Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.

My machine slowed down tremendously, with a YouTube video in another tab pausing entirely until I managed to close the tab. I tried again with Task Manager open and saw a process named "System Interrupts" with 75% of the CPU before I choked off the tab again.

I'm using the word "morality" to mean what is beneficial to society, within reasonable definitions. Please allow me to just hand-wave that away for now.

It's thinking about what are the ramifications of your actions on others? Why should you benefit and not others? Because you thought of it first? Because you're better at using this technique? Is this the kind of behavior that society wants to promote to achieve its goals?

We tend to use "morality" as a shortcut for meaning "not actively destructive to others." ... or something like that. I know we have to agree on which goals does society have, does society actually have goals, etc.

Or can we just let individuals pursue what they think are their own goals and hope for the best? And what best are we hoping for? Are we hoping that the system stays the same enough so that you personally will move toward your own goals? What if this pursuits prevents others from achieving theirs? What mechanisms do we have for changing things if we detect pathological behavior that will lead too far toward a place that everyone would consider to be "bad" (e.g., no food being produced).

Dog eat dog OK with everyone? What if this behavior ends up being so destructive that it affects even those who were initially excelling? What obligation do we have to others to keep the system working for them? Do we only think about that in terms of the eventual benefit to ourselves?

Morality's a big topic. I've probably mucked it up, but I'll leave it there.

The argument is that the popularity of the layout in contexts where it's possible is a strong argument for enabling it on the web as well. This is not a layout that they just thought of and are trying to invent.

Mostly, you just write grid-row-template: masonry and everything else just works with it. This is nice. It doesn't become harder to use the grid layout than it already is IMHO.

The drawback is mostly for browser-engine authors, for whom the bar for "fully supports CSS Grid" will be set even higher. They also mention that it might avoid "performance traps" where an implementation that needs to support all features of grid might be slower at some parts of grid layout than it would be if the specification were simpler.

If there were a separate display mode, then you'd have to repeat the grid-column specification for the masonry layout, which seems a shame.

> And yet I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without tests, because I did it.

> I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without anyone looking over your code, because I did it.

> If no one uses your app then who cares if it crashes.

> If many people use your app and it crashes, they’ll tell you and then you’ll fix it.

Those four statements are contradictory. What they're saying is not that you don't need testing or code reviews, but that you can get your users to test for you.

I figure the author probably does test their code (everybody tests, even if that just means running the app), but not rigorously or in a way that you could say gives one the security of regression tests.

No-one worth discussing the issue with claims that it's impossible to write complex code without automated testing. I'm a huge proponent of automated testing, and I wrote a relatively large, cross-platform renderer without a single automated test back in the late 90s/early 00s ... it just took a long time, and I became increasingly terrified of making changes.

Edited for formatting.

More recently, though (especially, the last couple of years), browser vendors work very closely with standards groups, contributing there, and looking for feedback from other browser vendors. At least in the CSS and JS space, the extensions to those standards have proceeded largely as a group effort rather than as you described.

Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.

Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.