DaiPlusPlus

Redux only plays a role in adding syntactic sugar over React's support for reactive programming

Redux doesn't have anything to do with any kind of syntactic-sugar for Reac.

the general guidelines are that you should only bother with Redux if your SPA is already considerably complex

If one already has an (non-React) SPA which is not already built following Redux then you're stuck with what you've got; it isn't really possible to take an existing SPA of any complexity and deciding to "make it use Redux" because it completely up-ends practically every aspect of SPA application-design, at least as far as how "traditional" (non-React) SPAs do things.

If you'll permit me to oversimplify: I tell people that React is a basically an opinionated Redux kernel wrapped around a JSX-based DOM+component/widget system (, which then means you now need a JS build system too); or conversely: Redux is like React, except without JSX components.

...or am I misunderstanding you?

the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

The funny thing is that prior to 2015 "the ones nobody uses" were the academically-designed ivory tower FP languages; perpetually relegated to being a minority curiosity because FP is immensely difficult to wrap one's head around at first, especially if all you've-ever-known was imperative C or VB and (compromised) OOP in Java and C#.

I remember when Google's overqualified design-team for Angular decided that Angular2+ is too good for Promise-based fetch() - instead everyone should be forced to learn RxJS's way-of-doing-things - cue the agony, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

...I think being forced to live through that experience did 2 things:

1) It forced an entire generation of front-end web-devs (and VB6 refugees) to get familiar with FP-like concepts.

2) It also made those same front-end web-devs swear-off ever using a Google-maintained SPA framework in future.

...which set the stage for the mass-adoption of ReactJS:

1) It made effective use of FP concepts, which many devs were now accustomed-to after having survived Angular2.

2) It wasn't made by Google.

Credit where credit is due, though: ReactJS became #1 on its merits.

...yes, Redux (not React) deserves to be #1, but Redux isn't a complete, all-under-one-roof framework the way React is; but regardless of that: The Redux/React approach is just fundamentally a better design than what we had before: stateful-controls/widgets and two-way data-binding.

If you'd like to relive how UI devs suffered throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and most of the 2010s I invite you to try making a native Windows 11 desktop UI using WinUI3 using the MVVM (anti-) pattern: nothing but mutable objects of indeterminable state getting caught in infinite-loops or unbound recursion due to INotifyPropertyChanged - and Microsoft is still pretending that's the "right" way to build a UI.

Sorry am ranting on about something I have very little control over; it's just frustating.

but I can't deny the wonderful downstream effect of their open source.

ReactJS has been a very mixed-bag...

if your purpose is truly to learn or to teach, the process of describing that image will do wonders for retention.

If you're wanting to learn then you won't have the expertise to craft a prompt that has the correct details or to spot when the model makes a mistake in its output.

If you're in a teaching position then you won't have anything to learn.

…but the illustrative diagrams are a simulacrum; if you ask Qwen, or any image-generator, for an “accurate” poster-design featuring a representation of a model of an atom and explaining its constituent parts I expect you’ll get an imitation-airbrush rendering of red, blue, and grey table-tennis balls orbiting in perfect circles; you might get an electron-shell diagram if you’re lucky. What you won’t get is anything remotely related to probability-clouds.

Edit: just to test myself I asked Nano Banana 2 to generate “an undergraduate infographic poster about how atoms work” - and the result was something right out of a middle-school science textbook and very Bohr…

With a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic "AI chip" R&D and production, while still getting-away with grey-market imports for their AI/LLM R&D.

Without a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic AI/LLM R&D and deployment, while still funding indigenous AI chip development efforts.

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From afar it makes America look so insecure and almost pathetic: China's R&D ecosystem is a huge mass with a lot of inertia - trade policy and embargos will be about as effective against it as the paper they're printed on.

how many current persons working on Minecraft are also Modders?

Probably less than you'd think: lots of people recognise they need to leave their work behind at work and not get too emotionally invested in something they love, because at work they'll be exposed to the gut-wrenching business-decision sausage factory.

