Microsoft has released Aspire 13.4, with the key feature being general availability of the TypeScript AppHost, as well as new integrations for Go, Bun, Blazor and WebAssembly. The company currently describes Aspire as a "code-first orchestration and observability layer for distributed applications" which makes it sound like some kind of service, but it is not. Developers use the Aspire CLI (command line interface) to model, develop and debug distributed applications, originally just for .NET, but now for a variety of languages, with TypeScript now first-class so that even the core Aspire file, called the AppHost, can be written in the language. Aspire can also deploy applications, though it is not a service that runs in production. Instead, developers add targets to an Aspire project to enable commands including publish, which builds the artifacts to be deployed, and deploy, which deploys the artifacts to the configured target, such as Azure container apps, Azure app service or Kubernetes. Other targets include Docker Compose, AWS services, and others via third-party integrations. The AppHost in the .NET variant is a C# project and for TypeScript, a code file called apphost.mts which imports an Aspire module. The AppHost configures and assembles the distributed application. For example, by running aspire add postgres the AppHost gains the ability to add PostgreSQL support with a few lines of code, including options to add a container image to run the database engine, creating a database, adding a web-based admin dashboard, mounting a data volume outside the container, adding health checks and telemetry for the database server to the Aspire dashboard, and injecting connection properties as environment variables to selected projects. The Aspire dashboard is a development feature that consumes OpenTelemetry data to monitor the health of a running application and show data such as memory usage. It is not primarily intended for use in production but can be run standalone or even used in environments which do not otherwise use Aspire, available in a Docker image. Aspire 13.4 adds critical features for Kubernetes deployment, including support for cert-manager, Gateway API, manifest resources and external Helm charts. There are also enhanced resource commands, which execute commands exposed by resources in a running AppHost, and new AppHost APIs for Go and Bun, so that applications using these can be added. Python, Java and Rust were already supported. A new aspire-skills bundle is provided for AI agents. The full list of new features is here. Aspire was first released in 2024 but its roots go back further, to an experimental tool called Project Tye that appeared in May 2020. It is a bold effort to simplify and improve the developer experience for distributed applications, though held back from wider adoption by its .NET and Azure flavor, which Microsoft is now attempting to broaden. Another issue is that articulating what Aspire is has proved difficult, leading to questions like, why not use Aspire in production? "You don’t run Aspire in production. You develop your app with it locally and then deploy to the platform you want," said James Newton-King, a principal software engineer at Microsoft working on the project. Distinguished engineer David Fowler acknowledged the communicating exactly what the project is has been difficult and added that "lots of the impressions about what Aspire is and how it worked is outdated because it’s changed so much." ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide September 1992

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide October 1984

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

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Sylvana Simons, inspirerend talkshowgast die direct aan tafel moet als er weer eens iemand een verkeerd woord heeft gebruikt, verkeerd heeft gekeken of raar heeft gefloten, is ineens de coulance zelve als het gaat om Donald Pols. Donald Pols gebruikte echter geen verkeerd woord (oké gebruikte vroeger mogelijk wel 'blank'), keek niet verkeerd en floot niet raar, maar zat bij een extreemrechtse studentenclub in Zuid-Afrika ten tijde van de apartheid. Sylvana Simons denkt dat Pols' verhaal juist heel inspirerend kan zijn. Want ja, hij is uiteindelijk toch 'goed' geworden. Daarom kan het heel inspirerend zijn dat hij geen idee had wat het Odal-rune-symbool betekende, kan het heel inspirerend zijn dat hij zijn strijd tégen de afschaffing van apartheid jarenlang verzweeg maar het in eerdere interviews wel deed voorkomen alsof-ie altijd al kritisch was op het systeem, kan het heel inspirerend zijn dat dit verhaal al een jaar op de plank lag maar pas naar buiten werd gebracht toen hij bij Tata aan de slag ging, kan het heel inspirerend zijn dat Milieudefensie dat verleden in de doofpot stopte terwijl Pols daar toen al 6 jaar directeur was en kan het heel inspirerend zijn dat hij directeur communicatie zou worden bij Tata Steel terwijl hij tegenover NRC nog heel inspirerend toegeeft: "De commotie die zijn overstap naar Tata veroorzaakte had hij niet voorzien." Ja bij dit verhaal denk je echt meteen: INSPIREREND.

wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:

鹿児島県鹿屋市、かのやばら園 / Kanoya Rose Garden, Kanoya City, Kagoshima Prefecture

America's best and worst places to be gay and trans? Check your ZIP code - "The index suggests America's acceptance of gay people has continued a steep decline, reversing many of the civil rights advances that increased the well-being and safety of the LGBTQ+ population, Out Leadership's founder and CEO, Todd Sears, told USA TODAY... 'Something Americans had come to take for granted, that LGBTQ+ people exist and deserve civil rights, has been thrown back into question,' Sears said."

