Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

To be honest, I’m not worried about work doing this to me. But when the government MANDATES this for all citizens, I’m ditching computers and going strictly pen and paper

In 2015 I was teaching that React was a lightweight library that simply did function state -> html, codebases were bug-free, snappy and easy to understand. And it was true compared to configuring jQuery listeners the unperformant way into a Rube Goldberg machine of cause and effect.

> Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.

The problem is that post-war Germany was founded on a promise of eternal prosperity, fuelled by our export industry, ever-increasing population counts, and cheap energy from coal (and later Russian gas). This engine was running so smoothly, we completely slept through digitisation, missed how China kept catching up with our engineers, and felt so reassured by the US entitlement to the world cop role that we shrunk the military further and further.

And now, all of that collapsed pretty much at the same time: Exports are staggering for a variety of reasons, people so few children our pension system costs explode, and energy prices have risen to the highest levels in Europe. All levels of the federal government are struggling with organisational problems, many have painted themselves into a corner, with incompatible silo solutions, and many still work on paper exclusively. In the meantime, the Chinese are able to produce many of the things we used to lead in at the same or better quality, and at lower prices - partly because a lot of strategic state subsidies are going on, partly due to stolen IP, but also due to a plain lack of innovation on our part. And we all know what happened with regard to the military recently.

Germans were never good with change, and right now, so many things change that most people are completely overwhelmed, oversaturated, anxious about the future, fatalistic, and angry. They get to each other's throats instead of looking ahead. Everyone is desperate for things slowing down at least a little bit, but they won't, and people know that.

There's lots of potential here, but I'm afraid on the great sinus curve of history, we're on a downward course right now. Unless something fundamentally changes, we'll see an extremist right-wing party take over power; many of its members openly celebrate Nazism.

I'm really trying to stay optimistic, but it's really getting harder every day.

And in case anyone shows up to talk about youthful sins and people can change: People can change, but they do it either slowly or quickly for a particular reason. Zuck shows no signs whatsoever of changing slowly, and his modus operandi is working too well to have something change his mind in a dramatic way.

Svelte is awesome. Svelte 5's runes are especially powerful because they let reactivity escape the component boundary. The same reactive model works everywhere, whether you're updating the DOM or building plain application logic.

Rich Harris makes the point that React isn't actually reactive: "React doesn’t have any understanding of the values running through your app. It is not Reactive."

Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao

>Modern JavaScript frameworks are all about reactivity. Change your application's state, and the view updates automatically. But there's a catch — tracking state changes at runtime adds overhead that eats into your bundle size and performance budgets. In this talk, we'll discover an alternative approach: moving reactivity into the language itself. Your apps have never been smaller or faster than they're about to become.

He starts with spreadsheets as the archetypal reactive system.

Defines reactivity as values automatically updating according to dependency relationships.

Contrasts that with React's model of rerunning component functions and diffing virtual DOM trees.

Argues that React "doesn't understand the values flowing through your application" and therefore isn't reactive in the traditional sense.

Virtual DOM is pure overhead:

https://svelte.dev/blog/virtual-dom-is-pure-overhead

>But it turns out that we can achieve a similar programming model without using virtual DOM — and that's where Svelte comes in.

React tracks component renders; reactive systems track data dependencies. React doesn't react, it repeats.

I think React should have been called "Repeat", "Re-Run", "Regurgitate", or "Retch".