SanderNL

I think you might be right. I’ll take the hit.

Still, I think talking about Kafka without load feels like Christmas without tree. I thought that was the main point of it. Handling massive loads (by distributing them).

8000 messages a day, tops? That’s 5 a minute. Does that warrant “infrastructure”? I think a gameboy’s Z80 could handle that load.

I don’t want to be dismissive, but I often see these big numbers being posted, like “14M messages” or “thousands of messages” and then adding “per year” or something, which brings it down to toy level load.

Even the first “serious” example is about “thousands of messages” per minute. Say 5K a minute. That’s 83 per second, say 100. That seems .. not that interesting?

Am I being too dismissive? I think I am. I am not seeing something right. Can anybody say something to widen my perspective?

[X] Critical of unimportant detail

[X] Did not read the article

[X] Disconnected from reality: article hits front page of HN

[X] Makes value judgements based on incomplete or irrelevant evidence

Quite impressive! Developer by any chance?

Using Docker to run in seconds is like saying using a Windows VM in Qemu and you got Office running in seconds on Free BSD.

It’s still a mess, but it’s hidden now.

You enumerated it yourself.

Interesting how the immediate reaction is “postgres does not scale” when there is a single table lacking an index.

This also tells how important competence and knowledge of the system is. People that came in new and didn’t know the system like you do probably lacked the confidence/skills to just “get in” like that.

I agree on the business case, but it’s still orthogonal to “how any of the web works”.

It’s how Google’s business works, maybe, but that wasn’t the argument.

Google maintaining or not maintaining something is completely orthogonal to “how any of the web works”. I see no point here.

Agreed. I think the two of us can talk all day about the necessity of it becoming a “large and complex field”. I accept I am an old miser about it, but it is indeed the reality.

I feel for the man becoming a millionaire doing that degrading hard work of being an entertainer/artist. Real frustrating that must have been. I feel deeply for those struggling millionaires that keep plowing on, for.. for.. humanity’s sake.

That’s not hard. Hard is solving world hunger, making cars drive themselves. You literally counted all major issues in one simple comment.

It’s sad a proper table is not in the standard. We got a kinds of ridiculously complicated bullshit CSS transitions, but some kind of basic lazy-loading table with pagination is beyond us apparently.

Nothing against you, but it’s kind of depressing to me.

It’s easy to make this work without JS. It’s telling that this is the state of ‘HTML’. These skills are rusting away and it’s a sad thing.

The “state of HTML” is that it has become a glorified payload wrapper to deliver corporate JS shitware to you as efficiently as possible.

That’s not the kind of split I mean.

Bellard’s QuickJS is a good example. It’s 100kb vs V8’s 40mb and for open source purposes plenty fast for a web browser.

We need more QuickJS and libcss and rendering backends, not “browsers”.

Is there some reason why browsers aren't split into a million pieces and worked on seperately? Most browser projects I see are tackled like giant monolithic projects.

For example, CSS seems like a constraint solver that has nothing to do with parsing HTTP requests. Even parsing CSS itself has nothing to do with laying it out. Rendering is another step altogether that also has very little to do with anything. I can see these things being split into standalone and testable libraries with limited scope. Maybe I'm wrong though. I often am.

A "browser" seems like an "operating system". There is so much going on and I can see how a "browser" could be made out of myriad existing components in various amounts. A bit like the various Linux distributions and their particular choices of underlying tools and frameworks. You don't do it all at once, you got a million separate small chunks working together (if you're a Unix kind of guy..)

Maybe we should all work on creating as much small composable components as possible and then let the other guys slap a nice UI on top of it and put a bow on it. This is probably not practical, but a guy can dream.

So if the feds stop by you have nothing to hand over. That sounds great, but legally dubious. Aren't you required to keep a log?

Thanks for the info nonetheless. I think I'll give it a shot and maybe don't look up how to get rid of bodies - for a friend. Oh, damn, did it again.

Unless you work at Kagi I am not taking that too seriously.

Kagi seems great and I’m more than willing to pay, but then my searches get literally attached to my credit card. At least Google can pretend it doesn’t know me directly..

It’s not that I am involved in shady business, but I do look up strange things from time to time.

How do others feel about this?

(I feel like there is a need for a private, maybe even local, search?)

I have the real unpopular opinion that some psychological pressure is necessary for human societies to operate somewhat optimally.

Straight up giving people money is different from living "on stamps". I know it's fashionable these days to call this "shaming" and I guess it is. My question is, is that a bad thing?

If I wasn't shamed/bullied/pestered into being a proper citizen I don't think I'd become one. Maybe I'm just an inferior breed or something, but my guess is this is true for a lot of folks.

Indeed. Most of them are also bad planners and lose track of priorities very, very easily. Besides that, there is non-stop internal strife and quarreling as they are deeply social creatures that need to be in constant competition with one and other in order to be happy. You need another class of humans to "manage" these issues.

Once those two layers interact, you get a whole new dimension of problems you get to deal with. The creation of yet another layer of "management" is inevitable. It's basically management all the way up.

But man, once you get a bunch them aligned and motivated the sky is the limit.

A rich text-based UI feels like it has all the downsides of a GUI while substantially lacking the upsides.

For example, Tilde. It seems nice and maybe it has nice features, but what about these features is so highly dependent on being accessible through a "menu"? Do you reach for the "menu" all the time? Or are there fancy "dialogs"?

This feels like Vim, but with some strange plugin that provides a "menu". I'd think why not just jump ahead and ditch the quasi-GUI and just learn some shortcuts?

Honestly not trying to be difficult here. I want to understand the mindset, because you are definitely not alone.

This will become increasingly normal, but it’ll take a while before massive impact (ie taking your and your friends’ jobs). I’m not sure of the timeline. Humans are slow to adapt, but in 20-30 years I think the pace will pick up.

I’m not too worried about the current generation, but my kids. Don’t know what to tell them TBH.

I guess it’ll all be fine though. We techies tend to have a paranoid streak which isn’t becoming.

Humans are .. complicated. You cannot just compensate a human’s caloric expense (although many companies would love that).

Anywhere a human gets involved shit gets expensive. Interestingly robots are pretty human-intensive, from design to programming and maintenance. Only at scale does the “human factor” go down and things become affordable.

Meanwhile, competitors are choking in papers, but fail to release anything I can get my hands on (that’s worth a damn).

I can actually appreciate “open” as “open to access” or “open to actually having a product iso posturing about being so far ahead but never releasing anything worthwhile” (looking at Google).

I agree. Maybe as a dev I've become cynical and don't trust anything. Least of all some app holding my document.

Makes me think of the "Voting software" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030

"I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."

Sometimes it's hard to just accept reality: even the big, mighty and omnipresent supernatural and all-knowing Government(tm) is just a bunch of non-magical, non-demonic regular folks trying to keep things on the rails. It usually works out OK, but there's a lot of rails and a lot of stuff to keep on them.

You are right and like you explained this is trivially easily fixed by autosaving regularly.

What I have trouble imagining is people working with documents on computers for more than a few years yet somehow failing to develop the Always Save Instinct. I regularly catch myself saving unreasonably often.

Your book was published somewhere mid-2021, right?