It is likely not worth your effort as whatever you come up with will likely result in discord deactivating your account for breaking their ToS, or them breaking their API forcing you to constantly play catch-up.

This is why open communication protocols are so important. Email is still as ubiquitous as it is because it’s a protocol, not an API.

I personally think it would be less overall effort to get your friends to switch to an open protocol like matrix, or XMPP than it would playing cat and mouse with proprietary APIs. But you do you, I wish you the best of luck!

Best I can do is

"\ude41🙂".split("").reverse().join("")

returns "\ude42🙁"

Yeah good point. I suppose the problem is this function that operates on numbers allows numeric strings to be passed in in the first place. The only place where I would really expect numeric strings to exist is captured directly from user input which is where the parsing into a numeric data type should happen, not randomly in a library function.

It’s kind of insane how bad this whole is-number thing is. It’s designed to tell you if a string is numeric, but I would argue if you’re ever using that you have a fundamental design problem. I hate dynamic typing as much as anyone else, but if forced to use it I would at least try to have some resemblance of sanity by just normalizing it to an actual number first.

Just fucking do this…

const toRegexRange = (minStr, maxStr, options) => {
  const min = parseInt(minStr, 10);
  const max = parseInt(maxStr, 10);
  if (isNaN(min) || isNaN(max)) throw Error("bad input or whatever");
  // ...

Because of the insanity of keeping them strings and only attempting to validate them (poorly) up front you open yourself up to a suite of bugs. For example, it took me all of 5 minutes to find this bug:

toRegexRange('+1', '+2')
// returns "(?:+1|+2)" which is not valid regexp

Agreed, but my point is with a centralized network the lowest common denominator wins. There is no reason you can’t have QoL features on an open network, and thusly let everyone have the features that they care most about.

Can you imagine what a shithole the internet would have been if email wasn’t federated an open? There is absolutely no way that whatever centralized bullshit would have spawned instead would already be either long gone or enshittified to the point of being useless.

Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.

For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:

• Ability to run it on my linux machine without using an electron client (npm is a huge mess of supply chain attacks and I refuse to run any software that is likely to contain dependencies from it)
• Ability to run it on my AOSP phone which does not have any google play services installed
• Ability to write software to back up messages without fear of a company changing their API and breaking my backup system

While I agree that first party systems suck, as someone with neither an iOS or Android device I personally prefer something work rather than a screen that says “connect iOS/Android”.

Yes, you are correct in that a single individual’s action will make no difference, just like your single vote makes no difference either. However if everyone does their part it can make a massive difference.

While your individual contribution makes no difference, you still should try to do your part. Yes, change takes work and a bit of sacrifice. Just like how it takes time out of your day to do research on candidates and go to the polls.

If you don’t do the work, it doesn’t make you smart or clever, it just makes you an asshole taking advantage of others.

If I super heat a metal and it turns visibly red what is happening? Was it already emitting infrared and as it gets hotter the frequency shifts up? Or is it still emitting infrared but has a wider band of frequencies it is emitting as well (i.e. is it emitting frequencies below infrared as well as visible red)?

There’s no way of knowing, which is the whole problem with their model and why a lot of us self host things in the first place. Even if they super duper promise not to use the data, they could be lying. And if they are actually true to their word today, that could change tomorrow.