Web Excursions 2021-05-13
🌟 [Post of The Day] The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is “Disgusting” | The New Yorker
Mercifully, admission tickets are printed on airplane-style barf bags.
contend with customs and transportation.
Svið, a traditional Icelandic dish in which a sheep’s head is cut in half and boiled, was impossible to procure, for “logistical reasons,” Ahrens said.
The food is instead represented by a photo of the head next to helpings of mashed potatoes and pureed root vegetables.
The same goes for ortolan, a nearly extinct French songbird, which is prepared by blinding the bird and then drowning it in brandy, a practice that is now banned in the European Union.
The term “disgust” entered the English language more than four hundred years ago, from the Old French word desgouster, meaning “to put off one’s appetite.”
But disgust wasn’t considered worthy of scientific examination until 1872,
when Charles Darwin defined it as a reaction to “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste . . . and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling, through the sense of smell, touch and even of eyesight.”
Darwin theorized that disgust is a basic human emotion—like anger, fear, or sadness—and that it is expressed with a universal “disgust face.”
Disgust may have originated as a food-rejection system, but it has expanded into a vehicle for perceiving the social and moral world.
Like a regional dialect or a style of dress, most food taboos advertise and affirm membership within a group.
Humans evolved in tribes, and food taboos helped to define coalitions.
Shortly before I began first grade, my mother stopped feeding me the rice porridge and the pickles that she and my grandmother ate every morning and started me on a special breakfast of what she called “brain foods”:
a warm, viscous puddle of milk, bobbing with chunks of raw egg yolk.
My Swiss Army knife was already being honed.
Disgust welled up in me, but it contended with other blades that were necessary for survival: the shame of ingratitude, and the fear of disobedience.
I ate the brain foods every morning for two interminable years.
Assimilating requires you to adopt a foreign tongue, in more ways than one.
But when the choice is between annihilation and assimilation, you assimilate.
This was as true for prehistoric humans as it is for a young, deracinated Chinese immigrant in America.
One of the wonders of the tongue is its sheer malleability.
My lack of disgust felt like cheating.
The Chinese pidan, for example—a clay-preserved egg with a swampy blue-green hue—has been one of my comfort foods since childhood.
The thought of stinky tofu makes me salivate.
Durian was more complicated.
I don’t like its smell, which some describe as a mix of turpentine and onions,
but I’ve eaten enough durian-flavored desserts to reflexively separate the fruit’s odor from its taste,
which is simultaneously creamy, sweet, and savory—like chives, garlic, and caramel, blended into a butter.
The museum is trying to have it both ways—poking the bear, then backing away, hands raised innocently.
Even those who believe in the museum’s statement of purpose question whether it can be put into practice.
The trouble with cultural institutions is that those who run them can’t always control what’s being communicated.
On the one hand, the museum is introducing visitors to new foods
on the other, there’s a cosmopolitan sanitization process at work
in which foods are being stripped of their cultural context and then
presented at a museum that keeps track of how many people they make vomit.
Ahrens and West’s decision to categorize them all under “China” felt simultaneously alienating and reasonable:
the Westerner in me understood the urge not to differentiate them,
while the Chinese rebelled at the notion that they would ever belong together.
When food is available only to a select few, it becomes a symbol for one’s social position.
By using the phrase “in good taste,” one invokes the gastronomically satisfying to connote something that is socially sanctioned.
Shame and fear flood your body, as involuntarily as the disgust face, until a kind of self-disgust takes root.
The origins of self-disgust have yet to be fully understood,
but scientists speculate that the emotion likely arises from the internalization of others’ disgust.
It is also a unique form of torture; to be perceived as repugnant is to live inside that repugnance, desperate to expel you from yourself.
If COVID is, in some ways, a failure of disgust, it is also a breeding ground for it.
The question—similar to the one that inspired West to open the Disgusting Food Museum—is whether this disgust,
particularly as it pertains to other people, can be swallowed for the greater good.
Panic Blog » The Future of Code Editor
A significant number of web developers now use tools like TypeScript and JSX, which often require a build or compilation process before they can be previewed.
The only way to make this work in Code Editor was to separately run the compilers on a remote computer in a different app; a cumbersome proposition for a mobile device like an iPhone or iPad.
So, as the time went on, fewer and fewer web developers found Code Editor useful, and sales declined.
Launching Nova reaffirmed to us how technologically diverse web development has become.
During its development, we got requests to support libraries and technologies we thought long dead, as well as requests for brand new frameworks we’d never heard of.
The churn of new web tools and tech is rapid and constant.
This is why having a flexible extension system is essential for a modern web-focused IDE. But that’s where the trouble lies.
The biggest technical hurdle is the inability to run external processes on iOS and iPadOS.
Even if it were viable, we’d likely run afoul of App Store policy as well.
what if we combined Apple’s new File Provider technology with a streamlined text editor?
we concluded that this hypothetical app didn’t fully address the needs of modern web developers,
plus we’d be facing stiff competition from other high-quality apps that are laser focused on this space.
We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon | Hacker News
Valodim: See app store review guidelines, section 2.5.2: Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps.
I am disappointed, though not surprised, that Panic is abandoning yet another of their iOS apps.
the biggest hurdle does not seem to have been technical, but ideological/business. These old school Mac developers like Panic and Omni have had a very difficult time adapting to (or failing to) the iOS/mobile era.
Panic and Omni want paid upgrades but Apple has never, ever even hinted at providing that as an option. The option is subscriptions.
Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions
Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach
to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.
Some Chrome extensions rely on the way the backend of a Google Doc is structured or specific bits of HTML to function properly.
By moving away from HTML-based rendering to a canvas-based rendering, some Chrome extensions may not function as intended on docs.google.com and may need to be updated.
snewman (one of the original three authors of Google Docs): Word processors have extremely specific requirements for layout, rendering, and incremental updates.
to highlight a text selection in mixed left-to-right / right-to-left text, it's necessary to obtain extremely specific information regarding text layout; information that the DOM may not be set up to provide.
to smoothly update as the user is typing text, it's often desirable to "cheat" the reflow process and focus on updating just the line of text containing the insertion point.
browsers are amazing "CISCy" engines
but if your use case doesn't precisely fit the expectations of the instruction set designer then you're better off with something lower-level, like Canvas and WASM.
Frameworks in general suffer from this problem
brundolf: A good open-source example of this type of problem is CodeMirror (a code-editing widget for the web).
To achieve syntax highlighting and everything else, it basically fakes every single aspect of text editing in a browser context -
even the cursor and text highlighting -
replacing the native versions with pixel-placed DOM elements driven by JS.
It receives raw events from an invisible textarea and does everything else itself.