phrase is more of an indicator of llm usage then age imo

tefkah commented on Markdown is holding you back newsletter.bphogan.com/ar... · Posted by u/zdw

nicoburns · a month ago

This article doesnt consider Typst, which IMO ought to be the first port of call if Markdown isnt sufficient for your needs.

tefkah · a month ago

typst is great, but there are many many steps between “markdown isn’t sufficient” and reaching for typst.

1. typst only really has pdf output at the moment 2. so much less tooling available (linters, site builders, converters etc) 3. much less of a markup format, extremely tightly coupled to a specific tool (typst compiler)

again, love typst, but it has (atm) so much fewer applications

tefkah commented on Markdown is holding you back newsletter.bphogan.com/ar... · Posted by u/zdw

henrebotha · a month ago

There are real limitations to this: You can't arbitrarily mix and match HTML and Markdown. As soon as you introduce an HTML block, you're locked out of Markdown syntax.

AsciiDoc lets you mix and match however you want. Or, put differently: AsciiDoc's superiority over Markdown extends even to being better at shelling out to HTML.

tefkah · a month ago

mdx does tho. you could just not define any components, then you can nest markdown inside html no problem

tefkah commented on Slackfs – Mount Slack as a Filesystem github.com/jeremy46231/sl... · Posted by u/sadeshmukh

tefkah · a month ago

ah, i was hoping this would just exploit slack as the hosting service for your files by abstracting away the api; but this is cool too!

tefkah commented on Israels top military lawyer arrested after she admitted leaking video of abuse theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/NomDePlum

tefkah · 2 months ago

I can find no evidence for the claim that this prisoner was one of the people involved in October 7th.

Also, to call shoving a metal tube up a prisoners ass to the point it causes an intestinal rupture “beat up” is incredibly disingenuous.

tefkah commented on React vs. Backbone in 2025 backbonenotbad.hyperclay.... · Posted by u/mjsu

panphora · 2 months ago

Author here.

I agree that all frameworks require learning framework-specific concepts, but I think there's a meaningful difference in what you need to know and how that knowledge transfers.

With Backbone, jQuery, or vanilla JavaScript, you're learning DOM APIs, event patterns, and explicit state management. These are things that are visible, inspectable, and fundamentally close to the platform. When something breaks, you can pop open devtools, see the actual DOM, trace the event handlers, and understand what's happening. The knowledge you gain is transferable. It's about how the web platform actually works.

With React, you're learning abstractions on top of abstractions: virtual DOM diffing, reconciliation algorithms, why objects in dependency arrays cause infinite loops, why your click handler sees stale state, why your input mysteriously cleared itself. This is React-specific magic that doesn't transfer. It's knowledge about how to work around React's mental model, not knowledge about how the web works.

You mention that batching and DOM reconciliation are solvable problems that justify React's complexity. But the article's point is that for most apps -- not Facebook-scale apps with 1,000 components on one page, but normal CRUD apps -- those problems can be solved with simpler patterns and conventions. We don't need a virtual DOM and a sophisticated reconciliation algorithm to build a form validator.

The real question isn't "does React solve problems?" It's "does React's complexity match the complexity of the problems most developers are actually solving?"

tefkah · 2 months ago

> The real question isn't "does React solve problems?" It's "does React's complexity match the complexity of the problems most developers are actually solving?"

Kind of disrespectful to reply to valid criticism of your AI slop article with more AI slop. Write like a human being man, what’s the point?

tefkah commented on React vs. Backbone in 2025 backbonenotbad.hyperclay.... · Posted by u/mjsu

preommr · 2 months ago

???

I absolutely failed to follow the logic of this article - is there any?

The toy examples having the same amount of code is meaningless. They're saying it's bad because react is more complicated. But this works in react's favor that simple examples are simple.

It's also meaningless because it's a toy example. Even if the react code was half the size of the backbone, you could still use the strawman of "react's complexity isn't worth saving 5 lines of code" which people would agree with.

Then they go on to complain about use-effect and state-management. But use-effect isn't in the code example. But then why compare it to backbone which also doesn't solve those problems and is arguably much worse at them.

> People say "you need to rebuild React from scratch to really understand it," and they're right

Actually laughed at how shameless this is. Who said this? This is just a thing the author got and just decided is a fact. Not only is that quote not in the linked article, I don't think the average person would say this.

And the answer to what about something small, the answer is either lit-dev, or vanilla. It's not early 2010s, a lot of the functionality of libs like jquery, backbone that made them popular was incorporated into js.

tefkah · 2 months ago

It’s just slop, not worth engaging with this article