aleksandrh

"Any non trivial coding task requires a conversation between human and ai."

Does it? Since when? Are we just going to pretend some of the world's best software wasn't written before AI coding tools came along?

Weird, I hate Next and I love Vite. We have a big (I mean _really_ big) production app that runs on Next.js at work and it's the slowest thing I've ever worked on. I had to upgrade my machine to an M4 Pro just to get local dev compile times down from 5-8 minutes to ~30-60 seconds per route. And my hot refreshes are down from ~15-20 seconds to 5-10. It's _bad_. All the Next.js team does is give you the run-around and link to their docs and say here, try these steps, you're probably doing something wrong, etc. Nope. The framework is just slow. They use simple toy apps to demo how fast it is, but nobody tells you how slow it is at scale.

Time to reset the clock. 0 days since a new web bundler was released (in Rust!!).

So tired of this ecosystem and its ceaseless tide of churn and rewrites and hypechasing.

> What happens when that fake-100px-but-actually-10em wide element is meant to coexist with something that is actually set in pixels? For instance, a 120px skyscraper ad? The things sized in fake-pixels-but-actually-ems will change proportionally with the user’s font size, but the things sized in real pixels will not. All of a sudden different elements on the page have different ideas about what scale they should be rendered at, and the layout falls apart.

This is technically also working as intended. When a user scales their preferred font size in their browser settings, their expectation is that the font sizes on pages will scale accordingly, not that every element will scale. The latter is what zoom accomplishes, but there's a reason why both zoom and preferred font sizes exist in browser settings.

In your example, the ad (or image, or whatever) should only be sized in rems/ems if it has text. For all other elements that aren't related to text, it makes more sense to size with pixels. If everything is sized in ems/rems, then scaling the preferred font size behaves identically to zoom. This is less than ideal because if I want to increase font sizes, and what you do in response is zoom the whole page, then there is less space for that same text to fit on the page because it competes with other scaled elements. So while I can read the text more easily because the glyphs are larger, I can read _less_ of the text within the same amount of space than if text were the only scaled element.

Also, at least in my experience, designers aren't the ones thinking in ems; they typically hand us Figma compositions that use pixels, and we translate to rems in our code base. Designers design for the base experience, and we are responsible for coding it in a way that scales proportionally/in a way that respects user preferences.

> Indeed, as the November 2023 drama was unfolding, Microsoft’s CEO boasted that it would not matter “[i]f OpenAI disappeared tomorrow.” He explained that “[w]e have all the IP rights and all the capability.” “We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.” “We are below them, above them, around them.”

Yikes.

This technology definitely needs to be open source, especially if we get to the point of AGI. Otherwise Microsoft and OpenAI are going to exploit it for as long as they can get away with it for profit, while open source lags behind.

Reminds me of the moral principles that guided Zimmermann when he made PGP free for everyone: A powerful technology is a danger to society if only a few people possess it. By giving it to everyone, you even the playing field.

And then claimed his GitHub was "hacked" to save his ass. And was somehow not banned by GitHub despite clearly violating their TOS.

Web dev here working with React for ~4 years now. I really don't enjoy it as much as I used to. It has made me dislike JavaScript in general, and I often find myself wishing things were simpler and more performant. I can't emphasize how relatable this part is:

> We shouldn’t need to do that—especially for a framework that so often claims it’s “just JavaScript.” If it’s just JavaScript, then it should just work with anything that’s actually just JavaScript.

And this:

> I have a confession to make: I’m still not exactly sure what the difference between useMemo and useCallback is—or when you should and shouldn’t use them—even though I literally read multiple articles on that exact topic earlier today. (No joke.) > > I have a second confession: it’s still not intuitive to me what should and shouldn’t go into the useEffect dependency array, or why. I feel like every time I write a useEffect call, I spend like 15 minutes refactoring my code to be in a shape the linter likes, even when I’m 99% certain it’s actually fine and it’s not going to suck my app into an infinite abyss.