briantakita

One huge benefit to VanJS is it's simplicity. It is far easier to fork than most other UI component libraries. I did it writing relementjs & rmemo. I encourage others to fork it as well. VanJS is well written. You get a reactive state management library (on the browser side) & a UI renderer in < 150 LoC. Very impressive. I encourage anyone interested to experiment with this. It has been very fruitful for me.

In case anyone is interested, here are my forks.

https://github.com/relementjs/relementjs

https://github.com/rmemo/rmemo, which exports https://github.com/ctx-core/ctx-core/tree/main/rmemo. Note that rmemo also supports server side reactivity.

The author works as a back end engineer @ Google. I appreciate his "outsider" approach as it is quite a bit simpler than other UI libraries & even reactive state management libraries such as Nanostores. I'm sure if he were in a different development role, his technique would be refined to account for full stack development use cases.

I don't mean to throw any shade on Tao. He is very talented & his approach is beneficially novel. I just don't think he as much experience what life is like as a full stack (or front end) developer as many here.

I forked his work to create relementjs & rmemo. Tao didn't want to support server side reactivity & I heavily use it. Also, Andrey (maintainer of Nanostores) didn't want to add my PR for autosubscriptions due to the complexity cost that would be added to Nanostores...So I wrote my own set of libraries. I hope library simplicity trends more because it is very nice to work with simple libraries.

Tao's approach is sound. He just relies on the DOM to manage the reactive state, so SSR reactivity would require a different approach. I ended up using WeakRef, which is significantly smaller than the approach used by traditional reactive state management libraries.

JSX is still a dependency with different variants which can cause issues. For example, SolidJS uses JSX but a different variant of JSX, which is a bit more slimmer (innerHTML instead of dangerouslySetInnerHTML).

I experimented with VanJS integrating into Astro. No plugin was needed & getting the SSR HTML is as simple as calling `.render()`.

I wrote a fork of VanJS called relementjs & took this concept further, using `.toString()` instead of render. Now SSR components can be rendered inside a template string.

` <div>${my_component()}</div> `

Build simplicity. It's nice to work with functions all the way down. VanJS could add JSX on top of it though.

It's government censorship when the government is involved with funding the companies doing the censoring or when the FBI "nudges" companies to suppress stories. Having spooks in executive positions doesn't help the optics either. If anything, a bunch of companies acting in lock step to suppress certain stories or opinions should face anti-trust scrutiny...assuming we have a functioning justice system. The government outsourcing censorship to private corporations is government censorship...

Maybe we are better off with less obsession with tech platforms

> if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.

It's not as Twitter was a common space for everyone before Musk took over. I do like X Spaces. Great conversations with different point of views. Far superior format to cable tv talk shows. It seems like X is pivoting it's model away from advertisers. Given the out of touch "corporate friendly" message brought to you by ... it's refreshing to hear more realistic conversations. Not perfect, but they are up against Cable news & some of the corporate sponsored YouTube channels...which seem so...fake.

> But instead I hate my job working in Typescript all day solving problems that I wouldn't have to if I could just use Elixir.

Before I focused on iso js, I worked with EventMachine & even a little bit of Erlang. Would love to hear more about an alternate timeline if I stuck with Ruby & went down the Elixir route.

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I used to work with Ruby & switched to js before TS to build isomorphic libraries & apps. TS has been beneficial imo though figuring out type inference for library code is a steep & time consuming learning curve & takes experience to figure out the edge cases. In the end though, having type inference work in library code is worthwhile for quickly developing apps. Re: expressiveness, the js/ts ecosystem suffers from mostly using camelCase, which has variable casing depending on the position of the name segment...which makes project wide searches for composed abstractions less reliable. I distilled the "tag vector" name convention to address this issue. Granted, Ruby having `?` & `!` available is as a terse & explicit expression of intent is nice.

> almost no one is building on Rails anymore compared to how many people build on React, and NextJS.

I got burnt out on Rails after the 3rd consecutive upgrade project for large codebases. I think the dominance of React has been detrimental to the js ecosystem as its bloated with the api being complex & unintuitive. It also took the JS framework guys a decade to figure out the MPAs are the way to go. I hoped people would have figured that out sooner. I got tired of the complexity & size of the reactive state management & ui libraries & recently wrote my own (rmemo & relementjs). I working on a vite alternative called rebuildjs with an Elysia/bun based app library called relysjs.

