Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.
Hi, new followers! Seems like a good time for a re-introduction.
I'm Hong Minhee (ๆดช ๆฐๆ), a software engineer based in Seoul. My pronouns are they/them.
I build tools for the fediverse. Fedify is an ActivityPub server framework in TypeScript, Hollo is a single-user microblogging server (what you're reading this on), and BotKit is a framework for making ActivityPub bots. I care a lot about making federation more accessible to developers, which, as my recent JSON-LD rant probably made clear, sometimes means wrestling with parts of the spec I have complicated feelings about.
I'm a free/open source software person through and through, and a socialist, which informs how I think about tech. Lately I've been thinking a lot about LLMs. My position is probably not what you'd expect from either camp: I think the problem isn't the technology itself but the enclosure of the commons. I wrote about this at length here if you're curious: Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them.
Outside of software, I have a long-running interest in CJK languages and writing systems. I'm always happy to talk about Chinese characters, Korean orthography, or the weird corners of Unicode where these things intersect.
95% sure that my favorite show of this season is gonna be either โyou and I are polar oppositesโ or โhellโs paradiseโ. I have no idea what criteria I could possibly use to rank these two against each other.
TIL: Banana slugs are hemaphrodites, and sometimes reproduction gets so passionate that one of em gets their thing chewed off - but it's cool, cuz they can keep going as a female!
I remember back in 2020 when I wrote emoji-picker-element, I was sure that using native emoji fonts was the way to go, and that I was skating toward where the puck was going. *Surely* we'd figure out all these font problems in no time, right?
I'd like to say that this is something for standards to solve, but it's actually basically just browser bugs that the browsers themselves could fix but don't bother (likely because any web app that matters just ships their own bloated emojis-as-images anyway).
It's also unfortunately not the kind of thing you could fix with Web Plat Tests, because the Unicode Consortium mints new emojis every year, so the test is outdated as soon as you write it, and doesn't solve Safari version fragmentation.
I remember back in 2020 when I wrote emoji-picker-element, I was sure that using native emoji fonts was the way to go, and that I was skating toward where the puck was going. *Surely* we'd figure out all these font problems in no time, right?
Compromise: use TOML for now, but call it "mini" for "modern INI" as per @mcc's suggestion, and write the preferences serialization/deserialization logic to make it easy to change that decision before shipping a beta or RC build.