conartist6

I know my history just fine. What I'm saying is: you can't say that it means that JS is a bad language to write tools in. That's would be like saying "our design had bad perf and it was implemented as JS, therefore no design implemented in JS can have good perf". I hope we agree this would be a faulty deduction, or at least an unfounded one.

So for context my beef with them is that they didn't try. I think you're being very "hand wavey" about why JS isn't a good host language, just as they were.

If the argument is that it's not fast enough, JS is actually quite fast: https://mrale.ph/blog/2018-02-03-maybe-you-dont-need-rust-to...

If the argument is "we need to show a 10x boost in raw throughput" then I think we first need to have an argument about why throughput is the right metric as a target for optimization. Throughput is the critical performance measure of a batch processing architecture. IDE's, like web UIs, "feel fast" when they're responsive, which is to say when they can start giving the user access to useful output (and interaction) at the soonest moment the program could possibly be ready to do so. In web perf we might measure this as INP: time from Interaction to Next Paint.

JS won't be winning prizes for throughput, no, but if we completed the move away from a batch processing mindset to an incremental recomputation mindset, and at the same time switched to measuring responsiveness metrics like INP, suddenly the perf characteristics of JS seem a lot more helpful. It's the closest language to the DOM, so when your IDE's interface is built on web technology you'll optimize INP by keeping the data layer in JS: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

There's an even stronger reason than the DOM though to see JS as the "native" layer for perf: plugins. An IDE's selling point is integration, and users want to extend their IDEs by writing Javascript code. Like it or not, JS is the most natural and highly-performant native kernel language for a system of JS plugins.

Maybe not. I misread the structure. Look for "required reading" and you'll find the two sentences.

You seem sure like them that JS is not good. They didn't even bother to consider it as a choice!

If you wanted to point to their evidence you couldn't because they don't have any.

Was it ever a reasonable choice? At the time the choice was made the tooling ecosystem was already split between Rust and JS, and by putting TS in Go they chose to split it three ways. Why not split it 4 or 5 ways then? The pressure will always be towards less duplicated work.

The only real choice of language to build the next generation of JS tools in is JS. Anything else is a vote of no confidence in ourselves.

As for how to do better ads, I imagine the best kind of ads would be those where you have a pre-existing relationships with providers of services: photo printing or cloud storage or whatever. When you send them customers who buy things, you get paid. You can then make the ads feel well-integrated into the product, like they're there to help the user. Fewer people should then be willing to go to the trouble of tearing them out. As a bonus if the promotions are built directly into the product, ad blockers won't block them either!

Also get ye some trademarks. Make sure your logo and branding colors are trademarked in combination with the name Photopea. Use the logo and branding colors more places.

It won't stop AI thieves cold, but now they'll be in violation of two kinds of law unless they do a bunch more work to rip out all the trademarked branding.

Finally, move beyond ads as your business model.

An ad blocker removes the ads from your website, and still leaves you paying to host the traffic. In a way it's worse for you than what unauthorized mirrors are doing. You're seeing that there's unmet demand for what you are offering, so my advice is: figure out how to capture that demand. Why aren't those people taking the deals you're offering them?

I took the liberty of disabling my own ad blocker to do a little research and HOLY COW THESE ARE BAD ADS.

Let's lay out the problems:

- Something is horribly mangled in the ad loading code. The ads flash in and out of existence, and cycle through at breakneck speed, ~5 seconds per ad. Between the flashing in and out and the flashing different ads, it is not possible to do serious work with this going on.

- Many of the people who don't have a photo editor on their device are using touchscreen devices. Many of those people are right handed. For them the actual photo editing tools would be largely impossible to use without accidentally clicking a giant ad which takes up the whole right side of the screen, at which point they would no longer be able to edit photos. Once this happens to you 5 times or so I imagine you start to get very angry.

- Because the ad doesn't fit into the UI at all, you're wasting huge amounts of the screen and impacting productivity proportionately.

So I guess my final advice is: if you don't respect your users, I don't know why you would expect them to respect you. Offer a better deal and more people will take it.

...and humanity is still here. It seems pretty resiliant.

Yes people have broken down the norms, but AI isn't eclipsing anything. AI itself is a human achievement. By my count AI contributions to society are still 0.00000001% of human contributions to society, and it's not catching up since once of its main effects on humans is to make them antisocial. The reason I'm not freaking out is that it's the AI users who are destroying themselves. The more you buy into the lie of an AI future, the more it is you being sucked dry. I just don't have the energy to save people that don't want to saved, and LLM users and gambling addicts fall in this category for exactly the same reasons

I've made a language called CSTML to do some of this: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml

Basically it's a text-based language for embedding semantic metadata into some kind of underlying text stream. Is this interesting to you?

