It seems a bit like tragedy of the commons. If we all move towards consuming content this way, who is posting what and where? How is it discovered?
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
Why would those content stop getting made? A lot of hardcore tech YouTubers are university lecturers. Chinese fried rice stalls on TikTok makes living in selling the rice. Japanese anime keeps getting made and aired.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
You assume that if digital communication is lost, people wouldn’t communicate at all? I highly doubt that seeing as our natural instinct is to search for human connection.
I see the concern, because I agree that social media has to some degree already done this, and that we've lost something in that process.
But - there's no reason this couldn't actually be a good thing. I can totally imagine a platform[0] where the focus is less on creation and more on curation. I sub to some person or community who's going to share good links, and I see only that, instead of the slop firehose from The Algorithm.
(and yes, social media was already more like this, in the early days).
[0] and platform implies more than I mean, could just be some nice wrapper around RSS or activitypub or whatever
I appreciate the rose-tinted, high-agency historical take, but I think the factors that led to computer science/programming becoming male-dominated were largely external to and independent of the preferences of women themselves.
This is an earnest question but is that really true for reactivity and state management? Of course with vanilla is all things are technically possible, but I feel like last I checked this wasn’t something well supported without really knowing what you’re doing.
I nowadays build sites (personal websites and projects) that are much more responsive than most things I see online or on a job, just using modern CSS, a little thinking about how I structure my stylesheets, trying to use semantic HTML and not making a div soup. It works pretty well, if used correctly and given the due attention.
What's reactivity in this context? How quickly a website responds? My personal experience is that fast backends with server side rendered HTML and a bit of dynamic sections are in practice MUCH faster than SPAs, 20 years after using Gmail for the first time. Gmail then was fast, 95% of modern SPAs are slow.
"State management" is a fancy way to say "your Javascript stores data in variables in some way, which are updated as and when needed".
"Reactivity" means "when those variables change, some generic code already exists to update the DOM instantly". As opposed to writing specific pieces of code to make those changes directly.
Unfortunately, with React, "updating the DOM automatically" generally means: you update the data; React recreates the entire DOM as a new copy in memory; React runs a diff checker to find out what changed from the real DOM; React makes each individual change in the real DOM. With React (or other virtual-DOM-centered alternatives) being used for the smallest of web projects, so many small sites do all that work when the procedure ought to be as simple as: you update the data; you update the DOM directly.
It comes down to inexperienced devs not being able to consider which tool is best for the job at hand, and just hammering nails into every web project in the same way.
I mean all you have to do is change the framework to a better one. Vue with Vapor mode, Svelte, Solid or Preact. These don't have a VDOM at all or use a super fast minimal one.
Signals are basically as fast as writing event handlers yourself but way less fragile and verbose. React is just shaping everyone's impression of all JS frameworks because it's very popular and very slow.
Reactivity is updating the DOM whenever the underlying data is updated. That's one of the most basic reason for existence of all js frameworks. There's TC39 Signals proposal to bring that natively, but for now as said above the choice is either use a framework or recreate one. It's surprisingly easy nowadays using Proxy.
It’s always been easy to reactively update the DOM. I was doing that in vanilla JS before HTML5 had been formalised.
What the frameworks do is take this concept one step further to create a SPA (single page application) but I honestly think they’re an antipattern that needs to die.
The problems are ownership and provenance mainly, and that all DOM access is slow and requires syncing code internally.
Anyone can write code that tweaks nodes or uses templating, but doing it in a consistent way on a project with hundreds of thousands linea of code is challenging, especially if you also need performance and everyone's least favourite child: accessibility.
Sure you don't get some of this with frameworks, but they help a lot.
Well yeah, obviously frameworks are intended to provide a standard interface for projects that scale. But you’re describing a different problem to the one originally argued.
> Reactivity is updating the DOM whenever the underlying data is updated. That's one of the most basic reason for existence of all js frameworks.