Why hasn't this been an industry standard for 100 years?

Because the US heavy rail system is a duopoly with no incentive to innovate.

“When people first saw it, they said, ‘Why haven’t we been doing this for a hundred years?’” Doerr said. “That’s the kind of question I love to hear, because it means the culture of safety innovation is alive and well.”

Union Pacific haven’t been doing this precisely because they don’t have a culture of innovation…

I don't want people to lose jobs. I don't want the advantages to accrue to a few hyperscalers.

Versus:

It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling

A contradiction exists: lower-capital requirements means less employment all-around and more profit to fewer people.

Yes, and it has me genuinely concerned.

That's already known as "rapid unscheduled disassembly" - and happens so-often in spaceflight that it's hardly anomalous at this point.

RedAI

I suppose that could be a generic term for any AI used as an mock adversarial or sparring-partner role, like how "red team" is today.

BlueAI

Would refer to an LLM/agent rained to simulate clinical depression...

...at which point I would ask why we're creating things that will know only pain and suffering? Are we the baddies now?

“Anchor + Offset” is stable because the anchor param should uniquely identify a specific record from which the offset is applied; a sort-order, direction, and page-size may also be optimally specified.

I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).

[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.

…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (page-size, page-index or item-offset, and an optional results anchor for stability).

I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.

May I ask what you end-up doing for the rest of the day?

There's no conspiracy here; the UK government is not wanting to censor Wikipedia (honestly!) - what this really is is the consequence of poorly written legislation introduced at the behest of tabloid-newspaper-supported children's online safety nonprofits - they have a very high level of public support (from parents stressed-out over how bad the Internet is thesedays, which is fair enough!) - and this translates into strong political support, which leads to MPs actively avoiding listening to technical experts and other opposition voices because no-one wants the Daily Express to call them out as being on the side of (vague and nebulous) Internet child sex predators (or "the paedos" for short, in UK tabloid speak).

...and none of this has anything to do with Prince Andrew et al (because that's in real-life, not on the Internet).

It's the exact same process that lead to the 2010s IWF/Cleanfeed/Wikipedia block over controversial 1970s music album art.

It's idiocy and fear of a rabid public, not a conspiracy.

My first clue was when he libelled the diver during the Thailand thing in 2018; it was all downhill from there.

...it was quite the sting because I bought a Tesla car only 2 weeks prior to that.

I just work with systems on the level of features and architecture instead of flow control statements.

That's kinda at the level I enjoy though - where I get to think-through things when figuring out exhaustiveness and correctness; introducing refinement-types into a codebase that's previously nothing but ints-and-strings; and trying out new and cutting-edge language-features directly.

I know I can prompt Claude etc into trying to do those things, but from what I've seen from other people doing it the result is somewhat of a mess - or just plain inelegant.

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May I ask how well Claude/Copilot/etc works with FP languages instead? So far - and back in early 2024 - I've only messed-around with asking ChatGPT to generate Haskell programs and the results were hallucinated gibberish.

I'm not anxious about my codebase; I'm anxious about all the fun parts being sucked out of my job as though I'm being promoted from IC to management - and given the inevitability of progress I can see how my new role as an agent shepherd, too, could be obsoleted in the near-future.

...so I've been avoidant of the whole thing ever since 2023, burying my head in the sand to avoid those feelings of anxiety and uncertainty-about-the-future, and it now makes it difficult for me to engage with the topic head-on.

Still baffles me how these tools became so accepted when tossing out a `curl -o example.com/script.sh | bash` would be met with (rightful) skepticism until that script was examined.

I've heard it said that piping curl into your shell is no different to running any other program you've downloaded from the Internet (binary, or otherwise): the maximum possible damage that `example.com/script.sh` could do is exactly the same as `githubusercontent.com/someone/releases/myprogram.exe`. At least with `script.sh` you can easily inspect what the script actually does instead of busting out Ghidra.

