szastamasta

Article has so much fluff and only some very coarse information like (we sharded writes, yay!). Almost no detail just keywords for SEO, or whatever they’re aiming for.

There’s also a lot of repetition. Maybe it was AI generated…?

I think that we cannot separate it from amount of free cash people have. Inflation, layoffs, etc. People simply want to limit their spending on less important things.

It just has to be cheap enough and you have to have enough free time to pay for media. Not something you can do when your utilities and taxes are 100% up from 3 years ago and you’re constantly boarded with layoff news.

I just mean you won’t write a video codec or a 3d renderer in JS. It will never get there. Just leave these things to WebAssembly where needed and leave JS as a slow, dynamic language we use for web apps.

Nobody needs classes nor prototypes in JS. Objects + functions is more than enough. I stopped using these few years ago and miss nothing.

Please stop. What a nonsense. JS is a dynamic language where everything is a Hashtable. It will never be really fast as your structs won’t be in single cacheline, you won’t be able to calculate field address during compile time by pointer offsets. There’s no simd, no multithreading, no real arrays.

JS is such a simple, dynamic language. It should just stay this way. Please stop bloating it with every feature that’s trendy this year. We already have classes that we didn’t need. We don’t need structs for sure.

It’s just like with cookies. I believe that lawmakers were honest and really wanted for companies to limit amount of tracking in the web. What we did get instead is a lot of „we value your privacy” popups and 5 pages of checkboxes to check if you don’t want to be tracked.

I just think that this will end up the same way. Nothing really changes, but we’ll just get more useless „lawyer talk” in more and more license documents to click on.

You see, I just don’t think more honest wins us anything. I’ve seen too many „We value your privacy” popups already.

Maybe I have misunderstood the article, but for me it looks like another „cookies” law.

They are not proposing to force media companies to make sure you have access to your media forever. Or force them to give you a downloadable copy when they remove media from store. They’ll just replace „Buy” button with „Get Access” or whatever and add some lawyer mumbo-jumbo above it.

Looks like a smokescreen to me.

Yeah, maybe I've got too old-school thinking. Or maybe just worked on too many failed startups :). But the overall cheapness of our industry is driving me crazy.

I happily use proprietary software - IntelliJ, Sublime, Affinity, MacOS, etc. In my experience if you get software for free, you are the product, or you will be charged x10 more when they finally get their "business model".

Of course money != value, but don't pretend that REST client is charity or fight for freedom or something. It's a wrench. And wrench should have its price on the shelf.

Unfortunately most business models around free software are ads and user profiling. Rest is just noise.

Yeah, exactly because of that we have no nice tools for devs. All is built either to get a better job (and then abandoned) or you cannot sell it (and then you abandon it). If we were not that cheap maybe we would have more Jetbrains like companies.

Every company is replaceable.

I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.

I still wonder why people do this. Build an end-user product and give it away for free.

It’s just making our work look worthless and kills small software companies.

Cool, share your library or web server, as it allows others to build products around this and you will benefit from theirs. But consumer products? Why are we so cheap? Will we do just anything for „likes” and „internet points”?

Exactly. The most eco product is the one you don’t produce. Longevity and reuse is what we really should strive for.

Yeah, I mean they are all different when it comes to tools around web page itself, but compatibility & web performance will be similar to the rendering/js engine.

It’s JSC + Webkit => so it’s just Safari in disguise

I just wanted to say that I love you man.

We are so crazy as devs. We’re outraged when someone wants few dollars for their app. Especially when it’s a one guy trying to make a living from building small apps like this. In the meantime we dream about opening a 1 person software shop selling small apps and getting out of corp work.

This is total madness.

I just thought that people moved to Electron for cross-platform and to native otherwise. Java was not particularly fast nor native-looking on desktop. I’ve spent quite a few years in Swing, and am not sure it’s much better than Electron. But with GraalVM, maybe…

I’m not sure about that. I think the OpenAI deals the cards here. They have the model and the data. If these media outlets fire creative people there’s nothing they have that OpenAI hasn’t got.

I hope that these media companies realize sooner than later, that if their content is AI generated, there’s no reason to go there. We’ll just skip the middlemen and go straight to OpenAI or whatever. No need to go to their site.

Hmm, I thought that JavaFX is effectively dead, after it was removed from JDK. Haven’t seen any app made with it for ages.

But maybe now, that we have GraalVM Java will make a comeback to desktop?

I love Firefox. And still use it from time to time. But I think that the only reason they are still alive is that Google needs Firefox to cover up its monopoly in browser market.

Hope they start to innovate again and give us some new ways to use the web. Or at least try, like Arc does. Because their catch-up game with Chrome is a lost cause. No way they can just build a better browser engine.

I agree. That's actually one of few problems with having just canvas - accessibility. Most libraries would not have it, and it would be a disaster for disabled users, but... That's one of few things current state AI could solve. Why not make a neural net that would read or summarize page for blind people? Instead we use it to generate bulsh*t junk content and fake comments...

We needed them because platform was too high level, not because we had not enough web APIs. If we could have a canvas and means to render efficiently, there would be no plugins necessary. And they were nightmare because you had to install them yourself on your client, not because they were not JS and DOM.

Yes, we have done it to ourselves in the 90' when every browser had some custom extensions and small differences. And everyone was playing catch-up game. Then we got a bit of normality in 2000' when we standardised things. And now Google is playing like Microsoft - expanding web standards like crazy and nobody can catch up. I hope we stop this madness soon.

You already have this anyway. I’m not sure you have seen the size of average page js bundle. It’s many MBs of JS. All this while expanding browser APIs like crazy during last few years. Simplify the platform and let people brew.

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this.

There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers:

SIMPLIFY THE WEB

- Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way to render things, fetch stuff from the network, etc.

- Get rid of CSS - leave just some basic rendering primitives, so libraries can be created to paint on the canvas. We don't need 78 new animation primitives. We'll build them ourselves if we have a sensible canvas and execution platform.

- Move JS out of the browser to a WebAssembly compiler and make browsers run only WebAssembly

- Or keep JS in the browser but don't add any new features, features should be in libraries outside of the browser. Language should be as simple as possible.

- Get rid of all semantic html junk. We only need some basic blocks to move things around.

This way we can have simple browsers and move all complexity to client libraries, which you can pick and replace when needed. Just keep things as simple as possible and let people build on that.

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Oh man, sorry to hear about the dev burnout. But what do you expect? We made software worthless by giving away ready products for free. It’s not a library for other devs to use, so we can all „stand on the shoulder of giants”. Stuff like this should be paid from the start.

The only real problem with null, is not having a real optional type in Java. If you have it, 99,999% of null errors go away.

Java Optional std lib class, instead of a language (typesystem level) feature was one of biggest mistakes in its recent history.

I’m very sorry for the guy. He really should focus on his family well being.

Open source is not feeding of the poor nor helping victims of crime. People give it too much emotional weight and think that it’s important for the whole human kind. But it’s not. It’s just some nice to have utility. And, to be honest, it’s not the OS as it used to be. Now it’s mostly big corps wanting some internet fame or free labor or companies wanting to use your software for free. If you do it for fame or better job, sure, try your luck. But don’t base your income on it. It has almost never worked.

I wish you all the best Denis. Hope it all ends good for you. Please don’t feel sorry if you abandon the project. You gave people something good and don’t owe them anything. And don’t be worried, no one will suffer if you do it. It might sound harsh, bit it’s also relieving. You are not responsible for internet people inconvenience.

They did this while introducing a lot of compiler magic and automatic dependency discovery that not always works. I’m not sure I’m sold on it. Code you write is not code you execute.