Look — I’m old enough to remember when the “web standards movement” was controversial. I had to argue with my boss about using CSS vs tables. And I remember when you did need javascript to do a lot of things that HTML now does natively. JS frameworks had to exist to push the state of the art, because the state of the art got stuck. The standards bodies and browser vendors got their shit together, and now you can do things you used to need frameworks for in plain HTML. That’s great! But let’s not re-write history, here.
Software is in a constant state of revolution and counter-revolution. It’s one of the things that keeps this job interesting.
Sort of but it just builds on top of cruft. CSS and html is poorly designed to do what we are doing with it today.
Like I understand the point of not building bloat. But the reason why people build bloated stuff like react is because the primitives are just raw shit. HTML and css is just really bad.
Oh? All things considered, I believe html and css are both great. Incredibly flexible and very easy to get a basic "framework" started for consistent design
Everything else I've used to date (for UIs) was either extremely limited or way more complicated to use in comparison
I personally feel like the only thing we're missing is a way more aggressive deprecation policy. Not actually removing the API, just clearly signal that you would probably be better off not using it in 2025.
CSS is incredible technology, but holy shit does it feel archaic in a large Typescript project to have a massive design system in a string.
Why can’t I click an element and see the css files that apply to it? Why can I get autocomplete for my utility classes and custom properties? I would happily nuke CSS from a project for a typescript library that could marry the two worlds with minimal trade-offs, but I’ve yet to have the time or courage to dive into a library like vanilla-extract: https://vanilla-extract.style
Look - the content is good and some of us are not native English speakers. People should edit their chatgpt correction but we should stop calling everything AI generated without real proof. Anyway, if the comment is meaningful and adds to the discussion, why should I care if it was AI generated?
I agree. The structure feels like an LLM. What scares me is that the more I use it the more I feel myself writing like chatgpt. Hell even thinking in its 'tone of voice'
I hope somebody building and selling microgrids and energy storage systems is ready to take advantage of this situation. Mass deployment of batteries at the grid edge is a great idea for a lot of reasons, but none more immediately compelling than "the power won't go out if the grid goes down."
It should be mandatory for critical infrastructure like ATMs to have 24hr batteries installed. And some sort of power backup to maintain internet access as well - even if it's just a matter of everyone being allocated a small amount of starlink data or public wifi.
These things have relatively small costs, but make the system much more resilient.
My fear is that without access to cash, people might loot stores or riot to get essentials, once they get desperate. Keeping ATMs online for longer would make that kind of event less likely.
Press releases like this are published for the purposes of securing funding. Medical research departments at universities are currently under siege by the federal government. Emphasizing the use of AI is a great way to avoid Elon Musk's search, replace and destroy operation for research funding.
I agree that this is probably at least partially a motivation, but it seems like a losing strategy to me. AlphaFold is run by a private company, and falsely elevating the importance of its use in the paper could be used to fuel the argument that all this research needs to be privatized. Given the current situation, I hope people realize that the breakthrough in structure prediction is literally impossible without 70+ years data generated by publicly funded research. Most of the foundational work in deep learning guided structure prediction was also publicly funded, with Deep Mind getting in at the tail end of the race once it seemed like the problem could be brute forced by throwing enough resources at it.
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:
- electrify everything, including industrial processes
- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification
- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation
- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere
It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.
I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.
I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.
Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
People are part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers because there aren’t other jobs available, and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.
There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.
It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.
tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
>and people can pick up skills faster than you think.
Possibly. But they can't change the attitudes that created them from childhood up. The barista that complains on r/antiwork that their manager is a douche and that they're taking another mental health day because standing upright is too challenging for an hour at a stretch isn't going to like mandatory overtime spot welding or manning the torque wrench. Can they be taught to do it? Yeh, probably, theoretically at least. Supposing they don't get out because they'd rather be scrolling on a phone.
