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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Srinivasan, a former partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, who is allegedly based in Singapore, conducted the Q&A through a free Zoom account with a 40-minute time limit — Srinivasan left seconds before the timer hit zero.

    oh that’s fucking embarrassing

    e: wait, people paid to attend this shit and they couldn’t allocate the price of even one ticket to pay for zoom? that’s worse



  • you know, for as much poison’s been poured into my ear about how everything must be Amazon scale, there’s no way in fuck they use react for their storefront or AWS, is there? I think the only reason react is considered an Amazon-scale frontend (besides Facebook, which also has a shitty UI, though not as bad as Amazon, and notoriously uses PHP for everything) is how hard they push it as part of AWS Amplify, a toolchain they say will help you reach their scale (but from experience: it absolutely will not, it’s just a set of technologies that increase your AWS bill and perform like shit, which is why Amazon doesn’t use it for anything of value themselves)

    the only case I can immediately think of of a very major site going from server rendering to react is GitHub (which used to use Ruby on Rails and Erlang, apparently) and it’s been an unmitigated disaster — none of the new features that supposedly require react are good, the performance fucking sucks now, and the thing keeps breaking (I get weird renders with broken styling every few refreshes and apparently I’m not the only one). the fucking thing even hijacks the keyboard shortcuts I use and has become an accessibility nightmare, all in the name of pointlessly turning it into a react SPA and vscode wannabe.


  • I have, in a previous age, unfortunately been the first one to suggest react at work. it’s declarative! the mental model makes sense! it’s kind of like functional programming! why, Facebook is surprisingly good at CS, maybe we should look at graphql too since that seems like such a good fit for react

    this venerable house, opulent and imperial, is a festering abomination. as soon as you run into any performance issues or edge cases with react (or far more quickly with graphql, where the edge cases include shit like authentication and API versioning), you’re going to start burning out developers doing the most counterintuitive bullshit ever invented to torture a development team. and react is structured such that performance issues will accumulate in web apps; it’s just a matter of time (and not even that much time) before they do.

    that’s why the advice now is to dodge performance issues with server-side rendering, almost like your site should have been fucking static html in the first place, except SSR won’t fire up without a gigantic bundle of JavaScript affixed to it, and in general it’s another source of bugs and weird performance regressions that you now have to debug in two places

    and for what? react’s DX is better than HTML and CSS until you hit a wall, then it’s much worse. you can get a fairly react-like set of functionality out of plain HTML with Web Components… except Web Components requires fucking JavaScript for no reason but to not threaten existing frontend frameworks (see our sister community FreeAssembly soon for the gigantic rant and JavaScript library I’m writing about this shitty situation)





  • thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most

    and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?

    but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over


  • facebook used to lie about react being faster than native on first load and navigation, in spite of that being impossible by both lived experience and as measured by benchmarks. supposedly templating is just too heavyweight for servers to handle at the mythical Amazon scale literally nobody reaches except Amazon but every shitty manager needs us to be ready for

    and now that react can do server-side rendering I guess we’re doing templating again, but in node and much less efficient and with extremely unclear semantics around when it switches to client rendering, and also weird bugs when things render differently under SSR

    also it’s still measurably much slower than old school server templating




  • fucking exactly! I’ve been doing a lot of CSS-only work for the sneer archive rewrite, and it’s shocking how fast everything renders without JS, and how much functionality you can retain with a good enough CSS framework and careful markup

    I’m also working on a JavaScript library and associated rant named fuckery because it turns out you can’t use Web Components without some utterly unnecessary JavaScript, because the W3C decided to do a fuckery


  • you’re wrong but that’s so obvious it’s boring

    but that weird bit of anti-furry shit you slipped in here looked significantly more interesting! and hey, what’s this in a thread about republicans doing anti-LGBT+ shit during pride:

    If you house the fascists and bigots, you become a house of fascists and bigots. It doesn’t matter what the individual believes if they continue to give audience to those people. They become indistinguishable from them.

    And when you’re just a normal straight person who gets the willies when gay people hit on you, fuck you right?

    Normal straight dude here. I can’t tell you how crazy often I have gay dudes creeping their way into my life just to eventually say they’re trying to get in my pants.

    bonus post: here’s you in a thread about a nude deepfake made of a 15 year old girl without her consent:

    Eve seen a deep fake nude of someone ugly? People make them because they wanna see you naked. Can’t see how that’s an insult.

    so, ah, there’s that. fuck off now.


  • it’d be very nice to have a progressively enhanced static frontend instead since there’s really nothing about any of this that should require JavaScript (and something like unpoly would give us react SPA style functionality strictly as an enhancement on top of plain HTML)

    this might be a cool project for someone to pick up once work on Philthy gets going; most of the alternative Lemmy frontends still have an unnecessary JS framework dependency, or are lacking features for essentially no reason




  • holy fuck I read the comments

    all the musksucking sub-linkedin reply guys chittering at each other about how this is clearly the kind of breakthrough musk was hoping for when he devised this genius-level challenge. you know, basic lossy audio compression applied by an asshole pretending to be an audio engineer (or maybe this fuckhead is the reason the FLACs I pay for are sometimes just converted from MP3s?)

    e: I got to the post where he supposedly makes a point about ADC and container bit depths. this fucking idiot is almost certainly an audiophile cosplaying, and the only audio engineering he’s done is set his amp on a block of wood



  • I seriously don’t know where these fuckers have been that they’re supposedly excited about implanted BCIs now that musk’s doing a monstrously shitty one, but somehow they managed not to ever read about any of the previous research into this that had the same outcome as neuralink (basic, inaccurate computer mouse control) with the same major caveats (the electrodes become unusable in short order due to scarring and can’t be repaired), except that the neuralink version is unnecessarily risky* cause startups gotta go fast

    [*] and the risk here is that something truly fucking awful will happen to the patient, because it’s the fucking human brain and they’re treating it like a submarine made of secondhand carbon fiber, including the ignored track record of failed lab tests before disaster struck


  • you are downplaying how impossible the requirements were.

    oh absolutely! but only out of a sense of shame for being in a career field where a medical device company posting that horseshit compression challenge didn’t immediately prompt a strong backlash and repercussions for neuralink’s ability to attract and retain talent, in lieu of a functioning regulator maybe possibly shutting them down before they can fucking mutilate someone else with this brainfart of an invention

    I feel bad for anyone who gets that e-waste implanted into their head and ends up with an implant that absolutely cannot do the things it’s marketed to do, barely does ordinary 90s brain implant shit, stops working very quickly (to the apparent surprise of the people in charge) and will most likely cause injury and severe discomfort to the patients saddled with it

    I wish my field had ethics. I’d sleep better if we did.