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Directive prologues and JavaScript dark matter

Tom MacWright does some archaeology and describes the three different magic comment formats that can affect how JavaScript/TypeScript files are processed:

"a directive"; is a directive prologue, most commonly seen with "use strict";.

/** @aPragma */ is a pragma for a transpiler, often used for /** @jsx h */.

//# aMagicComment is usually used for source maps - //# sourceMappingURL=<url> - but also just got used by v8 for their new explicit compile hints feature.

Via Jim Nielsen

Tags: typescript, tom-macwright, javascript, v8, programming-languages

It took me a few days to build the library [cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider] with AI. I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand. That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a ...

claude-trace I've been thinking for a while it would be interesting to run some kind of HTTP proxy against the Claude Code CLI app and take a peek at how it works. Mario Zechner just published a really nice version of that. It works by monkey-patching global.fetch and the No...

Hey, folks. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be away from the site for a couple of weeks for a family vacation. No guest editor or anything…just going off the air for a much needed rest. Wishing everyone well and I will see you in mid-June.

Tags: kottke.org

My constant struggle is how to convince them that getting an education in the humanities is not about regurgitating ideas/knowledge that already exist. It’s about generating new knowledge, striving for creative insights, and having thoughts that haven’t been had before. I don’t want you to learn facts. I want you to think. To notice. To question. To reconsider. To challenge. Students don’t yet get that ChatGPT only rearranges preexisting ideas, whether they are accurate or not.

And even if the information was guaranteed to be accurate, they’re not learning anything by plugging a prompt in and turning in the resulting paper. They’ve bypassed the entire process of learning.

— u/xfnk24001

Tags: generative-ai, chatgpt, education, ai, llms, ai-ethics

The latest issue of Jodi Ettenberg’s The Curious About Everything newsletter is typically great — every link worth your attention. Best to have a few hours free before diving in.

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Astronomers discover strange new celestial object in our Milky Way galaxy. “It was the first time X-rays had been seen coming from a so-called long-period radio transient, a rare object that cycles through radio signals over tens of minutes.”

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King of the Hill is returning after 15 years. “Hank and Peggy Hill are now retired and return to a changed Arlen after years of working in Saudi Arabia; and Bobby is 21 and living his best life while navigating adulthood as a chef.”

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Taylor Swift has bought back the rights to her first six albums. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me.”

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OK, May was a busy month for coding on GitHub. I blame tool support!

Tags: github, llm

Progressive JSON This post by Dan Abramov is a trap! It proposes a fascinating way of streaming JSON objects to a client in a way that provides the shape of the JSON before the stream has completed, then fills in the gaps as more data arrives... and then turns out to be a sn...

Teaser trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the third in the Knives Out series by Rian Johnson.

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A fun new benchmark just dropped! Inspired by the Claude 4 system card - which showed that Claude 4 might just rat you out to the authorities if you told it to "take initiative" in enforcing its morals values while exposing it to evidence of malfeasance - Theo Browne built a...

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528 Sadly the trend for terrible naming of models has infested the Chinese AI labs as well. DeepSeek-R1-0528 is a brand new and much improved open weights reasoning model from DeepSeek, a major step up from the DeepSeek R1 they released back in Janua...

OpenAI's featured chatbot recommends $200,000 in surgeries while promoting incel ideology

If you've found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here's something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system (so no npm / React / TypeScript / JSX / Babel / Vite / Tailwind etc) and code in HTML and JavaScript like it's 2009.

The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.

You don't even need jQuery to paper over the gaps any more - use document.querySelectorAll() and fetch() directly and see how much value you can build with a few dozen lines of code.

Tags: css, javascript, web-development, frontend, html

There's a new kind of coding I call "hype coding" where you fully give into the hype, and what's coming right around the corner, that you lose sight of whats' possible today. Everything is changing so fast that nobody has time to learn any tool, but we should aim to use as m...

Why the ancient English tradition of chasing a giant cheese down a steep hill is gathering crowds from around the world. Also: a life saving donation from a stranger half a world away; and Brazil's beatboxing nuns.

Using voice mode on Claude Mobile Apps Anthropic are rolling out voice mode for the Claude apps at the moment. Sadly I don't have access yet - I'm looking forward to this a lot, I frequently use ChatGPT's voice mode when walking the dog and it's a great way to satisfy my cur...