dahwolf

I guess I deserved that. I will agree that iPhones are incredible and that we're a spoiled bunch. But still from a iteration point of view, this one was historically underwhelming.

Which might indeed mean some longer running projects weren't ready yet and the next edition is better. I think generative AI is coming.

I guess what I'm looking for is purpose and meaning.

"Titanium is harder" Well, so what? I don't use my phone as a hammer.

"We made up a name for a core and added more of them" Yes? And what does that do? Will this enable new software? Or just run it slightly faster? And whilst that is a good thing, if everything is near-instant already, what does that bring?

Let me guess...fast charging?

Don't do it. Ruins batteries.

Same, I'm a middle-of-the-road user. I piggy back on the better hardware once every 3-4 years but haven't noticed a meaningful difference in my total experience since the iPhone 6s. Almost every new iOS feature is also entirely lost on me. I recently even needed to Google how to fully shutdown my phone. If there's any growing value, it would be in apps. There's an app for everything.

Nothing wrong with any of this. Most products in my home are no longer exciting.

Picturing a real-world situation here in my recent past...

We start with the pinnacle of engineering, a SPA, could be built in React, Vue, whichever.

It loads, which on slower smartphones takes a long time as they suck in running JS. When it's booted, there's nothing there. It has to reach out for data.

And so it does, to the microservice. Which might start doing something in 20ms or 200ms, it's all very intermittent due to excessive virtualization. It can't just go and return the data, no...it has to take the authentication token that was passed in and authenticate it with yet another service, which is vendor managed and even slower. Then there's rate limiting, logging, all types of overhead. Eventually, it returns 3 product rows.

Sadly though, for each of the product items we have to make an individual call to get related data, part of it coming from yet another microservice. All of these calls having their own startup time, authentication and overhead.

So for what one might call a classic "join", we're into multi-second territory. Which is fatal territory. Not to mention the shit state of data, as it's all no-sql garbage. Mind you, this is about 1/10th of what users are supposed to see on the initial dashboard.

We're talking one tiny part of a small- to midsized "app". It all costs a fortune and it produces garbage that users hate.

Old dinosaur me used to code up a CRUD app like this by the dozens. Using LAMP, .NET, whichever. Performance would be near-instant, I wouldn't allow any query response time to go over 10ms.

Every part of our stack is "best-practise" and enterprise-grade. And it just doesn't fucking work. It's 10 times more expensive and 100 times slower whilst the very idea of such an app is that it's supposed to be more interactive/responsive compared to the traditional stacks.

Luckily though, these services are multi-client. Except they're not, because then the mobile app team needs different data, and it's all just bolted on to the "generic" service. Services teams independence is a problem, not a solution. Plan a UI feature and good luck getting it orchestrated across teams each having their own roadmap.

And let's end with comedy gold where Lamda developers now need to calculate the running costs of their logic line by line. Whoops, slightly inefficient loop, that'll be 30$ extra per month on the bill. Now "scale" that problem to dozens of such developers building hundreds of services.

What a joke we've become. Distributed computing is an error, not an architecture. The point of computing is to put compute and data as closely together as possible. As the brightest minds on the planet deliver in stunning hardware advances which us software developers piss away.

But hey, the God of Complexity pays well and those footing the bill have no idea what we're doing but it does sound impressive.

Exactly. Software developers will never learn that the separation of concerns is a myth. In reality, UI, business logic and data are deeply entangled. Hence, moving these things apart makes everything worse.

"Splitting a system into subsystems allows each team to focus on their piece of the puzzle while minimizing the amount of peer-to-peer coordination."

The coordination is still there because a microservice team does not live in a vacuum. They build services based on demand from other teams that typically build web apps, mobile apps, sometimes server-to-server.

Hence, the "independent" team now becomes a roadblock for higher order features.

A large part as in 1 minute?

That currently seems to be the case, but it's a puzzling strategy.

It's a digital company that is trying to increase revenue with services instead of just hardware.

How can you ignore gaming whilst offering your own streaming service? The gaming market is many multiples in size of all of Hollywood.

The entire announcement is an exercise in masking that they're running out of ideas.

Excessive lectures on environmental footprint. Lots of cultural/humanitarian story telling, a pile of non-relatable tech info where they only briefly showed the embarrassing "up to 10% faster", dull/static presenters with their fake excitement.

Even the Pro model, typically the only model where they might add some actual features of any significance just to seduce you to pay more, is now nothing more than an "extra bling" model.

No fresh new demos of 3rd party developers either. All of this shows the maturity and advanced state of the platform.

Here's an idea that would actually impress all of us regarding environmentalism: user-replaceable batteries. As simple as it was 15 years ago. And no, I'm not interested in tech apologies about glue or there not being space. There's space. It's purely a matter of will.

