A Rant About “Technology”

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.

I somehow missed this wonderful piece by Ursula K. LeGuin.

JavaScript Temporal is coming

Implementations of the new JavaScript Temporal object are starting to be shipped in experimental releases of browsers. This is big news for web developers because working with dates and times in JavaScript will be hugely simplified and modernized.

Finally.

I was seriously considering finding a good time library in a compile-to-wasm language and just… wrapping it.

In my recent migration of this site off of Astro I’ve been paying attention to things like build bundle sizes, and in porting over Golden Times I stumbled on the problem of Luxon effectively being immune to tree shaking for …reasons. I only needed a few functions from Duration but I couldn’t get it to not just bundle the entire 220kb of luxon.js. I gave up and wrote my own instead, but in the future I could port it to Temporal.Duration. There’s also a compact polyfill.

iocaine

Another anti-AI bot in the vein of Nepenthes, this one looks more useful:

The core idea is to configure a reverse proxy to serve content generated by iocaine to AI crawlers, but normal content to every other visitor. This differs from Nepenthes, where the idea is to link to it, and trap crawlers that way. Not with iocaine, where the trap is laid by the reverse proxy.