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Is the madness ever going to end?

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#481

Post by resonious »

root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

Indeed. This bit: "... now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse." is actually true and a good thing.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#482

Post by mro_name »

> Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry?

because you can jumpstart without knowing anything about the problem at hand. And appear smart. And do tech-talks about it. And not dealing with the problem at hand saves you from failure. It's just not adult.

Known to all who rather wiped the windows than starting the thesis.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#484

Post by vbezhenar »

omgitsabird wrote: post #331
lucideer wrote: post #227

This is a bad article, but it's a great example of why tech like Electron have succeeded. This article is a long boring rant with zero insights, in which the author never thinks to ask why ... > Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the "unix greybeards" gone mad!? ... ok he does use…

> he's never had to mitigate XSS vulnerabilities in large PHP applications. You can do this with ) ?>, where e is a function that escapes strings. Is this more work than writing {{ }}? I guess, but this is what your template library is doing under the hood anyway.

The question is not how mitigate vulnerability. Every vulnerability is trivially easy to mitigate.

The question is whether it's easy to write vulnerable code.

For PHP it's easy and implicit:
For React it's hard and explicit:

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#485

Post by dilyevsky »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #477

Its a good rant, even if some of the details are wrong. I think what he's really getting at is just that software is flooded with bad developers. Its only become more true as salaries go up and everyone flocks to the field. By bad I DON'T mean junior or inexperienced. Bad is someone who really doesn't have any intrinsic motivation or drive to improve their craft, or worse doesn't care how it impacts the world - they'…

Don’t blame the player… The reason this happens is not the salaries but bc it is rewarded by hiring and management practices.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#486

Post by vbezhenar »

azangru wrote: post #97

> So, now your simple news article or blog post takes ages to load on a 1 gigabit connection and requires about 3 times as much electrical power even though you're only serving text and perhaps a few images If all the website is doing is serving news articles or blog posts, then sure. But, web is increasingly used to build apps. Apps are different from documents. No, it isn't crazy to build apps that run in the brows…

Web is a terrible app platform.

Unfortunately it's the best one available.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#487

Post by pydry »

kbenson wrote: post #159
Jensson wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small companies loves protocols, but as they become big and dominant they start pivoting to platforms to exert control and extract more profits from the ecosystem. We need regulations around platforms, protocols are inherently more powerful and from the perspective of humanity almost always preferable over platforms, so the incentives of companies should reflect that, but it isn't right now. Stuff like email, http et…

There are tradeoffs beyond just the company making more money, as Moxie's recent web3 assessment covered. Protocols take much longer to evolve, platforms are quick to evolve. Allowing platforms to innovate but somehow incentivizingnor requiring opening up what they've built seems like it would be the best of both worlds, but I'm not sure how that could be done well. If people actually paid for usage, that would be on…

The UK open banking regulations are a good model to follow.

The problem is the intersection of extreme profits at stake and the public's lack of understanding of the underlying causes. That's not a recipe for good political outcomes.

In the case of the UK open banking regulations I suspect tech lobbying (powerful) might have trumped high street bank lobbying (not as powerful).

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#488

Post by jack_pp »

pydry wrote: post #467
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the last 5 years. They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. This "ivory tower" stuff smacks of just world/just market fallacy. I suspect there are deeper issues here. For example, vendor lock-in inhibiting comp…

So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#489

Post by zaptheimpaler »

dilyevsky wrote: post #485
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #477

Its a good rant, even if some of the details are wrong. I think what he's really getting at is just that software is flooded with bad developers. Its only become more true as salaries go up and everyone flocks to the field. By bad I DON'T mean junior or inexperienced. Bad is someone who really doesn't have any intrinsic motivation or drive to improve their craft, or worse doesn't care how it impacts the world - they'…

Don’t blame the player… The reason this happens is not the salaries but bc it is rewarded by hiring and management practices.

I do blame the player. "Dont blame the player" is a bullshit copout. Players are all there is. If no one builds evil shit, it simply doesn't get built. People who either learn to sometimes put their self-interest below something bigger or robots who are easily bought. Concretely, candidates can choose not to enter a field they are uninterested in or make an effort to develop an interest, and managers can design hiring pipelines that test for these things.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#490

Post by bengale »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #406
root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

Comment fails to account for user perspective. As a user I do not want Electron nor React. It does not solve a problem for me, it creates a new one.^1 I would rather someone like UNIXSheikh make the "engineering" decisions. 1. I avoid both Electron and React. I like UNIX. Runs on many platforms.

You're in the minority. Companies don't need to appeal to every potential customer, just a large portion of them.
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