Devasta

Abandoning XML tech is was and forever will be the webs biggest mistake. The past 20 years has been just fumbling about trying to implement things that it would have provided easily.

Slow compile times are a feature, get to make a cuppa.

It's honestly embarrassing that we are twenty years since the browsers took control of HTML from the W3C and they still have nothing approaching even one tenth the capability of XForms.

The fact that legions of developers are working on browsers, and at the same time everyone scrambles to abstract away from the browser offerings towards JSX, Tailwind and TS is maddening.

From wikipedia:

Murdock purchased Cannon Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina, in 1982. At the time, the company was profitable and had no debts. He used the company's profits to pay back the loans he secured to make the acquisition before terminating 2,000 positions and selling the company-owned homes. He eliminated the company's $100 million pensions plan, taking $36 million to make personal investments and using the remainder to purchase annuity policies from Executive Life Insurance Company for Cannon employees. Executive Life later failed due to its own poor investments and reduced its payouts to retired employees. Murdock sold the Cannon Mills to Fieldcrest in 1985.

As an atheist, I have long accepted that there is no heaven.

The fact there is no hell however, is a tragedy beyond measure.

Just like with IE, Microsoft will lose domination in the OS space for no other reason than it just gave up.

It's maddening that they is a really capable OS sitting right underneath the layers of crap we have to deal with.

More licenses should do the same, this is excellent.

So if you had a machine that could solve blocks at a tremendous pace, could you rapidly go through 2016 blocks with minimal transactions processed, then just switch your machine off?

The difficulty will have gone through the roof and transaction processing time by the rest of the network will then slow to a crawl.

Imagine software engineering was like real engineering, where the engineers had licensing and faced fines or even prison for negligence. How much of the modern worlds software would be tolerated?

Very, very little.

If engineers handled the Citicorp center the same way software engineers did, the fix would have been to update the documentation in Confluence to not expose the building to winds and then later on shrug when it collapsed.

Honest answer: because any serious efforts to improve HTML died 20 years ago, and the web as it's envisaged today is not an infinite library of the worlds knowledge but instead a JavaScript based and platform.

Asking for things that the W3C had specced out in 2006 for XML tech is just not reasonable if it doesn't facilitate clicks.

With AI, all we will need is staff to write down a few paragraphs of their needs and constraints and the computer will be able to deliver the desired outcomes.

Also, despite the fact that we were all working remotely for years, we need you all to come into the office because water cooler chats are far better than writing down a few paragraphs outlining what you need and the constraints.

HTML -> JSX

CSS -> Tailwind

JS -> Typescript

It must be maddening working as a browser dev knowing that the very first thing most devs worth their corn do is immediately go to abstracts so they are able ignore your work as much as they can.

Shooting a healthcare CEO and shooting MLK are the same thing to you?

That's incredible.

Tbh the only thing that surprises me about Luigi Mangione is that there hasn't been a thousand more like him over the years. What a farce the US healthcare industry is.

Atlas Shrugged was one of the most important books I ever read.

A society where the rich destroy the entire world fighting stupid battles against each other, even witholding technology that would aid all humanity because someone other than them would benefit, all the while ordinary men like Eddie Willers are left to die in the desert?

Marx couldn't have laid it out so clear to me as Rand has.

I manage a team of business analysts and accountants who use XSLT for generating reports for banks, XSLT is usually their first experience programming outside some linkedin learning courses. Not once has one of them ever complained about namespaces, or verbosity or anything like it, this is something I only see on HN or the programming subreddits.

The vast vast majority of Devs only experience of XML is what they hear second hand, I'm sure a lot more would like it if they tried it.

If a browser was designed from scratch today it wouldn't have a markup language, documents would be PDF and everything else would be Javascript to canvas.

Suggesting something like HTML would have you laughed out of the room.

I manage a team who build and maintain trading data reports for brokers, we have everything generate in a fairly standard format and customize to those brokers exact needs with XSLT. Hundreds of reports, couldnt manage without it.

And after all their efforts to get the unknown markup into an document form, they'll convert it's contents into the dominant information format of the 26th century: PDF.

In the year 2525, if man is still alive, he may find he has a web page from an unknown time period. To read it, all he'll need to do is reimplement all standards for the previous 500 years. Version numbers wouldn't make this easier at all, somehow.

Maybe I'm just in the minority, I just don't see what purpose this serves.

Besides my mouse, I just don't have anything that uses USB. My phone generally isn't connected, I've not needed a USB drive in years and I struggle to think of a situation where I have a product that uses USB that I need to use my laptop for but also don't want the software controlling it installed on that laptop.

The internet has never been as good as it was when flash was at its peak.

Just this past week Trump made a tit of himself on camera with Zelenskyy. If this happened in 2005 there'd already be some minigame out where youd be Zelenskyy fighting JD Vance.

But flash is bad because it's not semantic markup, so instead we have react slop serving reaction videos istead.

Stuff like this is why UTF and any attempt at trying to encode all characters is a mistake.

The real solution is to force the entire world population to use the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea.

He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn't possibly be disrespectful because he didn't swear and he didn't raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance.

Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.

People are using machines dozens of times more powerful than machines from 15 years ago, but do they do things that are materially different to what they did before? Not really.

They absolutely do care, even if they cannot articulate whats wrong.

HTML can never be meaningfully improved, that fact is at the heart of the current attitudes by the browsers. We are 20 years into the takeover from the W3C and still can't even do a PUT request without JS, nevermind anything approaching even one tenth of the capability of XForms.

The best we'll get is little improvements like this which everyone will ignore because ChatGPT will recommend some react component instead.

Whether or not Musk is right about 150 year olds getting Social Security doesn't matter, he just wants to destroy the administrative state. So long as that happens, they'll be perfectly happy with the outcome even if they get proven wrong on some technicalities later.

Prove Musk wrong on this and he'll just go about his day as normal; 20 minutes later there'll be someone tweeting an unhinged screed about how the US government is spending 10 trillion this year changing the name of the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Homeland Inclusivity to which he'll quote tweet "Interesting" and then he'll set his little band of freaks to cause mayhem somewhere else.

Meta has legions of people working tirelessly to give it's users mental disorders, be it on Facebook turning your elderly relatives into racists and transphobes or Instagram giving young women body image disorders, and yet somehow everyone on those sites is a paragon of logic and reason compared to the average linkedin poster.

It's insane how it got this bad with no competitor trying to take its place.

> My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser.

Displaying ads is the key job of a web browser, and they are mostly video these days.

But people search reddit because its the last place on the internet not infested by AI slop, this is awful news.

When it comes to advertisers, there is no reason to assume anything but deliberate malfeasance.