A lot of this article certainly is saying "Look at this photograph."

A part of me still thinks the peak was somewhere around System 7.

Sure "top-line" of the message (the subject line of the email) should be concisely "what" changed, but the rest of the message (the body of the email) should be the details of "why" and "how". More details on the "what changed" is often redundant because by that point you are seeing the diff itself, but the "why" and "how" is often the real important part to a commit message.

Yes, this is what I meant exactly.

The "lossy aspect" feels like it tells me a lot more that the author doesn't know what commit messages are for.

If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.

Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.

But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).

Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.

There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).

I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.

My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.

I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)

Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.

That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.

It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.

Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)

Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.

It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.

Moment said many years ago "use Luxon" [1]. Luxon is not yet at the "use Temporal" stage [2].

[1] https://momentjs.com/docs/#/-project-status/

[2] https://github.com/moment/luxon/discussions/1742#discussionc...

The fun trick is that Invalid Date is still a Date:

    > let invalid = new Date('not a date')
    > invalid
    Invalid Date
    > invalid instanceof Date
    true

You were half-correct on expecting NaN, it's the low level storage of Invalid Date:

    > invalid.getTime()
    NaN

Invalid Date is just a Date with the "Unix epoch timestamp" of NaN. It also follows NaN comparison logic:

    > invalid === new Date(NaN)
    false

It's an interesting curio directly related to NaN.

> Invalid Date is just a Date with the "Unix epoch timestamp" of NaN. It also follows NaN comparison logic: > > > invalid === new Date(NaN) > false

This is just because a JS Date is an object and have nothing to do with the inner representation.

    > new Date(0) === new Date(0)
    false

The other biggest fun trick of timezone math to a riddle like that would be the International Date line where a baby born on one side of it can be born on the "day before" by calendar reckoning despite being born 30 minutes after the other side of the line.

Fraternal (not identical) twins, born aboard a ship traveling west to east across the Pacific. One of them officially born January 1st, 2016. The younger-by-30-minutes twin officially born December 31st, 2015. They'll have the hardest time persuading people that they're really twins once they're grown up.

This works even without timezones. If they're born even a second apart, it can so happen on different days (if they're born around midnight)

Yes, and if you ask any midwife, OB/GYN, or other person who routinely delivers babies, I'm sure you'll hear about plenty of born-on-different-days twins. One of my in-laws is a doctor who delivers babies; she has lots of stories, some of which she's restricted by HIPAA from sharing. But once a baby is born, the baby's birth date is public knowledge so she can share that info. So she often will tell her husband, "My patient is going into labor, I have to go to the hospital" without naming the patient. Then after the baby is born she'll say "Mrs. Smith's baby was born at 11 PM last night" because now it's a matter of public record who the mother was, whereas before it was protected by HIPAA. Next time I talk to her, I'll ask her if she's ever personally delivered any twins with different birthdays.

The timezones thing, of course, is just a way to have the younger twin be born "a year ahead" of the older twin by having their births be in two different timezones. Only practical way that would happen would be aboard a ship, because 1) babies born aboard an airplane would probably end up using the time zone of departure or of destination for their birth, and so twins would not be counted as being born in different time zones. And 2) any land-based transportation such as a car or a train would likely pull over (or in the case of a train, let the pregnant woman off at the nearest station) so that the woman giving birth doesn't have to do so in a moving vehicle. So a ship is the only moving vehicle where this kind of thing could likely happen, as there's no option of getting off in the middle of the ocean. It could happen while crossing time zones east-to-west, but crossing the International Date Line west-to-east makes more of an interesting thought experiment.

Yes, I've given this silly joke scenario way more thought than it really deserves. :-)

Isn't that precisely the same?

Doesn't even have to be the International Date line, any two timezones work.

Yes, it's the same, the IDL just makes it easier for it to work, as otherwise the babies have to be born on either side of midnight while crossing the time zone line. With the IDL the birth time could be almost any time of day except for crossing over midnight and the joke would work.