I loved how many Ruby community (other than Rails) had a commitment to create simple libraries. It seems like js framework communities have this drive to lock developers into their complex manifestations.

Sorry about the long comment. I have to get back to a major version update to ctx-core (general purpose contexts & utility functions) addressing type inference...which will make developing apps with these libraries more reliable & effective.

https://www.briantakita.me/posts/tag-vector-1-tag-vector-con...

https://github.com/ctx-core/rmemo

https://github.com/relementjs/relementjs

https://github.com/rebuildjs/rebuildjs

https://github.com/relysjs/relysjs

https://github.com/ctx-core/ctx-core

> On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific case, X is more likely than Y.

I'll take this a bit further. X is more likely than Y so Y is not going to happen & we should not consider Y.

There's a book, recommended by Bill Gates no less, "How to lie with statistics".

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

> Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.

I'll claim that statistics & even extracting quanta from qualia is going to have data loss from the sampling. So forecasting from statistics requires context on what is being forecasted.

Wow...Voices fit for print. At least they got to express themselves.

> reflective rather than reflexive responses

I understand where you are coming from. In my experience, the reflective response is often a steel manning of one's own position. This often involves framing, as in using phrases that are agreeable in another context into the author's position. The error I see is both sides of the argument constraining the scope of their discourse to only use information that supports their position. Lies by omission & more often than not, lying to oneself first.

In my experience, having tools to expand the contextual scope is vital, if not the definition, to supporting intellectual curiosity. That's where we seem to disagree on flagging & even downvoting. I think being able to somehow deconstruct comments to extract the insightful (& indicative) as signal over the noise in the comment would also be useful. It's open ended on how that would be done but it's worth exploring IMO.

I think tools that improve expression, understanding, & evaluation of context are critical to improving cohesion across humanity. I am busy writing open source libraries with the intent of creating apps to support contextual expression & understanding. I hope others create & collaborate in building these sorts of tools (tech, social, spiritual, etc) because it may be one of the most important advances for healing our many divides.

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> That's where we seem to disagree on flagging & even downvoting.

I think the author's intent of expression is often not heard with the same context. So the meaning of what was spoken & what was heard is different. Often one applies their judgements to what was heard while not grasping the context of what was spoken.

Have you done any analysis on who downvotes/flags, on what they downvote/flag, & how often?

> Arrow keys are the bane of keyboard life. You constantly have to lift your hands off the touch-typing home keys to move around your software file

Or you can purchase a programmable keyboard with customizable chords such as an Ergodox keyboard.

> That is also ahistorical.

I don't see how. The downstream evolution may have been the growth of bureaucracy, but was the impulse for the revolution caused by a desire to grow bureaucracy? I'm sure it has something to do with the over-production of elites who wanted a piece of the pie...but many of the "common folk" also went along. I doubt their intention was to have more bureaucrats. The sentiment was expressed as liberté, égalité, fraternité,. So, I think my point still stands. Also, the OP broadens the scope of bureaucracy, so I think he would also include the aristocrats & clergy in the ranks of the bureaucracy...in addition to the civil employees.

> which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of

I think this supports my point. When there is an influx of wealth, through honest or ill-gotten means (such as looting the Church...another bureaucracy), there is little scrutiny for having a large bureaucracy. When the ruling order is facing stress, then a bureaucracy is held under more scrutiny. The Chinese have a term, "the mandate of heaven", which is used to judge the ruling order. The moral is if the peoples' quality of life diminishes, the ruling order will lose it's legs to stand on.

Let's be honest here, the bureaucracy enforces the rules of the ruling order/ruler. The bureaucracy can take a life of it's own & can even become the ruling order. This happen with the court eunics in the late Han dynasty. Either way, the bureaucracy is a representation of the ruling order. When the ruling order loses the mandate of heaven, then the representations of the ruling order will face more scorn.

Btw, the eunics were scorned long before the dynasty collapsed...they just had enough power to punish the critics. Granted, there are many more complexities than having a monolithic bureaucratic bloc. There are different actors with different motivations. The eunics where a subset of the court bureaucracy who gained power through internal conflict. My criticism of the OP is that the author treats the bureaucracy as a single entity. It may be in effect to outsiders, but inside, many actors & factions compete for control...and I think bureaucratic innovation occurs.