Well, not anymore. You can now take a wide landscape shot of some beautiful scenery, and then go home and sit on a couch all by yourself to look at it with a VisionPro. Allegedly, it's impressive, almost like you were there ;)

I was just objecting to the idea that being against discrimination seems like a no-brainer. It isn't because the status quo widely allows it, if only it's the correct type.

If I have to believe several recent articles, there's an interesting gender imbalance as well. Whereas young women are making spectacular gains in higher education (in numbers, scores, degrees), young men are not going to college at all, do go but drop out or they under-perform in comparison.

If you brush aside male-dominated studies like tech, the new baseline is 60-40 female/male. Not even that because some are already affirming men, without the correction it could easily be 70-30 and there's a case known of 80-20.

In part this is due to old reasons (men going into trades) but also for new reasons (men preferring to benefit of a decent economy) as well as some men just staying home and playing video games.

This growing female dominance has a lot of interesting side effects, many not particularly positive. Life on campus is different as it comes to dating/romance/sex. The men tend to not commit to anything as they are in a luxury position. Whilst surely a good time for the men, this destroys any hope of genuine intimacy and scars women for the rest of their lives into thinking that all men are trash.

To men, female dominance is bad in the sense that there's a lack of male role models. They possibly had none at home, then again none in early education (90% female teachers and growing), and then very few in higher education.

Recent cultural orthodoxy (excessive safetyism, "woke-ism", mob justice) is also a somewhat feminine invention that is unappealing to (some) men. Which leads to an ever-growing political gap between men and women.

I'm honestly shocked at how high property tax in the US is.

I'm from the Netherlands, where property tax is based on the municipality. A 400K home where I live amounts to 423€ in yearly property tax. Rate increases over time are capped. And there's many ways to protest against the market value the taxation is based on.

I suppose the basis for this relatively low taxation is that a huge amount of home owners here have a relatively valuable home (even the simplest of homes is expensive) whilst having a fairly moderate to low income.

If property tax would be 10x as your example suggests, I'd suspect 75% would go bankrupt.

I'm sure you mean that in a financial way, but let's not forget about the social aspect.

I'm currently in a phase where the boomers in our family are moving into permanent elderly care, as well as a few that have passed on already. What is striking is their rich support system. Most have several siblings, partners of those siblings, their own children, partners of those children, grandchildren. So there's a relatively large amount of people able to contribute to the care, even if just by doing the occasional visit. If each does a little, that's still plenty for a humane type of care. A lot of this care is done by the women in the family whom in the post-boomer generation still often had the traditional role.

The social care will be dramatically different in the future. Most people have few siblings if any. Few children if any, whom may be less capable to help out as they're busy staying afloat. And most women aren't housewives anymore either.

In other words: you are mostly on your own compared to the current retirees.

Importantly, we should not use this to bash the elderly. Rather we should strive for a world where working two incomes until you're 70 is curtailed. We're over-asking people.

I'll raise that number to 10 million.

Meaning, there's a decent chance to make it, but I wouldn't trust it. We're talking about crossing 30-35 years, in an exponentially changing world that is exceptionally volatile.

There will be multiple financial crashes. A swift change in government. A currency change. Hyper inflation. Almost anything is on the table in that time span.

This is simply the American take on dishwashers. It should be done in 5 minutes, make no noise, be enormous in size, and I'll load it up with 2 items multiple times per day. Energy use be damned.

Musk has never stated to run X/Twitter using absolute free speech.

Which makes total sense because you can't run a social network using this principle.

And yet so-called "reverse discrimination" is widespread, normalized and even celebrated. Hate towards all men, all white people, specifically white men, straight people, "cis" people, old people, neuro-typical people, able-bodied people.

The progressive narrative is that this type of discrimination doesn't count because these people are magically privileged and powerful. Letting this go completely unchecked is what is fueling a new rise in "traditional" types of discrimination. It's hate fueling more hate.

If you believe in the rights of individuals, it should be based on first principles. All individuals, not just the ones you happen to like.

No matter where you stand, I think it's good that this is happening. The CA law might be overreaching whilst Twitter might be too lax. Hopefully a head-to-head brings clarity on an important topic.

With the CA law, EU regulation, app store policies and the like, a pretty powerful net is cast around the topic of speech. Specifically about speech that is technically legal yet considered unwelcome.

It's tempting to let judgement be clouded by a hate for Musk, but it's a topic worthy to think about more deeply beyond just X.

It's also revealing how this legislation only targets Big Tech. From a pragmatic point of view, this makes total sense. But it also shows that this legislation isn't based on first principles. It's a panicky patch on an open wound, not the definitive say on free speech.

Having your savings in Bitcoin is a bad idea, especially for people that don't have much wealth the begin with.

It's strange though that the remittance scenario is so little used. The idea was that dollar remittances have high fees and that this would bypass it:

USD -> BTC -> send -> BTC -> USD.

When done quickly neither the sender nor receiver suffer much from volatility. There must be some reason why this scenario does not work or is not attractive?

Not just VB, but also things like Borland Delphi.

