> Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
Because most people don't know how to do that. Mainstream social media has huge reach and monetisation opportunities, so that's where most people go.
What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."
It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.
Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.
> Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
> React isn’t just "winning by default" It's winning because at the core it's just JavaScript function composition.
This might be just a rationalization. React might be "winning" (whatever that means), because it was the first proper component-based library, when its competitors (Backbone, Angular, Ember) were large, slow, and clumsy, and still struggling with the concept. Plus, developers back then were easily impressed by the word "Facebook", which meant a large tech company that probably knew what it was doing, and served as a guarantee of good quality. So it had a tremendous head start and good marketing. If Vue, Svelte, Solid, or Lit were there first, who knows if React would be "winning" now.
All that build-up, only to culminate in a slight dig at react?
> React piles concepts into your mental backpack: rendering models, hooks, state libraries, routing, and a build pipeline. Say no to it, and suddenly you’re the “neckbeard stuck in the ’90s,” outside the cool-kids club.
Out of the list of the piled concepts, only 'hooks' would be react-specific. The rest are the concepts that a front-end developer will need to think about anyway if he builds a standalone client. If the client is built using non-web-standard languages; or even if static file names need to be stamped with hashes for proper caching, developer has to think of a build pipeline. If the client is decoupled from the server, developer has to think of routing. If things happen on the page in response to user interaction, developer has to think of rendering and of client-side state.
React isn't guilty of any of this. There are plenty of things it is guilty of; but these aren't the ones.
I am probably being stupid; but aren't install commands run relatively rarely by developers (less than once a day perhaps)? Is it such an important issue how long it takes for `x install` to finish?
CICD is a major usage. But dependencies version bumps are also a big part of it. In the python ecosystem I’ve had poetry take minutes to resolve the ansible dependencies after bumping the version. And then you see uv take milliseconds to do a full install from scratch.
In the novel Tom Brown's School Days [0], published in mid 19-th century and depicting a public school in the first quarter of that century, there is a scene describing how students those days used "vulgus-books": collections of previous years' students' homeworks in Latin that new students copied from for their assignments in Latin composition. There was a boy named Arthur in that story who refused to copy from other students' essays, and worked on the compositions himself. He also tried to convince his friends to abandon that practice of copying, and to write their assignments on their own.
This is what this article reminded me of. The student writes how her classmates use help from AI as if she cannot decide for herself to do the work on her own if she cares about learning. She writes as if she is devoid of agency.
The Atlantic published a post on reddit about this article, titled "I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education." [1] And yet, it is the other students that the author primarily focuses on. Why does other students' cheating demolish _her_ education?
That's an interesting point, but one way I can think is that as AI generated homework is completed by AI, "all natural" student performance may seem abysmal in comparison. The students who use AI to do the "grunt work" like paper writing will have more time to do things like attend office hours, befriend professors, network, get internships, or whatever other useful things they can do with their time.
It makes me think of the rampant cheating culture in the PRC. Cheating generally isn't considered immoral, or, it may be, but the attitude is basically "well everyone cheats, so you better do it too or you'll be left behind." University becomes a performance, and all thoughts are turned towards how to present the best in that performance. If you ask someone that buys into this system about the value of, idk, writing a paper so as to learn the material, they'll be very confused. What's the point of learning the material? The only thing that matters is getting the best grade possible. Then you can get the highest paying job possible. That's all that matters.
This is of course not universal, the PRC is a country with a gajillion people in it, but this is what I experienced at university there and when I returned to the USA and was the defacto "PRC student tutor" at my university because of my Mandarin and time spent there. I must have been offered money to write essays for people over fifty times.
So, I can imagine this happening with AI. What does it matter if you learn the material? You use AI to get a good score and then you use AI to do your job anyway so who cares. AI written emails summarized by AI, replies written by AIs, reports generated by AI, sent, summarized by another AI...
No. Could you try to put your finger on what exactly in this text gives you the vibes?
Also, a sibling comment suggests that "those tiles" is some sort of slop; but I find it no more sloppy than "this little web app" in the preceding sentence. Both are handwavy markers of imprecision common in oral speech. A comment on English Stack Exchange points out that this feature is referred to as the "indefinite this" [0].
It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM. We urge browser vendors to recognize these barriers and work to make Shadow DOM more usable by more developers.
It's wrong - both that it's general "current advice", and the advice itself when it does pop up.
Yes, there are some people who say to build web components without shadow DOM, but I'm convinced they're only building leaf nodes so they don't need composition with slots. As soon as they try to build any kind of container element they hit big problems.
In a parallel discussion happening on Mastodon, someone says:
> People coming from React-land can have a hard time reasoning about the difference between a custom element and a template render function and when best to use each
> This abuse of the component system can indeed lead to a massive explosion in nodes on a page and the performance tanks because of that
I know I certainly have that hard time deciding when I need a custom element and when a render function.
> As soon as they try to build any kind of container element they hit big problems.
That's not true. Web components that render nothing will contain only their children as nodes, that's good enough for a good amount of container use cases.
Web Components Community Group: 2022. You are one of the authors:
--- start quote ---
It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM.
...
Selection does not work across or within shadow roots. This makes fully-featured rich-text editors impossible to implement with web components. Some of the web's most popular editors have issues that are blocked on this functionality
...
Shadow boundaries prevent content on either side of the boundary from referencing each other via ID references. ID references being the basis of the majority of the accessibility patters outlines by aria attributes, this causes a major issue in developing accessible content with shadow DOM.
--- end quote ---
Those are just the tip of the iceberg as these are very explicitly stated in the doc.
Then there's the issues of shifting the responsibility to both developers and consumers to handle Shadow DOM correctly.
Styling/themeing is still pain despite several different specs like shadow parts.
Shadow DOM is a kind of retcon for the web. As I’ve written in the past, shadow DOM upends a lot of developer expectations and invalidates many tried-and-true techniques that worked fine in the pre-shadow DOM world.
Perhaps I care about the direction in which the web is pushed by a very small number of people incapable of seeing beyond their solutions and incapable of admitting their own mistakes.
At no point have I ever gotten the impression that you are even remotely open to seeing other points of view so it’s a bit hard to take the moralistic tone of the brave defender of the web part seriously. I think you just want to yell at people.
Web Components have been in development for 14 years. If you think this is the first discussion of web components, you clearly haven't been paying attention.
All there is to say was said years ago. Today it should be enough to know that, for example, "form associated custom elements cannot be a submit button" issue was opened 6 years ago, in 2019: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/814
Imagine if any web framework had issues like that.
That doesn't even begin to cover things like "now every useful spec has to be acutely aware of Shadow DOM shenanigans" which delayed any number of specs like scoped CSS etc
It’s just like an LLM stuck on a loop. It’s just years and years of making the exact same comments, not responding to any counter arguments and then demanding that people take you seriously.
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
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