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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

"Certifiably insane" to enable JavaScript, which was invented in 1995, or install an app, which first happened on the Palm series of smartphones in 1996. Either of those are "certifiably insane"?

For reference, the term neurodiversity was coined circa 1998.

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Neither the invention date or the mental health terminology have anything to do with the fact that js being commonplace is a privacy and security nightmare -- which was actually the point.

JavaScript asceticism is a weird trend that has just never died out, no one treats any other language this way... and "privacy and security nightmare" can be used to describe most of the internet at this point with or without it

It can certainly come across as a "weird trend" but I've found that the most insistent for disabling JS are the folks who have deep knowledge of browsers and the security plane running webapps. YMMV.

I don't drive a car because I have deep knowledge of mortality statistics, but I don't complain when I can't easily get somewhere 100 miles away

Showing a paragraph of text with some social links around it is like going down the block. If that requires a car you do have a problem.

yeah but it's an extreme fringe choice... I too make extreme fringe choices but I don't expect 99.9% of the people who don't make my extreme fringe choice to change on my behalf

hell, use a browser in a sandbox if you're that paranoid

there are a number of ways to do this securely, at this point it's practically a child's tantrum

but sure maybe it just needs a couple more decades of complaining in obscure comment sections and everyone will finally get it and switch back to mailing lists

ooh, don't forget irc

> JavaScript asceticism is a weird trend that has just never died out, no one treats any other language this way

I'm not aware of any other language that is layered on top of a perfectly serviceable user-facing content delivery syntax?

Literally any scripting language?

I have managed to get 35 years into a sysadmin career without knowing or writing a single line of python. I see a python script, I run a million miles away and wont touch it with a barge pole.

JS is a vector for browser exploits and privacy invasion. No other language is commonly used for these things.

Not even things like batch files and visual basic scripts on windows? Everyone seems to forget we had decades of dodgy scripts and activex controls in our browsers for years before javascript became the thing it is today.

They were never widely disseminated over a network. Office VBA exploits only lasted as a widespread threat until MS locked down macros by default. JS has been around much longer than that.

I can't recall ever needing to run a batch script to read a paragraph on a website, so doesn't seem like a very apt comparison. Are you claiming there's some group of people who have JavaScript disabled but would be happily running Activex if it were still around? Seems reasonable for some people to dislike and disable JavaScript in 2026, even though another, separate group of people had ActiveX enabled in 2009.

pngs in emails are used for this

http headers and CSS is used for this

flash drives left on the ground outside are used for this

That's because no other language is pushed in a place where people are requesting documents.

JS or installing special software to view HTTP served text from the web?! Yes, that makes no sense at all.

You don't start being sane just because you stubbornly keep the insanity up for long enough.

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