> I think the bits of truth in this article are like that.

It's fascinating that the article inspired some people to flag it.

> It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.

I do not interpret the OP arguing for the abolishment of the bureaucratic class & regulations. I think such talk is akin to art or architecture...people see beauty in things that they desire to move toward & an aversion against what they want to move away from...so the "art" or discussion skews toward a painting of a world free(r) from bureaucratic rules.

To your earlier point about taking ideas/philosophies too far...the article seems to imply that bureaucratic class is pushing for TOTAL bureaucratic control over the lives of everyone. That they want to take as much money & agency from everyone else...and I agree. Despite the work of innovators around the world, why are things so messed up? Why are there so many poor people? Why are resource rich countries full of starving people? Why are the profits of the commodities sold by these resource rich countries not distributed into the hands of the people?

That being said, there are many rules in the building codes, zoning, epa regulations that overtly or covertly diminish the quality of life of people. Some jurisdictions allow one to buy some cheap land, live in camper while building an alternative structure on it to save money...and many don't. It is also difficult to find small plots of land not run by an HOA which have their own building codes, such as a minimum square footage/footprint & style of the house. These sort of laws do nothing to improve the quality of life of people. They do cause housing to be more unaffordable & buffer the rentier class.

The EPA & some state environmental agencies enforce rules, in ways that are often counter-productive to restoring environments. Oregon has put people in jail for building a pond, which is used to capture water in a permaculture setting (slow, sink, spread). Florida has until recently banned home gardens for many people. The fires in Lahaina was made worse by poor water & land management. Upstream water rights are sold as long-term contracts to large corporations. Lahaina once had canals & the land was full of native agriculture & water management...not anymore.

Nobody is arguing to remove all regulation, but the over-regulation, taxation, & a cultural mandarin class imposes their vision on the rest us. They work for & facilitate the transfer of wealth from the have nots to the haves. Over regulation stifles innovation & promotes the interests of bureaucrats & their funders who grow wealthy even when they are a net loss to the rest of society (which they often are). People in many other countries are given the freedom to build & live in ways not allowed in the US...and find success & happiness with their effort. Why are we so restricted here in ways that have nothing to do with safety or the environment? The language used to justify actions & rules may sound plausible, but it's the implementation & the effects that really matter.

It's interesting to see the negative reactions to this post, which makes me think there is some uncomfortable truth being expressed that hits close to home. I won't be surprised if some buecratically inclined take this to heart & foster buercratic innovation. That being said, I resonate with the post. I have no interest in being a manager nor do i wish to be managed...but am interested in mastery of craft. I noticed there is much complexity lock-in in the tech ecosystem offerings & strive to strip away these complexities to uncover at the heart of the functionality. Tech solopreneurs & small teams still have a profound impact on the ecosystem & are empowered to bring innovation as a tide that rises all boats...to distill the essential functionality & focus on the essential complexity (within my control) to improve our conditions. There's all sort of different people & we have the ability to practice what we love & bring value to others.

Edit

I'm sure Lachlan will find it amusing that this post was flagged on HN. It does help to have a thick skin in light of critique...especially in the game of innovation. It is difficult to respect someone in a leadership position who cannot handle a critique...just sayin

The phenomenon you describe is not constrained to the 60s. It happens during a collapse of the imperial order...usually when "the common folk" no longer experience the benefits of maintaining an imperial buercracy. When the military rebels against the court Eunichs in late Han China...with the French Revolution & the disparity written by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables almost a century later. When Charles Dickens describes the conditions of the poor. When many Hebrews rebelled against Roman authority.

Your work is about making companies more successful in this system & I'm sure you are quite effective at your job. However, many are left out with their wealth & agency transferred to these organizations.

The innovator creates a tide that rises all boats. That improves the quality of life for society at large. The bureaucrat administers the existing order. Order is a service that saves many lives but can become very expensive to maintain...eventually costing more than it's benefits, or the cost/benefits of an alternate system. Some systems are more effective than others in maintaining an empire or civilization. The feedback of growing antagonistim toward counterproductive beucracies should be an indicator or the health of an empire or society. Sometimes it's better to cut the Gordian knot of complexity & let the innovators reform the system, through buecratic innovations, tech innovations, & social innovations.