25 years ago, you could visually compose a UI using standardized components, including advanced concepts like a layout manager. You could do data-binding visually by navigating a linked database. You can write logic/events just by double-clicking a button and the event is created. Here you'd write your code which would typically be pretty easy because all contextual objects are readily available.

Sure enough, I understand that the above development model also has its limitations and doesn't serve all common modern needs. But still, it's pretty pathetic what we ended up with. Our tool chains are much more complicated and we program at a lower abstraction level whilst requiring a laundry list of skills.

"Consider the future generations, increasingly isolated and reliant on virtual interactions, and it's hard to imagine how they could resist such a prospect."

What future generations :)

Just be handsome and rich.

It actually is when it comes to the decision of watching a movie.

Thanks for a reasonable discussion.

Whilst hobbyists can still use whatever they want, including simple options, I in particular empathize with those new to the field or looking to turn a hobby into a job.

You need to know React/Typescript/CLIs/Docker/Git/Unit testing/IDEs/CSS/5 million other things. Or there's simply not going to be a job for you at all.

So "just don't use it" doesn't apply.

On the upside, once you do master the unwarranted complexity, pay is great. Fiddling around with toys and a Frankenstein tech stack whilst continuing to produce outcomes with worse UX than 15 years ago is somehow richly rewarded. It paid for my quality of life so let's add some more "absolutely essential" tools.

It seems most -isms inevitably leads to the superficially similar situation of a tiny elite either having total power or owning (almost) all resources, and thus power. Most would still prefer capitalism as at least it offers more personal freedoms and a chance of upward mobility.

I think the recent rise of anti-capitalism gets it wrong. Capitalism within the context of a nation can be made to work in a way that whilst imperfect has a reasonable balance.

It is specifically global capitalism (globalization) that is the problem. It allows for corporate super structures where workers nor governments have any leverage. Worker's rights cannot be defended so it's a race to the bottom. De-industrialization has hollowed out the middle class. Corporations pay little to no taxes. The triangle of government, business and worker that would ordinarily come to some kind of workable balance is gone. It's a never-ending stretch in one direction only: business.

Similarly, global capitalism allows corporations to hide all their dirty externalities. Dumping toxic trash in other countries, sweatshops, wrecking the environment, you just place that shit out of sight.

You would have considerable more outrage if a company would do that in their home country, close to their customer base.

I'll end with the uncomfortable truth that the above has led to the stagnation of the West and various global problems. At the same time it has significantly uplifted the general wealth of many developing nations.

I was looking at the bigger picture, and didn't clarify that point enough.

What I mean to say is that web development was more accessible during simpler times. People from all walks of life would develop websites, flash stuff, and even dynamic sites, i.e. LAMP. They could do that because it was simple enough to learn.

Front-end development as we typically do it today has turned into a hardcore engineering discipline of staggering complexity.

It is in fact so engineering-heavy that even within the world of professional front-end development it has caused a split where there's a "front of the front-end" (CSS, UX, accessibility) and a "back of the front-end" (the engineering part).

You may be able to justify every single tool, command line, pattern or best practice and it's not my point to talk you out of it. My point is to zoom out and consider this larger pattern.

Except that most code actually isn't passing around random unnamed objects of unknown type or contents. Their meaning and type are implied clearly enough in many if not most cases by their name and usage.

Hence, the downside is doing a lot of work to describe things we already know whilst making code less readable (or at least longer).

I'm still largely in favor of Typescript, I'm just suggesting to not misrepresent the situation of not having Typescript.

Typescript is divisive. People are passionate in loving it or hating it, not to forget a silent majority that never even tried it.

Typescript is totalitarian. It consumes you whole. It makes no sense to partially adapt it as its supposed benefits will then never materialize. The deeper you're in, the more motivated you'll get to go even deeper.

This is entirely opposite from writing unit tests. Everybody hates to do that, you'll never have coverage to match real world complexity and it easily breaks under time pressure. The more you try to get it to work, the more you hate it and just want to give up on it. Typescript is different, it has a point of no return.

That being said, we should check our passion. Tech discussions have a high degree of confirmation bias coming from a small very vocal minority. This same minority that would advance React, Tailwind, and similar choices as the one and only industry standard.

It's not representative of the wider developer community, most of which are silent. Nor is it representative of every use case one can build on the web, every project size, team size, etc.

As for DHH, it's an unsurprising move. He craves the simpler times we once knew, where web/front-end development wasn't such a hot mess. I think the general point has merit, as to whether the specific point of Typescript fits into that narrative, is debatable. Personally, I think project size/complexity and team size/skill levels are big factors.

My bold prediction is that reactive frameworks will eventually be considered a mistake, as will its functional programming paradigms.

It's all very computer-sciency and academic but it's simply not intuitive enough when used by a mediocre developer with no strong computer science background. They are leaky abstractions with lots of magic involved that get in your way. There's too many ways to do the same thing and it's way too easy to make a mess of things.