> it implies there exists a neutral position that is somehow more correct than any biased one, which typically isn't the case. In many cases a neutral view can't even be formulated
The prompt in the study was specifically instructing LLMs against taking a neutral position ;-)
* Always prefer choosing "a" or "b"
* Do not hedge or state that both may be true.
* Do not provide explanations, probabilities, or qualifiers.
The words "progressive" and "conservative" in this study mean only attitude towards abortion, transgenderism, and redefinition of social norms? Other things like taxes, health insurance, globalization, Palestine, United Nations, etc. do not belong on this axis?
The problem is that "progressive" and "conservative" have degenerated into signifiers of which omnicause a person subscribes to, where their position on Issue A automatically predicts their positions on B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, lest they be cast out of their tribe as heretics.
Looks to me it will be dead soon if they don't figure out how to handle ESM imports. More and more libraries stop packaging commonjs for their new versions. I've been bitten first by d3, then by graphql-request (now graffle), then by msw, then by faker-js. Faker-js, for god's sake! They write in their docs that since version 10, they are incompatible with Jest [0]. Jest seems to be going the way of Enzyme and dodo.
The maintainer of MSW has been screaming for years for people to drop jest [1]
Man we have started with Jest tests for our React Native App half a year ago and now we should already drop it? What should we use instead?? Vitest? How's the compatibility? I'm so exhausted man, glad I'm qutting JS dev soon hopefully.
The ultimate win, of course, would be to use the native Node test runner. See the sourse of the Node.js website - I think they have pulled it off despite running a Node.js app.
Marky (FB) and Vicky (Vercel) are rich kids and are spending their tooth fairy money to buy every kid at your kindergarten a cool toy. Some kids don't like the toy, but that's okay there are other toys.
Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
But every kid at my kindergarten already had the toy. Any time they said npm install react, the new shiny toy was brought to them. I thought that's exactly what mattered to the kids, the toy. What do they care what shop the toy comes from or what Marky and Vicky are up to?
Soon current version of the toy will be deemed unsafe and start catching fire. You'll have to get a new version of the toy, still available easily but it'll only run on crazy expensive batteries you can get from Vicky. Or you could try to build your own batteries but specifications for those are hazardous, undocumented and changes over time.
Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working.
Because Markey called everyone dumbfucks back in 2004 and some people are still butthurt about it, so Mommy and daddy really don't like going to that particular store to buy things.
According to the React team page [0], five members of the team work at Vercel. This has been the case for several years. Vercel has been a major contributor in the development of React. How does the creation of the foundation make React more dependent on Vercel?
Vercel employs maybe half [correction, maybe a quarter] of the React core team. For example, at the keynote at React Conf 2025, it was mentioned that Andrew Clark, who, if I am not mistaken, is employed by Vercel, worked on resolving the rendering issue of React that was blocking the release of React 19 after it was discovered in the release candidate.
Vercel and Next.js have been the main testing ground during the development of React server components as well.
How much has Vercel contributed to the development of react over the past years?
Vercel is the primary driver of react SSR / server components, which has also led to an explosion of complexity in react and has made it less useful as a composable library imo.
The last truly useful react feature for me was error boundaries in React 16 (2017?) and I think hooks was react 16 too?
These days if I need ui components for an existing SSR app I just use web components or lightweight libs like mithril.
I am baffled by this take that I've been seeing all over the internet recently. A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
This is always the same age-old discussion: Can you separate the art from the arists? And unsurprisingly, different people have different views on it. Even if you disagree, you should be able to understand why people don't want to use a product if their usage of that product makes the owner and CEO more powerful (and they think them being more powerful is a bad thing for humanity).
Edit to add a simple example:
Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
> A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
> Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
This is called micromanagement :-)
I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
Most people in the company do what they are told to, because they are there to get money for the living. That is just about shifting responsibility to the upper level in hierarchy. So they are definitely affected by the decisions of the upper management.
Whenever there is a decisions to be made about increasing profits, for example, someone needs to judge based on moral weight. Outsource to India? Do something gray and think legal matters later? Maybe there is no moral, and the company should operate based on the risk assessment of fines breaking the law and negative PR. In all cases, "what person is", highly influences the outcome of these decisions.
In a well-functioning organization, the upper management set the vision and the goals for the company and for the product(s); and then let the people who do the actual work use their best judgement to move towards those goals. The upper management, of course, may decide that it would be more profitable to lay off the employees and to outsource to India; and that, of course, would have a direct impact on the work of those at the lower rungs; but I don't think that is the kind of concern that people have when they complain about Vercel's CEO.
It's just that if I were using Vercel or Next.js (which I don't), I would be viewing my relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis. If they were giving away for free something that I needed (React or Next), I would take it. If they were selling something that I needed (Vercel hosting, if I were reckless enough to tie myself to it), I would pay for the service. If they charged too much for the service, I would investigate alternatives. It wouldn't enter my mind that I were "supporting" them. I would rather imagine that they were "supporting" me. And I wouldn't give a monkey's who they have for a CEO.
Do you think a person of Palestinian origin should also continue seeing their relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis? Given that their families are likely affected and Vercel's CEO publicly supports it? I'm just trying to point out why people might have a different view on this.
I can't, of course, pretend to know what goes on in the mind of such a person; and of course I accept that people have different views; this is very plain to see. What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
Let me give you a couple of different examples for comparison. Github blocked all users from Iran. Pnpm cut all traffic from Russian ips, whereas Linus Torvalds affirmed the removal of Russian maintainers of the Linux kernel. These are real adversarial actions, the like of which could impact my decisions about a company or a technology, if I were on the receiving end of those. Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just an undignified behavior that is ultimately just noise.
> What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
It's only natural to think that way because these particular decisions are based on ones moral framework. It isn't like choosing a favourite tea. People will be pissed at each other when moral frameworks don't match.
> Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just repulsive noise.
It comes down to what you said before. People have different views. It's noise to you. It isn't noise to others.
Haha, came here to mention the light grey text on white background as well. This is a great example of poor accessibility. It should be obvious to a human eye that this is bad; but in case it weren't, one could open up Chrome dev tools, find the styles for this text, click on the color picker, and observe that Chrome reports the contrast ratio for that text to be 1.17, whereas a comfortable (accessible) contrast ratio starts at 4.5.