I can foresee this, it's not prophecy... just common sense. But I suppose other people need to run the experiment and see the results for themselves.
Out of high school, I must have worked 4 or 5 factory jobs (even in the early 1990s that was drying up), and so I have some idea what this is like. It's not a long-form media article for me. I don't think it's menial. When I use that word, I'm talking about the person at the cash register at Dollar Tree, or the job where you scrub the toilets at Wendy's.
>I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce,
Maybe. But I'm not understating its size, or the demographic projections that say it's shrinking quickly.
>and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.
They'd be great. But you can't just make a magic wand and have them appear, and if you could you'd never fill the positions.
Something I learned over the last year as I got into running is that many avid runners don't even like running.
I wouldn't say that I "like" running, either. I got into running because I was experiencing a mental health crisis, and I needed something besides drugs and alcohol to deal with feelings that were otherwise impossible for me to cope with.
Suddenly, as a guy who has shouted "what are you running from?" at Bay to Breakers celebrants, what had been a joke became a dark and profound awareness. It turns out, I was asking myself that question. Running, paradoxically, helped give me the emotional resilience to face what I was running from head on.
There are very few things in this world that cost you nothing, are equally available to everyone, and can automatically, reliably and immediately improve your subjective experience.
This is a brilliant joke, and I love it. But the flip side is that almost everyone I know that ever got into running has Been Through Some Shit, is aware that running is annoying, not very fun, and kind of cringe, and Does Not Care, because whatever it is, running helps.
All of which is to say — you can think of run clubs as support groups, for everyone who has found themselves with a good reason to run, to be seen by other people who Know. For many runners I know, it's impossible to hate them anymore than they used to hate themselves. So, bring on the jokes.
Any time I have run (other than in an intentionally limited scenario like a sport) I have wondered “why am I not instead riding a bicycle or rollerblades.” We if we ever need a phrase for reinventing the wheel but, like, simpler and worse, I propose “doing a run.”
Ok I'll bite. I go running with my kids before school a few times a week. Usually a mile, but sometimes longer if time permits and we feel up to it. It's a very low-barrier activity - all you need to do is put on shoes. If we're not feeling 100%, we'll walk portions of it.
I always feel euphoric when I get back - it's a much better way to wake up than slamming coffee (although I do that too). And it improves my kids' mood and focus in the morning. I get a few minutes to chat with my kids on the cooldown walking home. They are able to improve their stamina, which makes them better athletes (they really love sports).
It's one of the highlights of my day, and my kids seem to enjoy it enough put down their iDevices for a few minutes in the morning. Sometimes it can be a bit unpleasant getting started, but that feeling usually passes within a minute or two. We could do some other activity instead - but I can't think of much that beats running when it comes to benefit vs simplicity and time commitment.
Just wanted to add a positive perspective on running. And I'm a cyclist, not a runner.
How do you guys still have knees? I've not been doing high-impact sports, just tennis a few hours a week for a few years, and my left knee always hurts now. Am I just unlucky?
Tennis is a sport that I think of as being especially punishing on knees - with all the quick changes in direction on hard surfaces.
In the past I had some issues with my IT band when I used to run longer distances. I was able to clear it up by using a foam roller in combination with other stretches. These days I have issues with my achilles/calf, which I’m sure I could clear up with a combination of strengthening, stretching, and weight loss - but instead have just been sticking to slower speeds and shorter distances. Cushioned shoes helped, too.
It may be worth seeing a sports or physical therapist. It’s amazing how much of a difference a strengthening exercise can make. Or if you’re like me and don’t like seeing doctors, there are a lot of physical therapy videos on YouTube to try out.
Last suggestion I have is to look into cycling. I ride with lots of guys who took up cycling after ACL injuries, achilles injuries, etc., forced them to give up other sports. With a proper bike fit, I think you shouldn’t have any issues with your knees. And can be done both indoors and outdoors (smart trainers and Zwift have come a long way in making stationary bikes more fun, though still not as fun as outdoors).
