Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 15/09/2026Last week on MDN, we received a PR to remove initial-scale=1 from MDN. I merged the PR. A reader then reports that initial-scale=1 is in fact still not useless on iPhone. TLDR: When text is present and the image overflows the initial viewport, the page shrinks slightly without an initial-scale. 100
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026A year ago today, it was a Wednesday afternoon at 5pm. I was at our weekly linguistics senior essay seminar. I got the notif from Apple News that Charlie Kirk died. My classmate sitting next to me saw it from my laptop. By the end of the class the news had traveled around and our minds were blown. 100
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/08/2026The whole "I won't say Turkïye" "I won't say Côté d'ivoire" "I won't say Cabo Verde" (and probably soon "I won't say Naoero") discourse is ridiculous. Do you do that to your friend if they renamed themselves? 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/04/2026Linguists trying to promote linguistics without wugs, syntax trees, and IPA chartmedia.tenor.coma man in a black shirt is making a funny face while holding a piece of meat in his hand .ALT: a man in a black shirt is making a funny face while holding a piece of meat in his hand . 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 06/04/2026I try to remain understanding and supportive towards undercompensated open source maintainers, but geez, if you can't support the latest upstream dependency after their RC has been out for 3 months, I'm just going to migrate to the competitor. 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 24/03/2026Normie case SCREAMING CASE gen z case SpOnGe BoB cAsE I Am Cultured Treat Me with Respect Case 100
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/03/2026My pet peeve: the tick sign that pairs with ❌ is ✔️, which is totally inaccessible in dark mode. OTOH if you use ✅ for tick, then you ought to use ❎, but then the visual contrast is poor. Can we please have a cross sign with red background, or a tick sign that's green? 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 08/03/2026The most-starred repos are always those closest to newbies and casual users. 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 28/02/2026It is year 2026 and Copilot still refuses to be half as decent as real LLMs at generating text 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 26/02/2026Anthropic does great research, makes great products, and has awesome aesthetics in their UI design and model names. It's such a shame that such a company could be run by total assholes. 110
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 05/02/2026I really like cleaning up the pile of crap on my computer once in a while. Recently, I ran a complete audit of every software and program I have installed, and compiled them into a list: joshcena.com/notes/tech-r.... This is going to grant me eternal peace of mindjoshcena.comMy tech registry | Joshua ChenA registry of the technologies I use and how to update each one. 000
Reposted by Sida ChenOlivier Poncet 🦝 @ponceto91.bsky.social · 01/02/2026Après moltbook, voici molthub, un site de p*rn pour les LLM. Vous n'êtes toujours pas prêts. (je crois que tout est devenu totalement hors de contrôle 🤣) moithub.com 177711
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/02/2026Midwit move: "Lagrange interpolation" "floored polynomial" yada yada Try instead: search it on OEIS In this case the obvious correct answer is 31, for the maximal number of regions formed by joining n points around a circle. Anyone past elementary school should know that by heart 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/02/2026I still browse X occasionally because it's like alcohol/smoke: a little and it amuses you; too much and it poisons your brain Bsky is the only platform where I don't find my brain poisoned, at the cost of it being absolutely mundane. Oh I need those midwits even if it's engagement bait 010
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 12/01/2026Not going to name call, but there's a language in TIOBE top 10 (January 2026), that has *all* of `stopifnot`, `setNames`, `data.frame`, *and* `seq_len` in the same standard library. 000
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 09/12/2025I've been writing little OCaml programs in and out for a year, and it's still on the "disgusting" side of the spectrum for me. I don't know how a language managed to combine the unwieldy parts of FP *and* C. (For reference Haskell and Rust are two of my favorite languages) 230
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 05/04/2025The HTML spec keeps on giving html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/pa... 010
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 25/03/2025Canny machine-translates post content (written by user) to the browser's preferred language, but the UI labels remain in English—has to be the funniest l10n strategy 020
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 31/01/2025I don't remember if this is my first time (maybe Docusaurus 2 too?), but it's good to be involved in a news that stayed in HN#1 for so long! (Interestingly, exactly 10 out of the 300+ comments ever mentioned or linked MDN.) 030
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/01/2025The Temporal docs are now live on MDN! After watching it evolve for ~5 years I finally sat down and wrote docs for it—one of the biggest additions to the JS docs area ever. 3459
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 17/12/2024We don't show enough appreciation for what a piece of art parser generators are. They are the ultimate forms of software design. Here I'm taking one second to appreciate this epic error message that LALRPOP produces. 021
Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 14/11/2024Starting to realize that "GraphQL is great" might be a hot take 000