I don’t know, this seems like something to be taken with a grain of salt. Throughout, the post is dripping with personal contempt for the people he’s talking about. It just seems like he’s taking his personal experience with the “blueskyists” pre Bluesky and turning it into something important enough to coin this term “Blueskyism”, without ever making the case that that’s true.

It’s less, “this is an important thing to consider in contemporary, online political discourse”, and more, “I have personal experience with these sorts of people, and let me tell you, they annoy the living piss out of me.” And I have no trouble believing him.

I believe that a substantial challenge with modern pundit discourse is that every pundit with any meaningful reach can now go online and see a whole bunch of people calling them big dumb idiots on any given day. Even if the vast majority of discourse is fine it feels absolutely horrible to open up twitter or bluesky or whatever and have a whole bunch of DMs calling you an asshole.

I think this drives people like Nate Silver to overreact and draw big conclusions about platforms and political ideologies and put out content like this.

Some people are annoying on social media. If the platform structurally focuses you on a group of annoying people it'll look like everybody on that platform is annoying. But I'd hope that somebody who got famous for data analysis could do a better job with this. The bluesky firehose is there. AI tools make mass sentiment analysis easier to perform than ever. We could have a real analysis of "blueskyism" but instead we get a bunch of gripes from a person who sees a tiny portion of the website yell at him every time he opens the site.

Did you even read the piece?

The author seems to underestimate this Supreme Court’s willingness to make nakedly partisan rulings.

Edit: oh here we go. Partisan first amendment issues were perfectly fine to discuss here when it was about Twitter. But, different ox being gored now, so we’re going to flag this into oblivion. Absolute frauds.

I would not blame dang for keeping that flagged. The quality of the one on Gaza was appalling, it must have been really hard to moderate one and this one wasn't going to be much better.

If only; he is not.

Huq is a U Chicago professor of con law and understands what is happening [1]. He is just having a really bad lawyer brain moment as the eroading rule of law crosses the line he probably uses in class as an example of "too far."

1: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/aziz-huq-writes-about-libe...

And now we see them getting main stream networks on a leash.

Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.

I’m having a hard time imagining where this is useful. If I’m trying to assign to a property, but encounter an intermediate null value in the access chain, just skipping the assignment is almost never going to be what I want to do. I’m going to want to initialize that null value.

Hi there, one of the lang designers here :)

Think of it this way. We already supported these semantics in existing syntax through things like invocations (which are freely allowed to mutate/write). So `x?.SetSomething(e1)`. We want properties to feel and behave similarly to methods (after all, they're just methods under the covers), but these sorts of deviations end up making that not the case.

In this situation, we felt like we were actually reducing concept count by removing yet another way that properties don't compose as well with other language features as something like invocation calls do.

Note: when we make these features we do do an examination of the ecosystem and we can see how useful the feature would be. We also are community continuously with our community and seeing just how desirable such a feature is. This goes beyond just those who participate on the open source design site. But also tons of private partners, as well as tens of thousands of developers participating at our conferences and other events.

This feature had been a continued thorn for many, and we received continuous feedback in the decade since `?.` was introduced about this. We are very cautious on adding features. But in this case, given the continued feedback, positive reception from huge swaths of the ecosystem, minimal costs, lowered complexity, and increased consistency in the language, this felt like a very reasonable change to make.

Thanks!

I'm also not sure I have a lot of code where this would be useful, but adding it to the language I don't feel makes it worse in any way; in fact, it makes it more consistent since you can do conditional null reads and conditional null method invocations (w/ `?.Invoke()`), so why not writes too.

Adding something is always gonna make things worse by default and has to be proven to be useful. Otherwise you have bloat and "yet another way of doing the one thing".

I'm a fan of this notation because it's consistent but language design should not just add features because it doesn't hurt.

I enjoy language features like this too. In fact, I love how languages like C# have handled nullability over the more recent years. No telling how many bugs I have prevented.

The only gripe I have though, is that I have to be remember which version does and does not support such syntax changes. It's not a major issue by any means, but when dealing with legacy applications, I tend to often forget what is and is not syntactically allowed.

“Why not?” is never a good-enough reason to add a new language feature.

If it’s rarely used, people may misinterpret whether the RHS is evaluated or not when the LHS doesn’t exist (I don’t actually know which it is).

Optional operations and missing properties often require subtle consideration of how to handle them. You don’t want to make it too easy to say “whatever”.

> people may misinterpret whether the RHS is evaluated or not when the LHS doesn’t exist

I fully expect no RHS evaluation in that case. I think the fear is misplaced; it's one of those "why can't I do that when I can do this" IMO. If you're concerned, enable the analyzer to forbid it.

There are already some really overly paranoid analyzers in the full normal set that makes me wonder how masochistic one can be...

improving crappy codebases without breaking anything. Bad .NET developers are forever doing null checks because they write weird and unreliable code. So if you have to fix up some pile of rotting code, it can help you slowly iterate towards something more sane over time.

For example in my last gig, the original devs didn't understand typing, so they were forever writing typing code at low levels to check types (with marker interfaces) to basically implement classes outside of the classes. Then of course there was lots of setting of mutable state outside of constructors, so basically null was always in play at any moment at any time.

I would have loved this feature while working for them, but alas; they were still on 4.8.1 and refused to allow me to upgrade the codebase to .net core, so it wouldn't have helped anyway.

These null checks are actually for Optionals in the type system. The whole standard library and many better packages use nullability and thus indicate what can and cannot be null ever. And structs can never be null.

So no, c# are not constantly null-checking more than in Rust

Unfortunately, I suspect this will just makes it easier to keep writing sloppy code.

This is the kind of comment I wish I could print on every sheet of a roll of toilet paper

Ok, hear me out. How powerful of a battery would we need to turn the blades and nacelle into a helicopter?

And just think. Once it arrives on site, you have a big ass grid storage battery to install!

Is there one for 2026? I’m guessing if there is you’ll see one trending down while the other is trending up, for obvious reasons.

> Hopefully nothing that advances a dystopian fascist agenda, right? Right?

Hey! You can’t say that! That’s wrong speak!

So what is it that you’re saying is keeping younger people from getting out? Just the knowledge that there may be people out in the world with them who are creepily obsessing over their birth rate?

Already getting dopamine in other ways.

Apathy resulting from being treated and talked about like cattle, raised and bred to feed the machine of capitalism while they watch it destroy the world around them.

And to add, the lawsuit didn’t lose on its merits, but on lack of jurisdiction.

I feel like for lack of jurisdiction, the courts should refuse to hear the case, rather than have it count as a "lost" case?

I mean, that's basically what happens.

The "lost her case" language is very much a public narrative around the court case, but from the legal perspective, her suit was dismissed for a lack of jurisdiction, which is pretty much the court refusing to consider the case.