By Gallup's measure, acceptance of LGBTQ people – at an all-time high four years ago – has fallen every year since as public approval of LGBTQ+ legal protections recedes and transgender rights become a culture-war flashpoint. The political shift has spilled over into the broadly supportive corporate world, which – despite a track record of backing the nation's LGBTQ+ population – shrank Pride Month budgets, flashed fewer rainbow flags and downplayed solidarity amid the "go woke go broke" backlash against Target and Bud Light and pressure from activists to roll back LGBTQ+ commitments.

2026 State LGBTQ+ Business Climate Index (pdf) - "Eight years ago, Out Leadership set out to measure something the corporate world had never quantified: what it actually feels like to live LGBTQ+ in each U.S. state, and what that lived experience costs the businesses operating there. The framework was built on a premise that has only sharpened with time. The laws, courts, and political climates that shape an LGBTQ+ person's daily life are the same forces that shape where companies can recruit talent, retain executives, win contracts, and keep their people safe. The Index measures both at once, year after year, so leaders and lawmakers can see what their decisions actually cost — in dollars, in talent, and in lives."

1. Texas, Florida and Maine each drop seven ranks under the new methodology. Texas and Florida fall because the expanded 32-indicator framework now registers three years of legislation the legacy framework couldn't measure, bathroom restrictions, drag laws, DEI bans, attorney-general litigation. Maine falls because peer states passed protective laws it didn't.
2. 103 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in states scoring "high tension" on the new Corporate-Policy Alignment indicator. Texas (54 HQs), Ohio (27) and Florida (22), 103 companies in all, score 1 on the new alignment metric, meaning their state policy environments now openly conflict with the LGBTQ+ workplace standards their employers already hold themselves to.
3. 21 State attorneys general now actively litigate against LGBTQ+ rights. Under the new Attorney General Score, 21 of 50 sitting AGs land in the most-hostile tier. Four, Ken Paxton (TX), Todd Rokita (IN), James Uthmeier (FL), and Jonathan Skrmetti (TN), are flagged for directly targeting corporations over DEI and LGBTQ+-inclusive practices.
4. $324B Annual GDP being forgone by states without comprehensive nondiscrimination protections. Applying the Williams Institute's 3% inclusion-dividend estimate to BEA's 2025 state GDP data shows roughly $324 billion in annual output left on the table. About $171 billion of that sits in Texas, Florida and Ohio alone.
5. The seven-year sort: top ten steady, bottom ten getting worse, middle vanishing. Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont and California have held the top tier every year since 2019. Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma have held the bottom tier every year since 2019. The gap between them has widened by 11 points.
6. Vetoes pay off: governor leadership lifted Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, and Maryland over seven years. The states that have most improved over the seven-year history of the Index share a pattern: a governor consistently using the veto pen to block restrictive legislation. Andy Beshear (KY), JB Pritzker (IL, +4 ranks), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), Michelle Lujan Grisham (NM), and Wes Moore (MD) anchor the long-term improvers.

Frank suspected something odd when he spotted a use of React's useMemo function in some JavaScript code. Now, there's nothing wrong with using that method, in and of itself. It watches some variables and recalculates a callback if they change for any reason. It's a great tool for when you want to avoid recalculating expensive things over and over again.

But in this case, the calculation in question was isAuthorized, which wasn't an expensive calculation; it was just checking if certain values are set. The code looked like this:

  const isAuthorized = useMemo(() => {
    return (session && token && !group) === false;
  }, [session, token, group]);

session, token and group are all either going to be null, or be an object. To be authorized, all three must be set to non-null values. A rational person, knowing this, might choose to return session && token && group, and exploit JavaScript's truthiness. Or, if you really wanted to coerce it to a boolean, you could return !!(session && token && group).

So why on Earth are they negating group? How would this even work? If the check is "all three must be set" what is this doing?

Well, if you do a && b && c, JavaScript will return the last value you looked at. The && operator short circuits, so that means it either returns the first falsy value you encounter, or the very last value in the chain.

So in this scenario: (session && token && !group), if session or token is null, the expression evaluates to null. Otherwise, if group is null, then !group will evaluate to true. Because they use the === operator, JavaScript won't do any type coercion, and that means null === false is false, as is true === false.

I can't believe that this code works as intended. I mean, it works, it gives the correct output, but I think that's an accident. Happenstance of someone with no clue gradually throwing operators into an expression until it does what they want. Perhaps it's LLM generated code- who can even guess anymore? It certainly seems like it was generated through a stochastic process; whether that's a bumbling developer or a bunch of math, there's definitely no intelligence involved, artificial or otherwise.