Maybe Reformation religions require belief, but the paganism was a set of rituals known to work (by virtue of having worked before), sort of a like a spiritual experimental science. Belief was not required.
Religions don't necessarily work because people believe in it, either. There are a number of religious sects that started with end of the world prophecies.
I think that religions work the opposite way: people believe in them because they work. Since the purpose of religion is generally to explain the nature of reality and how to flourish in it, it needs to work for you. If it doesn't, you either just go through the motions, or quit and find a different religion (or swear off religion, which is sort of the same thing).
A pile of gold always reminds me of an Asimov short story, which began by a guy offering 100k credits of gold bars to a respected movie producer to make a film of questionable artist merit. "He didn't need the credits. He wasn't sure he didn't need the gold."
Cynicism in unhelpful, and it's not correct. This has nothing to do with governments and everything to do with market economics. This sort of thing happens every few years in computing.
Then what's your solution? It's a capital intensive business to get into, without some regulatory changes either on the supply side or the demand side, there's no way for it to be naturally prevented without consumers bearing the brunt of the downside. Yes, the market will eventually correct itself but until then consumers suffer.
The only legal check for monopoly corporations is regulation/taxation. That doesn’t work cross border. Especially when the other side has nationalised and artificially props the monopoly.
The solution then is removing the product from market till local competition takes its place.
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples.
> Industrialized manufacturing of electronics?
Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though.
> Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence
I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media.
Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.
how do you not think the internet is a military technology? i mean (waves hands) like it's from ARPA, the military paid for it, it integrated cold war air defence, it made global comms resilient to attack, and made information non-local on a massive scale
GP's assertion about tech revolutions making wars doesn't make any sense to me on any level, but it's not just because the latest revolutions were 'not military tech'
i'm liking william spaniel's model : wars happen when 1 - there is a substantial disagreement between parties and 2 - there is a bargaining friction that prevents reaching a less-costly negotiated resolution.
I don't see how a technical revolution necessarily causes either, much less both, of those conditions. there sure is a lot of fear and hype going around - and that causes confusion and maybe poor decisions - but we should chill on the apocalyptics
A cogent article. But I think the biggest problem is that the DOM was built for documents, not apps. We know how to build a performant UI architecture: Qt, Java/Swing, Cocoa all have pretty similar architectures and they all ran fine on much poorer hardware than a modern browser on an M1. But unless you use WebAssembly, you can't actually use them on the browser.
When the industry shoehorns something into a tool designed for something else, yeah, performance suffers and you get a lot of framework churn with people trying to figure out how to elegantly cut steaks with spoons.
But most apps are documents, they are built to render data and text fields in a nice way for the consumer to use.
You most certainly shouldn't be building graphs with table elements but JS has canvas and svg which make vectors pretty efficient to render.
The document model provides good accessibility and the ability for things like SEO and GEO to exist.
If you are making a racing simulator, then using HTML in no way makes sense, but for the apps that most of us use documents make sense.
It would be nice if browsers implemented a new interpreted statically typed language with direct canvas/viewport rendering that was more efficient than javascript, but chrome would need to adopt it, then developers would need to actually build things with it. It seems like it would currently have to come from within the chrome team directly and they are the only ones that can control something like this.
The irony is that CSS works fairly okay for the small number of UI elements and web games that are decidedly not documents. Or perhaps that's not so much irony as filling in the gaps.
Everything works fairly okay on modern hardware. I'm sure someone could build a 3d rendering engine using only table elements and css and it would run decently well.
There are hundreds of tools in the belt, people can use any of them to tighten down the screw, but it doesn't mean that they are the most efficient or best to use.
I would also say that a lot of web games are closer to documents than you think. A chess board could be seen as a document, it has tables and rows, the characters are just shaped different than the characters we write with.
Something like a racing sim again could be implemented in css but someone who actually understands how to use canvas is going to have a more efficient way to represent it.
While I don't have the performance bottleneck numbers of React, I don't think it's about Javascript vs. WASM here.
I've seen/built some large Qt/QML applications with so much javascript and they all performed much better than your average React webapp. In fact the V8 / other browser Javascript engines also have JIT while the QML engine didn't.
Comparing QtQuick/QML + JS to HTML + JS - both GPU accelerated scenegraphs, you should get similar performance in both. But in reality it is rarely the case. I suspect it might be the whole document oriented text layout and css rules, along with React using a virtual DOM and a lot of other dependencies to give us an abstraction layer.
