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Sida Chen

@joshcena.com
64 followers 29 following 52 posts

I care about languages!

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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 15/09/2026
The implication I read off the sources is "removing it has no observable effect; it's a safe optimization". Matuzo explicitly says "there are edge cases but idk what they are", which implies they are obsolete. At least we should have a caveat saying there are catches.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 15/09/2026
Pinging @vale.rocks @matuzo.at @quirksmode.org since you all are transitively cited in the evidence chain in that PR. Wondering if any of you have ideas about this. Looks like initial-scale=1 is useful today after all.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 15/09/2026
Links: - github.com/mdn/content/... - github.com/mdn/content/...
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 15/09/2026
Last 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.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026
Anyway, this is one of the real "JFK getting shot" or "twin towers falling down" moments of our generation—people would anchor their personal lives to it, and we are living in a different world afterwards.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026
I, too, am of many controversial opinions. Many people I admire and resonate with are actively rejected by the "mainstream". Watching some of his videos makes me actively think about rebuttals instead of feeling like I'm watching a clown show.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026
At the same time, I look to him as actually competent and knows what he's talking about, unlike the many clowns in power. He has belief and he spreads them unapologetically. He has specific debate skills tailored to mid-witted college students. Call it cunning, but it works.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026
Obviously I oppose most of his opinions and I loathe his very existence. Deep down I feel some sort of relief that he ceases to exist. I also laugh at his memes and joke about "counting or not counting gang violence?"
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2026
A 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.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/08/2026
The 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?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/04/2026
Linguists trying to promote linguistics without wugs, syntax trees, and IPA chart
media.tenor.com
a 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 .
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 06/04/2026
I 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.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 24/03/2026
We should collectively say no to title case in the 21st century
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 24/03/2026
Normie case SCREAMING CASE gen z case SpOnGe BoB cAsE I Am Cultured Treat Me with Respect Case
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/03/2026
My 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?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 08/03/2026
The most-starred repos are always those closest to newbies and casual users.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 28/02/2026
It is year 2026 and Copilot still refuses to be half as decent as real LLMs at generating text
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 28/02/2026
Seeing their latest blog post, I at least partially take it back. These people do care about security, and probably for the good of all of us.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 26/02/2026
Anthropic 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.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 05/02/2026
I 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 mind
joshcena.com
My tech registry | Joshua Chen
A registry of the technologies I use and how to update each one.
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Reposted by Sida Chen
Olivier Poncet 🦝 @ponceto91.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
Après 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
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/02/2026
Midwit 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
"What is the next number in the series? 1, w, 4, 8, 16..." Choices: 32; 31; 30; not enough data
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/02/2026
I 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
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 14/01/2026
FYI the code snippet doesn't use the method at all
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 12/01/2026
Not 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.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 11/12/2025
A language doesn't need to be Haskell-pilled to be enjoyable though. Rust, being a "C-like", FP-inspired language, brings me far more joy than most other languages. Ultimately I think the syntax, libraries, and semantics of OCaml have all failed me.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 09/12/2025
I don't write enough Ruby to form an opinion, but I write Python daily so it's grown on me. I think both are fair. Some of my problems with OCaml: small stdlib; verbose syntax (and not in a useful way IMO); impure things aren't stashed away; declaration order matters. Just death by a thousand cuts
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 09/12/2025
I'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)
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/11/2025
I also don't think you have the correct responsibility analysis here. Are you aware that require-yield is recommended by ESLint core, or that require-await is also a core rule, or that, in general, linters aren't just to "catch bugs"?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 02/11/2025
That's a very skewed depiction of the rule. It requires async to be licensed by an await, the same way require-yield (which is a core rule) requires generators to be licensed by a yield, or no-extraneous-calss requires classes to be licensed by an instance property.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 11/09/2025
So we are putting a maximum on a maximum now
Sign that says "maximum permitted occupancy of this space shall not exceed 73 persons"
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 10/09/2025
Today I realized this is an a and not an o
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 31/05/2025
Bun is great Until it OOMs
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 29/05/2025
Bon courage !! Ton français rattrapera très rapidement celui de tes contemporains dès que tu seras là-bas 😃
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 08/05/2025
This is a truly awesome post!
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 05/04/2025
The HTML spec keeps on giving html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/pa...
Screenshot of the HTML spec. Text:
An end tag whose tag name is "sarcasm"
Take a deep breath, then act as described in the "any other end tag" entry below.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 25/03/2025
Canny 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
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 31/01/2025
I 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.)
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 28/01/2025
It will be in Firefox 135 behind a flag, and other browsers are still working on it. If all things go well it should be GA late this year.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 21/01/2025
The 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.
Screenshot of MDN showing the landing page of Temporal
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 05/01/2025
Isn't that what Yarn PnP does?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 23/12/2024
And it starts cooking...👀
Screenshot of a GitHub PR page with title "Reference for stage 3 temporal" to the mdn/content repository. It has 247 files changed and 11,492 lines added.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 17/12/2024
We 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.
A beautifully rendered error message from LALRPOP demonstrating a particular parse path that leads to ambiguity, with an ASCII diagram showing two possible derivations.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 04/12/2024
You want 4. Those who can't but know how to tickle ChatGPT the right way to get a solution. They actually deliver anything you ask for.
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 03/12/2024
Out of curiosity is stage 3 a sufficient condition for implementation issues? I imagine the "research phase" should start before stage 3 and stage 3 should be for "experiment phase" and "shipping phase" already?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 03/12/2024
Would be useful to have links to implementation issues too, so we know how close we are to stage 4 (and to documentation inclusion)
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 23/11/2024
I just think there should be a way to customize module resolution in any env—Node or HTML or workers. What about the Worker() constructor since the type is also specified there?
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 20/11/2024
Sorry too busy to write docs outside of JS lang :( Typically Web API docs are written by people tasked by either FF or Chrome, so if Google cares enough you would see it when Chrome ships it, otherwise you would definitely see it when FF ships it!
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 14/11/2024
Starting to realize that "GraphQL is great" might be a hot take
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Sida Chen @joshcena.com · 12/11/2024
Welp, time to make another pedantic MDN PR I guess
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