It comes down to trust: do you trust Example.com to not serve-up a malicious program (shell script or executable binary)?

Now we take that principle and apply it to Mr. Musk's "MechaHitler" LLM vendor xAI: they have a well-documented history of unnecessary risk-taking - and outright criminal behaviour (child-porn generators are a good thing that everyone should have, apparently?). Would I trust Grok with anything? Absolutely not.

is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed

Slashdot is still around

many who notice don't care, or are willing to overlook it if the premise is interesting enough

I imagine the set of articles that are somehow both interesting-enough-to-read but not interesting-enough-to-write is smaller than you'd think.

then why will it be impossible say in a year or two to vibe code something at the level of most sophisticated apps and services today?

Replace "vibe coding" with "outsource to India" and it's the same situation we were in 20 years ago: I remember around the time when YouTube had well-established itself (2009-ish?) and so a cottage-industry mushroomed all selling visual-lookalike YouTube clones, but implemented as monolithic single PHP project or WordPress plugin, using the local filesystem for video file storage (or worse: Base64-encoded text in MySQL, lovely).

...to someone with no prior experience or knowledge how highly-scalable, Google-tier web applications (like the real YouTube) work or are built, these "Me-Too-Tube" sites were indistinguishable from the real thing and as far as they were concerned they were happy with it.

Never mind that even if those $25 scripted websites were ever actually scalable, it isn't enough to simply have a video-sharing site; you need to get millions of people to decide to start using it - and that's something which will elude Claude's abilities... possibly forever, I feel.

I followed the footer links to the site's author and his other work and I'll dare say my impression is that the whole thing is engagement bait to draw attention to his VC investment firm from other people who also think bollocks like this is somehow inspirational[1] - also not helped by how the other footer link goes to an obvious AI slop blog on Beehiiv (a "hiiv" of scum and villainy; for bots who get banned from Substack).

[1] https://x.com/jeremygiffon/status/1965535859073319334

Less "extremely negative" - but there's at least a few "net-negative" things here: for example, the Ethereum and Web3 papers. Smart-contracts and NFTs failed to create any meaningful value or have any lasting economic impact, while their negatives at the time were well-reported (and let's include "crimes against taste" in that too).

I agree with you - but I’m the one with an anxiety disorder here.

I'm probably behind on using AI and need to get more up to speed

Same.

My difficulty is that for the past 8 years I've been working for (tiiiiny) SaaS business where I don't have anyone I can simply ask in-person "hey, can you show me how to 'do' all this newfangled AI agentic team coding?"; so my only direct-exposure is with the painful Copilot sidebar chat, which I now find myself allergic to.

So let's see elsewhere: while searching online for some (reputable) "agentic coding courses" my results are for the same kind of people who used to run those dodgy coding-camps from 10 years ago. I'm having difficulty finding resources for practicing SWEs like myself wanting a continuing-professional-development course experience, not a get-rich-by-buying-my-course video library from a contemptable AI booster

Even more surprisingly, my local major university (UW.edu) doesn't seem to offer any certificate courses for getting into agentic development either[1] despite offering courses on C++, Six Sigma, and actual ML/AI courses. It's maddening. I can't be the only one with this problem...

[1] https://www.pce.uw.edu/search?type=certificate&programType=c...

How is the token-cost-be-damned part in the latter example?

It's there, but...

1. The project owner figured out a way to minimize token usage for agent claim verification tasks.

2. Verification agents used older and much cheaper models, including local models for the most trivial things.

3. They could afford it anyway; but I think it's an inevitability that the token-cost for a task will approach some limit for some quality threshold - concurrent with the dollar-cost-per-token shrinking over time as better hardware comes out.

In a new project, you don’t have that validation.

I'm still trying to understand that part of the project's history, actually. Obviously the HTML5+WebGL+Emscripten+Etc entrypoint was a "new" project; one of the first things they did was build their own means of verification, I just don't know how that part worked-out in practice (besides the agents dogpiling in on TODO.md).