> Russia's trying to take over a country in imperial conquest, by their own words, > They're, right now, trying to expand their own territory by taking over other countries.

Citation please. Neocon/neolib accusations dont count...original sources only. From what it looks like, Russia is protecting Russian speaking people from a group of Nazis which performed a coup against a democraticly elected government in 2014. This cohort which the US arms violently oppressed these Russian speaking people over the last decade. It's not like the Ukranian people are benefiting from the conflict either. There have been opportunities for a peace treaty but were rejected at the behest of western interests.

I would rather there be a peace treaty, but as this war drags on, the terms will become tougher & more wealth will flow from the US people to the billionaire managerial class...and more lives will be lost. Classic imperial indifference to the people...

> and you call America not the imperialist?

I was born & raised in Hawaii. The kingdom of Hawaii from was illegally stolen from the soverign Kingdom of Hawaii led by Queen Liliuokalani in a coup backed by US business interests & enforced by the US Marines. The US military has bases & have defiled sacred land with bombings & pollution. The native Americans, South American countries, African countries, Middle Eastern countries, European countries, & Asian countries have felt the wrath of US imperialism. Yes, the US has practiced imperialism for over a century.

> The "global south" is not trying to buddy up with Russia

Many in the global south see Russia as a liberator from the dominant & abusive hegemon that pax Americana has become. Theres no permanent alliances, only permanent interests. So if you want America & western nations to have more influence than Russia or China, start acting in ways that benefit these other countries & their people. Coercision will only get you so far. If there are better alternatives to coercision, the better alternatives will be taken. Your cohort can't even bring happiness to the people in America. The thing we dont need is looking abroad for monsters to slay.

> The people who state this after the stuff you stated, aren't actually who they say they are.

Ok buddy. You sound like you drank some funky imperial kool aid. My name is in my handle. You can look me up if you want. We can do much better than what is happening right now. You implying I'm not who I say I am is you denying the fact that people don't agree with the insanity that you peddle & will exercise their free speech to say so. I have heard the same tired imperialist, racist, divisive arguments that come from your camp & it just does not make any sense other than to support world domination for the billionaire managerial class. No thank you. Hard pass. The blood, sweat, tears, & innovations of our ancestors are squandered by the ruthlessness, arrogance, corruption, & incompetence of the self-serving "leadership" of the billionaire managerial class.

Your cohort would be better to focus on making the lives of the people in America & the world better through peaceful means...promoting the freedom, liberty, & prosperity of all. The propaganda & doubling down on lies is not working anymore. Censorship or tech will not change what has already been seen. The genie is already out of the bottle. Your cohort is better of repenting for multitude of sins because the mark has been missed.

I enjoy using Firefox as my primary browser...but it's animation performance significantly lags Chrome

Palmer Luckey has a VTOL kamakaze drone startup. The video demos look impressive but it remains to be seen how effective they are in the field.

That being said, I'd rather we focus on peaceful endeavors that improve our quality of life, instead of on destroying things. That's a billionaire managerial class game, IMO. Make people dependent on the system so pleasing the managerial class becomes more important to survival. If history isba guide, this system will only last as long as the imperial order remains intact. There are many long term domestic & geopolitical pressures on the imperium & I would not be surprised if it collapses within my lifetime.

> Whenever you see library functions, bottom-up design is happening.

I'm glad he acknowledged that library functions is the majority implementation of "bottom up design". In that case extracting primitive api functions & layers composed of these functions is effective at reusing logic & creating appropriate levels of abstraction.

That being said, many frameworks do not offer these layers of abstraction so create a sort of "complexity lock in"...where one has to use the entire framework in order to use a few useful parts of the framework. I find this complexity lock in to be unfortunate as it not only couples the programmer to the entire framework, even if the majority of the framework is not useful. It also creates noise in the conversation, making it more difficult to search for the appropriate solutions at the appropriate level of abstraction.

There is a cost to integrating other libraries into the framework.

Frameworks also tend to become an institution in search of increasing market share. This means there are changes done to the framework. Some of these changes are breaking changes that don't necessarily improve the core development experience in meaningful ways.