I'd love to know more about this from someone who did an in depth profiling of the same/similar apps on something like QtQuick vs. React.
It depends on the app. If the app has many hundreds or even thousands of DOM elements, there's no way to make that work smoothly with React or any other library or framework. Then a canvas based solution can fix things. I know, I've had to fix slow React apps.
You can easily prove if the DOM is a performance bottleneck. DOM performance means one of two things: lookup/access speed and render speed. Render speed is only a DOM concern with regard to quantity of nodes and node layering though, as the visual painting to display is a GPU concern.
To test DOM access speed simply compare processing speed during test automation of a large single page app with all DOM references cached to variables versus the same application with no such caching. I have done this and there is a performance difference, but that performance difference cannot be noticed until other areas of the application are very well optimized for performance.
I have also tested performance of node layering and it’s also not what most people think. To do this I used an application that was like desktop UI with many windows that can dragged around each with their own internal content. I found things slowed down considerably when the page had over 10000 nodes displayed across a hundred or so windows. I found this was slower than equivalent desktop environments outside the browser, but not by much.
Most people seem to form unmeasured opinions of DOM performance that do not hold up under tests. Likewise they also fail to optimize when they have the opportunity to do so. In many cases there is active hostility against optimizations that challenge a favorite framework or code pattern.
> To test DOM access speed simply compare processing speed during test automation of a large single page app with all DOM references cached to variables versus the same application with no such caching. I have done this and there is a performance difference, but that performance difference cannot be noticed until other areas of the application are very well optimized for performance.
This was my instinct. Remember, the author is a hammer. His role is to find performance issues in the frontend. His role is not to find performance bottlenecks in the whole system.
> the biggest problem is that the DOM was built for documents, not apps
I don't see the difference. They're both text and graphics laid out in a variable-sized nested containers.
And apps today make use all the same fancy stuff documents do. Fonts, vector icons, graphics, rounded corners, multilingual text including RTL, drop shadows, layers, transparency, and so forth.
Maybe you think they shouldn't. But they do. Of all the problems with apps in web pages, the DOM feels like the least of it.
> I think the biggest problem is that the DOM was built for documents, not apps.
The world wide web was invented in 1989, Javascript was released in 1995, and the term "web application" was coined in 1999. In other words: the web has been an application platform for most of its existence. It's wrong to say at this point that any part of it was primarily designed to serve documents, unless you completely ignore all of the design work that has happened for the past 25 years.
Now, whether it was designed well is another issue...
It very possible to make lightning-fast React web UIs. DOM sucks, but modern computers are insanely fast, and browsers, insanely optimized. It is also very possible to make sluggish-feeling Qt or Swing applications; I've seen a number.
It mostly takes some thinking about immediate reaction, about "negligibly short" operations introducing non-negligible, noticeable delays. Anything not related to rendering should be made async, and even that should be made as fast as possible. This is to say nothing of avoiding reflows, repeated redraws, etc.
In short, sloppy GUI code feels sluggish, no matter what tools you use.
> but modern computers are insanely fast, and browsers, insanely optimized
I think these facts have been used as excuses to shit up the app layer with slow mal-optimized js code.
An example of a recent high performance app is figma, which blows normal js only apps out of the water. And it does so by using c++ wasm/webGPU for its more domanding parts, which is most of it
I think we have to let go of the "just get more ram" approach and start optimizing webapp code like figma does
> I think we have to let go of the "just get more ram" approach and start optimizing webapp code like figma does
I think you're underselling how much work went into making Figma that way. You're talking about a completely different realm of optimization that most companies won't spend money doing, and most web programmers won't know how to do.
As long as there's no incentive to do otherwise, companies will slap together whatever they can and ship as many features as possible.
For most apps React is never going to be an issue when it comes to performance, unless you use it wrong or you use it for something that is not standard, like rendering fractals.
It makes sense to analyse performance if your website is meant to reach absolutely everyone, like old smartphones.
There's the issue that a single-page app can be bloated from the start, but that's also in the using it wrong category
> modern computers are insanely fast, and browsers, insanely optimized.
You made the reverse point: If you need modern hardware to run a react app with the same performance as a svelte/vue/solid app on low-hardware, something is fundamentally wrong.