Most web apps and websites do not have that much state variables (even though it may be a lot of data). So while React may offer a small dev speed boost, it’s consumed by the need to build stuff and a whole deploy pipeline to nurse.
Libraries like HTMX and Alpine can take care of most the boilerplate for old style imperative patterns. And backend frameworks like Rails, Phoenix, Laravel donhave their own implementation for data updates.
I click the upvote button and a number goes from 0 to 1. Somewhere else on the page a banner gets displayed saying you have upvotes.
Your javascript can target those 2 divs, ala doc.getElementById(counter).innerHtml and document.createElement.
Like that kind of works for simple stuff. But it gets more complicated fast. Reactivity is when your counter listens for change in the count and updates itself whenever that count changes.
That's why you wouldn't target those 2 divs directly, but have one dedicated place, in which you update the divs and call that place from any other place that needs to update the 2 divs.
Well, that's simplifying the situation, but as those situations become more and more in ones site, at some point one might switch to a mediator pattern, which kind of is very close to signal emit and listening for signals.
No, it's not, despite what other comments here say. Of course it's possible but you end up recreating React or another library along the way. JS is getting native signals sometime in the future but for now pure JS is not sufficient for a full, complex app.
> you end up recreating React or another library along the way
That's always the trotted-out response, most often recited by people who've read someone else saying it but not had the experience to form an opinion for themselves.
You absolutely don't end up recreating a massive, bloated, slow framework that tries to be as generic as possible to try to be everything to everyone. What you end up creating is a relatively tiny, fast, piece of code that is specific to that site's needs. The difference in size, speed and simplicity tends to be absolutely enormous.
Wrong on both counts. I've worked in companies with vanilla JS only and made parts of those frameworks they ended up building. It is absolutely not "relatively tiny, fast, piece of code that is specific to that site's needs" and once we switched to React we actually saw improvements in many parts of the sites' loading speeds. Next you're gonna No True Scotsman me by telling me the company was just bad but I've seen enough examples at other companies to see that using React or a similar framework is simply the right move.
The joke is that those who react have no idea and those who don't have no idea either. I never use react so I'm going to have to go with: Those other companies are also just bad. (joking) If everyone can work with/without it should be fine? As long as you don't try to do both.
For a large ERP-like back-office where leadership didn't want to use an existing reactive framework, I definitely ended up recreating built on top of jQuery ( at the start of the project IE still needed to be supported ).
Once you start adding dynamic forms for managing multiple items of different kinds, dashboards, error states, i18n, etc, you either end up with a homegrown framework, or with a lot of spaghetti.
Hate to tell you this, bit 99% of apps built with React are rebuilding what has already come before. Namely, taking some information from a database and displaying it on a screen, and taking some input from a computer and putting it in a database.
Almost every web application being built today, framework or no framework, is a variation of a theme. We have no issue recreating those ad nauseum, but we draw the line at recreating a framework?
> is that really true for reactivity and state management?
No. Use a framework if you want those things. Everything around reactivity, state management, and components have been badly fumbled by the web platform and the various front-end frameworks are far more ergonomic.
1. The tools available in vanilla have improved a lot recently and 2. LLMs have made niche skills/knowledge more accessible. SPAs still have their place but the average CRUD app is now really well served by vanilla or lightweight libraries like HTMX.
On the other hand, the average CRUD app doesn’t care about the traffic and rendering overhead of a reactivity library such as Vue. Looking at the boilerplate code needed for basic reactivity that your sibling comment linked to in the Mozilla docs… no, thanks. Just eat the 16kb and have some decent ergonomics.
If the rest of you weren’t so stupid, our industry wouldn’t have a problem
This attitude is why we’re all still stuck writing C++ in 2026. Nobody wants to admit that they’re not hardcore enough to write in poorly designed languages so we never make the effort to improve the situation. We all seem to agree that Zig is an upgrade over C. There’s nothing inherently modern about Zig that we couldn’t have written back in 1995 - we just didn’t because nobody wanted to admit that C is frustrating and clunky, albeit fast.