Should say "thousands of gallons"

It seems to me that the scans are documents.

It doesn't seem outrageous to me though that there exists a category of documents more detailed and sensitive than "administrative" documents.

But their product is my work.

How can that be safe. It is theft. Theft isn't safe. Someone else just has something you want, and you take it

I don't think it's necessarily a privilege to have a childhood with a singular focus. Again, having your whole destiny picked for you leads to a kind of person who often does not lead themselves with any confidence. The trappings of success will be on them before they've ever faced a test from the engineering school of hard knocks. They'll try to lead right away (because they'll be sure they were picked to lead) but the smarter move would be to try following for a while.

I think the test is right: how long can you hold onto a single project so that you specialize more and more deeply? Every startup is an attempt to do exactly this, and most startups still fail.

...and by the way AI isn't any of the 5000!

I think you're right that many more people are in theory capable of joining the group, but not that the industry is conspiring to keep it small. If anything it's the people who have an academic history that stretches back to childhood that end up dependent on having someone to guide and grade them. Beating your own path through the wild is scary, uncertain, and often thankless, so I think you'd only want to do it if you already felt sure you were among the most motivated and dedicated members of a group.

Mmmm I skimmed. Another shitbag hand-wringing about how to remake society for AI...

They're a dime a dozen, and all think they are philosophers.

They never mention the collapse of all knowledge production, funnily. They spread communist propaganda and never even stop to consider that their core message is "what's yours is mine".

I reject the idea that we should remake our society in the image of Soviet society

I think you're basically right about this: if you're going to ask an ecosystem to bear the costs of a breaking change, you should be asking yourself what will be bought for the price you will pay.

For users it's a set of scales that hangs in balance. On one side is the disruptiveness of the change to them, and on the other is the promise of what they will gain once on the other side.

If there's a problem with the current thinking it's that it proposes to trigger a big expensive breakage that we'll be paying for for 10 years, but there hasn't been any serious discussion of what else is broken about git that needs to be fixed to git to continue to be relevant for the next 10 years.

Most discussions are pre-constrained by the idea that ecosystem wide breakages are impossible.

In theory it's good for me if the git ecosystem splits compatibility in half with no obvious benefit. That just makes it easier for me to waltz in with a third backwards-incompatible migration path, one which actually offers eye-popping kinds of benefits in return for the cost of the breakage. That's why I'm competing with you in the race to replace Github. It's just that I'm also racing to replace git, so I assume you'll be in some amount of trouble if I should succeed.

They do apparently. There's information about it in the comment thread on this story on lobste.rs

Can you use OpenStreetMap like Google Maps?

I tried to use it to list restaurants but the UI reacted like nobody had ever tried that before

It's like YouTube. It likes to try to send you down rabbit holes. It thinks maybe there's one type of post you want to engage with, so it will keep feeding you that type of post because it is running a big ol classifier with computer vision as a category

Nice try, but there's a meta-meta-agent that just tries a few things and gets it going while the other agents optimize the prompt.

Or put another way: "You can't fool me, it's turtles all the way down!"

If we're trying to give perspective, may as well leave it to the master: https://xkcd.com/1732/

They are destroying fucking humanity. They are evil.

They have no will but to fill the world with hate and drivel

Disgusting. They bent over 5x backwards not to meddle in election politics for Trump (that is: in the era after they banned him for violating policies)

Right on every count except that it needs to be bad for people

a random number generator is software, so it can be controlled

Yes, all those ways exist. I was more saying that if copying between structures processes using serialization is all you need, the JS ecosystem already has that.

The thing is if you need to do big expensive copies on the input or output it forces you towards a batch processing model, which is the opposite of incremental computation.

I was floored that they emailed me about it for the first time today saying "of course you already know all the details from the blog post".

Me: "No!"

I still think that rewrite was ill-advised. Yes they got a 10x speedup, but now it's unclear whether the JS tooling ecosystem lives in Go or Rust or JS.

Given that we've now got a three way language schism, the story for sharing data between processes isn't really solved. Data can move nicely within Go, but not between Go and Rust or JS. Tools like ts-morph also got left behind with no replacement.

I think that in retrospect the power of the JS ecosystem was all about plugins. It's plugins that make ESLint such a powerful platform that it still can't be replaced.

From the perspective of making a efficient platform for running plugins, JS actually is the most theoretically efficient implementation language! That's why, for example, VSCode put a bunch of work into moving its core state from C++ to JS, a change which brought them big perf wins and helped them beat out Atom: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...