> Anything not related to rendering should be made async,
The thing with DOM interaction is that if you try to make it synchronous then it gets really fucking slow (reflow and friends). So you want it linearized for sanity reasons, but probably not sync.
This is the first sane comment in this entire comment section. So much nonsense in here, but I guess I should expect that when JavaScript is in the post title.
Could you be more specific? Because NVDA has a consistent 20 year growth of something like 400x and +30%/yr, so I don't think the bitter lessons are there.
A good education taught her how to teach. She has a 4 year degree, then some sort of 1-2 year program of being essentially an apprentice, and then you must take several college classes every few years to demonstrate your continued learning, and oddly IMO, the same school that was adopting weird and unproven teaching methods around reading was giving their teachers fairly good yearly workshops about how to teach.
She has a genuine-ness that is palpable, something that I've also inherited. My girlfriend describes it as "You have golden retriever energy" and it gets people engaged with you. She's a very fun teacher.
She treats kids like people, yet the way the interactions go and the way she gets to kids ensures that they still generally respect her. She also used to have an administration that recognized her talent and value, and would stand behind her when a kid was a serious problem. She has helped "bad" kids do better, and helped bullied kids, and has helped needy kids, and this gives her a sort of legendary status. Everyone knows and loves Madame.
She was well experienced dealing with stupid shitheads because she grew up next to my dad's family (lol small towns) and raised three kids that were pains in her ass in diverse ways.
She works her absolute ass off. She habitually showed up to work ten minutes late (ADHD runs in our family quite bad), but the admin ignores that when she is teaching every student in the school and grading assignments until 8pm most nights, and building the curriculum for all the other teachers. I once stayed up with her until early in the morning grading a writing project she had given. Hundreds of students, every year, and she would always know their name and lives and all about them even though she's bad at remembering names otherwise. She was willing to teach kids how grammar worked and how to diagram sentences when they came into her class and didn't know. She was also able because of her education.
She comes from a family tradition that treated education as a total good, something everyone should seek out as much as possible, and something that would lift you up, along with your family, despite ostensibly being a very rural lineage. We have the journal of a woman in our ancestry 200 years back talking about how she learned to read and write because that's just how great education was in general. We aren't nobility or anything that would traditionally do that kind of thing.
A crazy mix of genetics: We are all super neurodivergent and probably super inbred and the latest generation is experiencing crazy illnesses and autoimmune disorders, but my mom's family consistently scores above average on standardized tests and has done so for generations. So she has a good brain to use the things she learned, even though there's tons of "smart" things that isn't so good at. The role of a good educator just happened to really fit well with her mix of beneficial and problematic brain issues.
So, you know, luck. She picked this career path because she was 20 and her marriage failed and she suddenly had to support three kids. Turns out she's really good at it. We aren't ambitious people, but this general theme is the same for my entire extended family.
You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.
Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.
The VOC and EIC would like a word. While under these so-called 'Judeo-Christian values' Europe was wildly antisemitic, colonised most of the known world, and subjugated, genocided, and enslaved indigenous populations. The UK even wrote a slave bible. Slavery in the US also happened while these 'values' were held in high regard.
If your personal religious beliefs help you be a good person then that's great for you, keep believing. But historically it doesn't appear that more religious societies are more moral societies.
When he starts vibe coding his rocket control software, I might find what he says credible. It's easy to say words, but quite another thing to bet your expensive rockets on it.
Going around to municipalities that you are not a resident of and saying "we will sue you into obeying state law" is basically being a tattletale. Nobody likes that. I'm sympathetic to more housing, and I think state laws should be followed, but I'm not sympathetic to the author.
Also, I just dislike activism in general, which seems like it generally is trying to force people to do things they don't want to do through passing laws. I get that there is sometimes a need raise attention. But generally it seems like activists are very one-sided, agenda/ideologically driven. It also feels like they are trying to find meaning in activism (yeah, we forced other people to do what we think is Right), instead of healthier, more traditional forms of meaning.
So if I build an apartment building on some lots zoned for single-family and someone complains, they're a "tattletale" too? And nobody should like that either?
Religions don't necessarily work because people believe in it, either. There are a number of religious sects that started with end of the world prophecies.
I think that religions work the opposite way: people believe in them because they work. Since the purpose of religion is generally to explain the nature of reality and how to flourish in it, it needs to work for you. If it doesn't, you either just go through the motions, or quit and find a different religion (or swear off religion, which is sort of the same thing).
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