It's probably a clout thing, or just a weird guy (Hanlon's Razor), but a particularly paranoid interpretation is that this person is setting up for a massive, multi-pronged software supplychain attack.

It does raise the idea of managed backward compatibility.

Especially if you could control at install time just how far back to go, that might be interesting.

Also an immediately ridiculous graph problem for all but trivial cases.

The author is almost certainly ljharb.

The maintainer who this piece of “cursed knowledge” is referencing is a member of TC39, and has fought and died on many hills in many popular JavaScript projects, consistently providing some of the worst takes on JavaScript and software development imaginable. For this specific polyfill controversy, some people alleged a pecuniary motivation, I think maybe related to GitHub sponsors or Tidelift, but I never verified that claim. I dare not speak his name, lest I incur the wrath of various influential JavaScript figures who are friends with him, and possibly keep him around like that guy who was trained wrong as a joke in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. In 2025, I’ve moderated my opinion of him; he does do important maintenance work, and it’s nice to have someone who seems to be consistently wrong in the community, I guess.

A ward even

mm.dd.yyyy is cursed, too. The not-cursed options are dd.mm.yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy

dd/mm/yyyy is most common worldwide (particularly Europe, India, Australia) followed by yyyy/mm/dd (particularly China, Japan, South Korea).

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_by_c...

IMO the best format is yyyy/mm/dd because it’s unambiguous (EDIT: almost) everywhere.

I'm torn. Maybe a better approach would be a prompt saying "you're giving access to images with embedded location data. Do you want to keep the location data in the images, or strip the location data in this application?"

I might not want an application to know my current, active location. But it might be useful for it to get location data from images I give it access to.

I do think if we have to choose between stripping nothing or always stripping if there's no location access, this is the correct and safe solution.