underblob – underblob

Humans don’t know what they care about

If you hand over the management of your civilization to machines, you then lose the incentive to understand it yourself or to teach the next generation. […] Up until now, we put a lot of our civilization into books. But the books can’t run it for us. So we always have to teach the next generation. If you work out, it’s about a trillion person years of teaching and learning in an unbroken chain that goes back tens of thousands of generations. What happens if that chain breaks?
Stuart J. Russell

Extend URLSearchParams to object

There must be a reason this is a bad idea or it would be included in the API, right? 😅

URLSearchParams.prototype.toObject = function() {
  return […this.keys()]
    .reduce((o,k) => ({ …o, [k]: this.get(k) }), {});
}

Pwned

[…] no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Rudyard Kipling

Git Rollback Alias

Related to the Alias for Git sanity post from a few years back, recently added another to ~/.gitconfig

[alias]
  revert-merge = !git revert -m 1 $1
  rollback-merge = revert-merge

Where $1 is the commit hash. This only works for rollback of a merge commit on the main branch.

Southern Reach

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead…

Deferred Promise

Found myself in a situation where I wanted to execute a process and then check back on it later to be sure it had completed.

class MyClass {
  constructor() {
    this.readyPromise = new Promise(
      resolve => (this.readyResolve = resolve)
    );
  }

  async executeProcesses() {
    await // ...executing processes...
    this.readyResolve();
  }

  ready() { return this.readyPromise }
}

Predator Prayers

People want to give up the responsibility of being able to understand. And because they can’t understand, then they have faith. And they put their faith into people who say they can understand. And I think that’s a situation that’s ripe for a predatory relationship.
Paul Stamets

Chrome extension with imports

To write a Chrome extension that allows ES6 imports, imitate <script type="module"> with a dynamic import:

Chrome extension MV2 access to page data

Chrome extensions exist in an “isolated world” to prevent global var collisions between the website and the extension that runs on a given website. This mostly applies to content_scripts in an extension.

E.g. window.foo: my extension declares foo in the global scope and the website the extension runs on also declares foo in the global scope. With “isolated world” scoping for the extension, this is not a worry since it doesn’t share scope with the web page it runs on.

Author: underblob