This is all good advice, thank you. I saw an ortho doctor, he recommended weight training, which I am doing, and cycling is my favorite cardio, so I need to do more of that.
Basically, I guess "exercise the thing up to the point where it starts hurting" is the general advice for this kind of thing. I just hope the pain can go away so I can enjoy tennis again.
Running mechanics also greatly impact injury risk. One of the best suggestions I got was to drastically increase my cadence, which forced me to go from longer (more powerful) strides to shorter (lower impact) strides. My observation is it also shifted much of the load from my lower legs (knees and ankles) to my core (hips and glutes).
I took up running in 1978. I don't run as often, let alone as far, as I did 40 years ago, but I still enjoy it. As the parent comment says, it's quick and easy to lace on the shoes.
If you weren’t doing any activity before, the pain is probably related to muscle imbalances, (relative) overtraining or similar. Obviously not a doctor but the takeaway shouldn’t be that exercise is bad, more that years of inactivity leads to serious atrophy that later causes injury when activity levels pick up.
The proposed solution for “public order” matters a lot. If your solution sounds like “we should dump even more money into SFPD so that paranoid residents of Walnut Creek will feel safer riding BART to go shopping in Union Square, whether or not more police actually make them safer,” no one is going to support this.
Unfortunately, thanks to the paywall, we have no idea what the proposed solution actually is.
Being able to cut complex shapes on site for art builds, where a designer knows Illustrator but nothing about tool paths, has paid for my Shaper Origin several times over already.
This is true and we do not talk about it enough. Moreover, Capitalism is itself an unaligned AI, and understanding it through that lens clarifies a great deal.
People experience existential terror from AI because it feels like massive, pervasive, implacable forces that we can't understand or control, with the potential to do great harm to our personal lives and to larger social and political systems, where we have zero power to stop it or avoid it or redirect it. Forces that benefit a few at the expense of the many.
What many of us are actually experiencing is existential terror about capitalism itself, but we don't have the conceptual framework or vocabulary to describe it that way.
It's a cognitive shortcut to look for a definable villain to blame for our fear, and historically that's taken the form of antisemitism, anti-migrant, anti-homeless, even ironically anti-communist, and we see similar corrupted forms of blame in antivax and anti-globalist conspiracy thinking, from both the left and the right.
While there are genuine x-risk hazards from AI, it seems like a lot of the current fear is really a corrupted and misplaced fear of having zero control over the foreboding and implacable forces of capitalism itself.
Probably not even that specific, more like an underlying fear that 8 billion people interacting in a complex system will forever be beyond the human capacity to grasp.
So, this has happened multiple times. Its best case.example.is.eugenics, where "intellectuals" believe.they can degermine what.the best traits are.in a.complex system and prune sociery to achieve some perfect outcomr.
The peoblrm, of course, is the sysyrm is complex, filled with hidden variables.and humans will tend to focus entirrly on phenotypes which are the easiest to observe.
Thesr modrls will do the same humanbbiased selection and grabitateb to a substatially vapid mean.
Well, we do have a conceptual framework and vocabulary for massive, pervasive and implacable forces beyond our understanding - it's the framework and vocabulary of religion and the occult. It has actually been used to describe capitalism essentially since capitalism itself, and it's been used explicitly as a framework to analyze it at least since Deleuze. Arguably, since Marx : as far as I'm aware, he was the first to personalize capital as an actor in and of itself.
tl;dr: Fear of the unknown. The problem is more and more people don't know anything about anything, and so are prone to rejecting and retaliating against they don't understand while not making any effort to understand before forming an emotionally-based opinion.
Some people (including myself) only need cars for long-distance trips where air or train travel is not feasible, and for most people, even if their car is mainly a grocery-getter, psychologically, they want to know they can drive across the country with it.
Software is in a constant state of revolution and counter-revolution. It’s one of the things that keeps this job interesting.