Better than transferring what remaining wealth I have to the billionaire managerial class who spews out untruthful propaganda that makes my life worse. They also happen to demonize Russians.

Look, the Russians are humans just like us. They have their interests just like we do. The Russians have given the West many warnings to not spread Nato, to not arm Nazi extremists in Ukraine, & to not persecute the Russian speaking Ukrainians. However, the West backed the Maidan Coup to topple the Ukranian democracy in 2014, armed Nazi extremists who carried out atrocities against civilians, & kept on spreading Nato in spite of Russia's soverign interests.

Are you truly surprised that Putin acted how he did? Are you also surprised that a bear attacks after you poke at it? Let's be real here...If you really care about the Ukranian people, you would support peace...because the Ukranians have pregnant women, old men, & teenagers forced into service fighting on the front lines at this point. Their entire county has been decimated.

Is this why Niger kicked out imperialist France & many people in Africa are carrying pictures of Putin as a liberator? My question to you is, if you think Russia has imperial ambitions, why is the West making it attractive to the global south to turn to Russia...by acting like imperialists?

It's all well & good to make someone else the boogie man. However, if you act like the boogie man, don't be surprised if you get called out...even if you double down on your claim that someone else is the boogie man.

I live in America so my interests are intertwined with America's long-term success. I don't benefit from delusions of grandeur practiced by an increasingly greedy, ruthless, & incompetent managerial class in the West. I don't care who you call the boogie man...you cannot escape responsibility for your actions.

That's emotionlessness...not happiness. Can't wait for the next lecture from "the adults in the room" on the the virtues of colonialism & why the current war on a way of life is necessary for Democracy. Meanwhile I'm wondering how the military or the jet setting managerial class is never held responsible for its CO2 emissions...or how CO2 doomsday cult members do not seem to notice that their international CO2 summits do nothing to affect the atmospheric CO2 levels.

I'm tired of this dream of idiocracy...wake me up already

Wake me up if this mean we are off the hook for the wealth transfer to the jet setting war mongering billionaire managerial class in exorbitant taxes for a lower quality of life...with a surveillance state as a bonus..."to save the planet". I'm not happy about owning nothing...

Before act 3, there was act 1 & act 2. These conflicts were at least decades in the making, if not over a century. Best option is to seek peace & seriously understand & respect the terms of the "enemy". Better than perpetual conflict that only seems to benefit the Billionaire class. Trade > war

The war of attrition involves bleeding out the empire with cost differentials. The MIC needs to provide more value for its weapons or the imperial outposts will become cost & geopolitically prohibitive.

The US has lost much stature among the global south. As the so called "adversaries" understand how to effectively drain imperial status & resources. The exceptionalism position does not help in light of regularly bombing civilians & making the world a more dangerous place by flooding weapons into conflicts.

And the quality of life of the people in the US & Europe is falling...fast.

Europe has more stringent food safety requirements than the US...so yes, at least some of the laws are in place for safety reasons.

And who says protecting domestic food sovereignty is a bad thing?

My family is 3 generations of living in plantation housing...on stolen land in Hawaii. A big part of how colonialism works is controlling "the essentials". Food production, water, land rights, information, martial force, etc

It seems like the claim is there is some large consumer demand for these foodish items. If there is, then we can expect a huge black market for these foodish products to emerge in Italy. Policía de Italia better get ready for the deluge...Expect Mama Mia to throw away her heirloom cookbooks for the new meatish craze that's about to sweep through Italy.

The soylent Don will be the most powerful man in the country I tell you...Actually, that could be the real reason behind the ban on the foodish the Italians so desperately crave. Soylent Don wants to corner the market? Your multi-national corporations better make Soylent Don an offer he can't refuse before this gets out of hand...

The law also limits the freedom of corporations to dump experimental foodish products onto the market. What a travesty

> The unintended consequence of the new law is to ensure that Italy 100% misses out on the many promising social, economic, and environmental benefits of a transition to synthetic and plant-based food. The new law strikes me as very shortsighted. I hope Italy eventually comes to its senses and repeals it.

They seem to be avoiding the "unintended consequences" of consuming synthetic food. Perhaps they are thinking on the timeline of lifetimes & generations?