Yeah, people like to talk about how cultish Rust programmers are, but C programmers are so much worse. Just a couple days ago I had one trying to explain to me that all other languages are worse because you don't understand what the machine is doing under the hood. Completely ignoring it doesn't matter because I have a computer from 2023, not 1986.
> Just a couple days ago I had one trying to explain to me that all other languages are worse because you don't understand what the machine is doing under the hood.
Point out to these people that compilers rewrite your code quite significantly so the choice of language matters a lot less than the choice of debugger, profiler, etc.
True, though it is also true that achieving good responsiveness was not as easy in the past, say 10 or more years ago, without flex box and grid and without calc and clamp and such.
I nowadays use flex, calc, clamp, min, max, scoped variables, and even display table sometimes these days and it just works so well. Eliminates almost all hacks.
That is an odd caveat to throw on the end. Sure, to avoid frameworks you have to know what you are doing. Is that really such an outrageous expectation?
If people knew what they were doing jQuery, Angular and React would not have existed in the first place. With devs moving companies every two years or so, being able to hit the ground running was very important and you couldn't afford to spend weeks or months learning the idiosyncrasies of your new codebase especially when it came to state management. That's the main problem frameworks and libraries were solving.
That's not quite right. jQuery was exactly the right tool for those of us who knew what we were doing. Browser inconsistencies in the early days were practically insurmountable without jQuery to provide a consistent API surface.
> you couldn't afford to spend weeks or months learning the idiosyncrasies of your new codebase especially when it came to state management. That's the main problem frameworks and libraries were solving.
Not really. Frameworks are usually created to avoid boilerplate and provide some nice scaffolding to support you while you’re coding the business layer. And a lot of them do smooth over accidental complexity, even though the architecture is generic and may hinder you in the future.
But the learning curve still exist, as most of what you interact with is custome codes, modules and components.
There are JS libs (like Reactive Mastro [1]) that go well with writing otherwise vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, and there are libs (like React) where you're quickly sinking into a mud of abstractions and have to fight the reactivity runtime when you try to write vanilla JS.
Was this in violation of the Netherlands constitution or just not explicitly illegal in Amsterdam? I don’t know the details or the incident you’re referencing, but there is generally a distinction.
Were they actually not breaking Dutch laws? Around terrorism-related activities I would guess the laws are fairly similar across Western countries, partly due to 9/11. Speech regulation has been consistently different between the US and Europe, including the UK - the US even passed laws to refuse to enforce UK libel judgments 15 years ago after Americans became aware of their abusive effects.
If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
A/I didn't break any laws at all, not even US ones. But the US president currently gets to override US laws, so they still committed a crime in the US despite not breaking any law, but even the US president doesn't have that power outside the US. No crime was committed in the Netherlands, nor in Italy. It's actually illegal in Italy for their Italian bank to keep A/I's money, since that's plain old theft - they're currently figuring out a way to give it back to them without triggering the mango.
European countries need to get off Mastercard/Visa and US Tech and Energy dependencies first, otherwise it's just a shakedown by the US every time they hit an external legal system.
// If European countries banded together to direct their banks to offer services to the sanctioned ICC judges, for example, I think the US would back down on that - yes even under Trump, although there would be some bluster first.
That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
Trump personally intervened when two US spooks were driving on the wrong side of the road in London, with the driver most likely on her phone, killed someone, and then fled the country.
Compare this with a hispanic american who severely injured someone in similar circumstances. Extradition granted and was convicted for a 32 month prison sentence in the UK.
> That's a very good way to force the Hague Invasion Act to manifest in some form or another.
You may note from the title that this is the "American Service-Members' Protection Act".
The current attempt to destroy the ICC is not due to protection of American service members, but Israeli ones.
The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
The admin (and perhaps many in the country) might like to think they can go alone, but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies.
While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
//The admin is going after the court on the basis of it prosecuting American allies. However, America loses NATO if they were to invade over this.
Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
NATO's founding multilateral principles and the USA have been leading parallel lives for quite some time. Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation, described them as a 'paper tiger' repeatedly. As the Wpost reported on 3rd April '22, Bolton claimed that Trump came very close to leaving NATO in 2018, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “was waiting for that.” [1]
In addition, the executive branch will take no notice of any 'binding' mandates or statutory notice periods, as already demonstrated in the 2020 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty.
Indeed, Congress literally had to enact 22 U.S.C. § 1928f (the Kaine-Rubio provision) in 2023 which expressly prohibits the president from exiting the North Atlantic Treaty without prior congressional authorization. But since any subsequent enforcement is dependent on legal resolution by the Supreme Court, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
//but the US has a surprisingly poor record when it comes to fighting without allies
Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
// While I'm sure Trump did his usual thing with regards to the death of Harry Dunn, "war crimes" is on a somewhat different scale to "dangerous driving".
A false equivalence. Trump intervened in a case where the ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent based on their inability to drive on the right side of the road or stay off their phone.
The point was that if he'll personally intervene in such a contextually miniscule matter for an intelligence asset, then he can be assumed to intervene with significant force in the case of the ICC taking custody of an 'ally'.
> It's colloquially known as the Hague invasion act as it's ultimate mandate is to invade the seat of the ICC. Literally the first line of the the wiki article.
The nickname is irrelevant.
The first line of the wiki does not support your claim: "all means necessary and appropriate" is much vaguer than "must invade", and no domestic law would change that an invasion of the Netherlands would be a violation of the sovereignty of a NATO ally.
> Do you believe that's not part of the design at this point?
Read further in my previous comment and find out.
> Trump already started a war in Iran without mandatory consultation
None was needed for that, not from NATO at least. Should've raised it with the UN, if that's what you meant?
> Agreed, but a great record at privatising their lands, mineral rights, and energy sources on the behalf of the GOP and aligned industry. You don't need to win a war if you can profit immensely off it and/or disenfranchise your domestic opponents.
I'm not saying they won't do such things, but it's bad for the US if they do. That said, Iran is looking like it'll be another Vietnam only this time with an oil crisis to match the OPEC crisis, so this is already bad with regard to energy sources.
And that's without everyone else in NATO is likely gearing up for fighting against the USA and Russia at the same time even if we'd very much rather not, and Israel itself (the country for which they are doing this to the ICC) is looking somewhat unstable and even the most allied parts are distancing themselves from the USA.
> A false equivalence.
That's my point: the behaviour with regards to Harry Dunn is a false equivalence with regards to these other things.
> ultimate charge was life imprisonment of a CIA Agent
No, not even close; even in the most egregious cases, and this wasn't an egregious example:
A person convicted of causing death by dangerous driving is liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years and a driving ban of at least 2 years for an offence committed before 28 June 2022
She was convicted in absentia and got "8 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and disqualified from driving for 12 months".
The servers were seized under a mutual legal enforcement agreement and it remains to be seen if it underwent a separate Dutch legal review.
Quite of a bit of legal footwork gets skipped when the “terrorism” charge is invoked.
But it looks like the servers are not being physically turned over, the disks are being imaged and that is what is being transferred.
This implies the solution is every actor in the world willfully complying which doesn’t sound very realistic if you ask me.
Similar to saying world hunger would be solved in everyone who could donated $100 to those in need. Sure it may be true but foot stomping about why isn’t it organically happening is missing the point.
The problem itself does not matter. If the nature of any solution relies on willful global compliance, it’s not going to be very effective at whatever it’s trying to solve.
Every society fundamentally relies on willful compliance. Sure, you can force a few outsiders, but once a sizeable population stops being compliant, it just breaks down.
I'm saying telling people they shouldn't do something is about as useless as farting in the wind. Blaming someone does nothing, it's the force of action behind the words that mean something.
But, because this person could be anyone, anywhere your words are hollow and empty. You are impotent to stop their future actions.
Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.
In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.
> Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
This 100% describes my experience working there in the core teams of iOS 10+ years ago.
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
reply