sjoedev

I likely align with you on most political and social issues since you seem to be in despair. However, this question is seriously misguided. This is by far the best time to have been a human in all of history.

You say AI is making our creative pursuits feel meaningless?

How many creative pursuits do you think the average person had throughout history when close to 50% of people died before age 5, fewer than 10% of people could read, women and minorities had close to zero rights, the average worker was impoverished and farmed sunup to sundown to barely eat and avoid famine, there was little treatment for diseases (infectious or otherwise), common people could be conscripted for war at a moment’s notice…I could go on.

You think the average person in history spent their time painting and writing? These are luxuries 99% of people who ever lived could have never dreamed of.

This is myopic “Silicon Valley” rhetoric and lacks understanding of art or why it’s appreciated.

We have video cameras and movies, yet stage actors on Broadway are celebrated like movie stars. People still read books. We have cameras and photoshop, yet a huge market still exists for oil on canvas. We have synthesizers, drum kits, and all the tools we need to make music on a computer, yet live concerts with guitars and drums sell millions of tickets annually. We have the technology to deliver payloads on another continent with millimeter precision, yet every few years, the whole world gathers to watch people who have trained a lifetime to run, jump, and throw stones.

“The old way is dead” doesn’t hold up in the arts like it does in the sciences. Technology moves on, but humans are the same. You can inspire and awe us today using the same tools and methods that were used hundreds or thousands of years ago.

> Next.js and TanStack Start don't send any JavaScript to the client if you decide to server-render everything.

AFAIK, this isn’t true. And you still get more JS per interactive element than with HTMX.

Sure. I personally think SPAs/React have better DX than HTMX. IMO, the most compelling reasons to use HTMX instead (for building dynamic/interactive web applications) are to reduce the amount of JavaScript sent to the client and make pages become interactive faster. These are UX concerns: how much the user has to download (waiting) and how long before the page becomes interactive (waiting).

With HTMX, you get these benefits regardless of what language you use on the server. These benefits could be reasons the parent commenter chose HTMX, and JavaScript is a perfectly good language to serve HTMX applications for the reasons I mentioned.

Adopting something like HTMX is primarily a UX choice, and the language you use to serve it is almost irrelevant to UX. JavaScript is a nice backend language. It’s fast, has a massive ecosystem, and many people know it well.

Do keep in mind: they also develop, maintain, support, and market Unreal Engine, which is possibly the most advanced and innovative game engine out there. It’s used by tons of other studios (including AAA) and is used in other industries like space flight, automotive, etc.

I think online/digital gambling is worse because it follows you everywhere. I don’t like any form of gambling, but at least with casinos there’s some escape in not physically being there. It’s also harder to enforce age requirements online.

I wouldn’t put them in the same category. Bootstrap has a much stronger opinion about how you write and structure CSS, while Tailwind is a framework for building a style system and writing arbitrary CSS that conforms to it. In practice, Tailwind is actually much closer to writing vanilla CSS. It does come with a widely used default (and very good, IMO) style system, but you ultimately apply arbitrary CSS rules just like vanilla.

Tailwind is certainly divisive. It’s better suited to component-based frameworks than templates or plain HTML, so a person’s background likely contributes to how they perceive it. Personally, I’ve worked a lot with vanilla CSS, opinionated libraries like Bootstrap, and Tailwind, and opinionated libraries are the only one I have no desire to use again. I generally want Tailwind in component-based projects and vanilla CSS in template-based projects.

At the end of the day, pick what you like and use it. They all get the job done.

> In the Swiftie-verse, an “Easter egg” refers to a hidden clue or detail that Taylor plants in her work …

I don’t see this as meaningfully different than, for example:

> In the computing world, “Java” refers to a programming language …

Which seems totally fine to me.

Code review has been an industry standard tool to ensure the correctness of software for decades.