Because of course one of the people involved in creating one of the worst management fads ever would also join the JavaScript hate train.

"The Pragmatic Programmer." Hardly. Real pragmatism is recognizing that popular languages are often the best tool for the job, no mater how aesthetically distasteful they are.

Ever notice how prolific JS users rarely defend the language? Of course it's badly designed. We use it because it's pragmatic to use the lingua franca of programming.

What isn't pragmatic is using languages with declining market share because they feel aesthetically "better," or imposing horrible management fads like Agile/Scrum on your team against their will.

So I'll pass on joining this guy's fan club.

Except this is the first generation who will be statistically speaking worse off than their parents. The millennials have a right to bitch about the boomers in a way that no previous generation in living memory has.

There are bugs in a beta? What a shock!

Boomers are the current generation who won't shut up about kids these days being lazy.

They seem oblivious to the fact that their parents said the same thing about them.

They also seem oblivious to the fact that their kids would be doing a lot better right now if they hadn't joined the cult of supply-side economics and shredded the safety net.

The argument that "my app is too complex for PE" is intuitive and popular, but the trouble here is people tend to project far more complexity on to their projects than is actually there. The vast majority of web applications are simple CRUD with some UI polish, but the authors of many such apps think they're building some crazy complex thing that's incompatible with PE. Rarely is that ever the case. I worked on some of the most complex web applications ever written in Silicon Valley and I can say from personal experience the majority of them didn't need a thick client JS framework. The ones that were using them would've been better codebases if they were vanilla JS + a collection of small single purpose modules. Almost all single page apps can and should be built with PE and very few wouldn't benefit from it. There are exceptions, but they're very, very rare.

I've been aghast at the broad adoption of thick client JS frameworks on the open web and a growing open hostility towards progressive enhancement, as if it's somehow not possible to build a single page app without totally breaking everything that makes the web a great platform.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that the vast majority of websites should not be using one of these, as the majority of these frameworks are incompatible with progressive enhancement and progressive enhancement is still the best way to build most sites. I firmly believe vanilla JS should be everyone's default. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are very narrowly tailored. I think this article which outlines those exceptions should be required reading for every web developer.

It seems like a lot of people these days don't realize you can build single page apps using progressive enhancement. And when you do, they perform better and are more fault tolerant while avoiding an unnecessary hard JS dependency. This whole stereotype you hear from people about single page apps being the future and progressive enhancement being the past is the most annoying false dichotomy ever. You can do both so long as you consider choices other than big, largely badly designed frameworks. It seems like most people who use Angular just want to make websites that don't reload the page when you click links. Maybe consider using a client-side router library instead of a giant monoframework. Way less code that has to be dumped on the user.

I'm not saying it isn't possible to use the big monoframeworks responsibly. The article above outlines good use cases for them. If you're building a client-only Electron app for instance, then go nuts with React or whatever if you like it. But seeing people design regular websites on the open web that are mostly just text, forms, and images using things like Angular and React is the biggest, most depressingly popular cargo cult antipattern we've seen since the days of Flash sites.

I didn't think good sci-fi was getting made anymore until I came across The Expanse. The novels are terrific (especially the 5th novel) and Syfy's TV adaptation is surprisingly good as well. Both are worth a look.

The premise is a near-future sci-fi setting with as little magic tech as possible. Almost all sci-fi tech in the story consists of reasonable derivations of current technology. Newtonian physics in space is respected. There's no inertial dampeners. There are no relativity-busting star drives. Gravity in space is through rotation or constant acceleration. And the story is solid.

It's up there with BSG and Firefly in terms of emphasis on depicting space realistically (by comparison to the looser realism of Star Trek/Farscape/Stargate/etc anyway). I still enjoy BSG's and Firefly's stories and characters a bit more, but The Expanse is far superior in terms of scientific accuracy.

Notably, for any Game of Thrones fans out there, George RR Martin is a fan of The Expanse and it is frequently referred to as the Game of Thrones of sci-fi.

No indeed.

But I'd like to amend his question to this: Can we ever expect VLC to "just work" with off-the-shelf Blu-ray movie discs which have already been decrypted by other means? At present Blu-ray menu support is super spotty, whereas DVDs decrypted by other means tend to work fine.

Millennials didn't vote for Reagan and his flat tax scam that "starves the beast" of needed tax revenue to protect the safety net. We voted for expansions of the safety and and higher taxes on the wealthy.

Unless that ideology somehow ends up wrecking the economy the way Reaganomics did, which I doubt because a culture of high taxes on high earners worked great for us in the 50s and 60s, then the next generation after us will be thanking us for undoing the shitty policies of their grandparents.

Slashdot was on the decline, but I'm actually optimistic about the new owner's chances of succeeding at turning the ship around because of their commitment to listening to the community for the first time in far too long.

Am I right to assume this is already possible on Linux desktops and on OS X? If so, how?

a new competitor will come and replace them (possibly Sourceforge, if they manage to continue with the same enthusiasm they've started with recently, and manage to turn that enthusiasm in to their product)

SourceForge's death spiral hits me right in the feels as much as any other Slashdotter, but I am pretty convinced that new competitor which will dethrone GitHub will be GitLab. Basically the same product, but open source. Similar monetization model for enterprise use. That's who I'm rooting for these days.

Sorry SourceForge. You had your chance.

If you go under https://slashdot.org/prefs.pl and click on "Discussions" this option is present:

Choose your discussion system:
( ) Interactive Discussion System (D2)
( ) Classic Discussion System (D1)

The "interactive" system is widely derided. I personally think it was a good idea, but it needs work. A lot of old timers around here stick with the classic system, including me.

I would recommend investing heavily in a new discussion system, perhaps something that feels more like reddit's, but keeping Slashdot's moderation system in place. But whatever you do, don't remove the classic one as an off-by-default option.

I have some confidence you guys can come up with something that I'll be happy to switch to, but some people around here hate change. All change. They'll appreciate being able to keep the old system around.

The site itself is in some desperate need of further development.

- The infamous UTF8 issue.
- The new comment system is widely disliked.
- That said the old comment system probably does need to be replaced with something better. (Don't forget to keep the old one around as an off-by-default option. Some people here just hate change. All change.)
- Remove all hard dependencies on JavaScript. Progressive enhancement is a thing.

A right to the basic needs of food, shelter, and healthcare is not subjective or vague. That's about as specific as you can get. It means at a minimum all people have a right to just enough food to not starve to death. A right to at least dorm room-sized shelter. A right to see doctors for preventative care or go to the hospital without having to worry about medical bankruptcy.

Those things are narrowly tailored and well-defined. It's not reasonable to call those things vague or to imply that it's some crazy slippery slope to endless transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, especially when people have worked out budget proposals that deliver on those proposed rights that require only modest increases in taxation.