The commodification of social spaces? If you can’t spend time in places without paying (in the cost of coffee, beer, gym fees, etc ) then that excludes big chunks of people, or they alert ration their social times to some extent
I tend to agree with this, I prefer the way Svelte make the not HTML/JS/CSS bits really stand out but it's definately just a personal preference. I don't really care about the "it's not JS" argument, people are happy to use typescript without that compaint so it feels rather arbitrary.
I've been using React for maybe 6 years now and Javascript for at least 10 years before that. I've started using Svelte in the last 6-12 months in professional capacity having messed around with it ofr 12 months of side projects before that, to me it feels much closer to writing HTML, CSS and JS than React ever did. Animations, transitions and other things that can be really awkward in React, requiring hooks and all sorts of framework specific constructs just work as if writing in plain HTML/CSS/JS. The template type bits feel nicely and explicitly separate unlike JSX's oddities wrt things like "className", I prefer it. Particularly I find a typical svelte component significantly more legible.
Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 by Jeremy Deller is the best documentary I've seen recently. It's a history of dance music in the UK (and it's American roots) presented as a lecture given to secondary school students, part social history part love letter to a music and a time. Full of surprising and interesting footage and observations.
Yeah, this matches my experience moving from React (5+ yrs) to Svelte (2 shipped 3 month projects over the last couple of years at this point). Svelte clearly lacks the massive community support of React but I've found it easier to get by on my understanding of JS and the DOM when I get stuck. I've heard lots of gripeing from other React devs about the $ syntax and a few other things around lack of JSX but that feels like really small change when compared to the flexibility Svelte allows around things like transitions (no more hooks!).
Addiction By Design is one of the very best non fiction books I've read. I highly recomend it to anyone interested in the intersection of tech/ society/ psychology/ capital/ design and a whole bunch of other stuff. It really is fantastic (if occasionally more than a a little bit bleak)
There's a fairly large section in Addiction By Design (the book which the OP is talking about) dealing with the specifics of machine gambling industry in Australia. Highly reccomend it!
Margret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s work on UK road signage in the 1960s was a real turning point in research lead design and still looks great 60 years on the font and layouts were put through their paces and refined in all sorts of extreme conditions 60mph in driving rain etc.
I’m on the other end of the spectrum, play quite a lot of games have never experienced drift. Our switch controllers are a good 5yrs old at this point and seem fine. That said I suspect I’m an outlier, when we took our PS2 to tradein after 10+yrs of use the shop assistant remarked that the controlers looked barely used (definitely not the case), guess I just use controllers gently?
If they're concerned about financially and socially disadvantaged users perhaps the place to start helping those people would be on the universal credit login page which currently delivers 100+ kb of javascript for a couple of form fields.
i imagine because you’re required to be present in some sense for ~8 hours a day 5 days a week. that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, especially if you have caring responsibilities or any other life commitments. once you’re in a depressive state getting out of that hole can be a real struggle
Looking at Meta’s product line at the moment it’s easy to see how people might not be motivated to give their all. Facebook and Instagram are so markedly driven by numbers rather than any kind of product vision, i can imagine it being pretty depressing.
I’ve worked at both the bbc and ft.com and we put quite a bit of effort into accessibility. I think we were pretty successful but others are probably on a better position to judge
I scribble stuff down on whatever scraps of paper are to hand the deal with them as and when our throw them out every couple of weeks out so. My todo list is on the ‘things’ app
Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go
Feels like theres some cherry picking going on. eg whilst “the power rock of the ‘80s is… incredibly cheerful’ the 80s also played host to Joy Division and Suicidal Tendencies neither of whom exude incredible cheer (though the angst is expressed very differently). Similarly the cheerful rock’n’roll of the 1950s might be contrasted with the mournful blues and jazz which spawned it. Or what about the 50s novels of Richard Yates pretty bleak stuff compared with the life affirming tone of best selling contemporary novelists such as John Green and Becky Chambers.
Identifying that subset of the language was paradigm shift in JS development. around 2008 when the good parts came out i don’t know any serious JS developers who didn’t take on board many of its lessons. examples: avoiding ‘this’, understanding the value of functions as first class citizens, understanding closures. these weren’t unique to crockford but by presenting them in an accesible plain spoken way he moved the state of the language forward.
i do agree that there’s a need to weigh the value of new features vs bloat but id say 1 good feature in ten is pretty poor odds.
another example of crockfords pragmatism is JSON which for all its flaws has been a real boon.
thats a strangely abstract way of looking at it. i think of it as a way to capture some of the externalities of car use, the environmental, social and public health damage.
leaving aside the fact that the speed limit is an upper bound on speed not mandatory… on my bike i’m more regularly held up by cars (often a single occupant) than i am by cyclists when driving my car. but overwhelmingly its cars holding up other cars.
my feeling was that Crockford’s ‘…good parts’ was intensely pragmatic. About as far away from the academic approach you’re describing as i can imagine. A bigger, multi paradigm language makes it harder to read other peoples code as the chances are higher that they’re employing a different paradigm or alter a different idiom, a clear maintenance burden.
I'm not sure he did, at least not in terms of serious, academic, literery theory but you can perhaps see how it might be a useful heuristic for an author in terms of thinking about what type of story they want ot write. Vonnegut was always throwing half baked ideas into the public realm just to see where they'd land and that's a large part of his appeal for me (c.f. the stories of Kilgore Trout).
This shapes of stories thing that resurfaces every so often is kind of perfect for internet amplification, it's easy to grasp there's the potential for some nice pictures and Vonnegut is always engaging as a both speaker and a writer. I'd read his essay on the topic in the 90s because I'm a Vonnegut completist but at the time I don't think it was considered anything other than a minor flight of fancy. It's kind of a shame that things like this and DFWs "this is watter" speech which are kind of easily graspable tend ot eclipse the more interesting stuff. Though maybe it's a gateway.
Taxi services in Germany pre-Uber weren't perfect but they weren't the disfunctional rackets you see in the States. Uber "succeded" in Europe by undercutting existing farily decent service providers with subsidised fares. Those subsidise seem to have dissapeared and at least in London Uber is now in my experience no cheaper and significantly less reliable that the older firms which have survived.