Penny-wise, pound-foolish isn’t a saying because it’s a total rarity. Plenty of people follow “common” practices that seem positive but are actually negative.
Cash is much easier to steal from your employer, let alone miscount, misplace, or even accidentally destroy. You’ll see most if not all of these outcomes occur if you work a service/retail job.
Are action or horror movies exploitation of the biological adrenaline drive? Every leisure activity is appealing to more than just hyper-rational thought.
> Conversely, in 1363, King Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball, football, or hockey; coursing and cock-fighting, or other such idle games",[7] suggesting that "football" may have been differentiated from games that involved other parts of the body.
IMO that blog series misses the point. Knowledgeable motivated developers can make great experiences with any technology, and conversely there are bad experiences built with every technology. That series blames the people involved for not being better, but that’s just blaming plane crashes on human error and calling it a day.
- If the UK GSD is anything like USDS, using them for comparison is like comparing a pro sports team to your local high school’s. They are an outlier specifically created to be better than the average, so tautologically their stuff will be better. Code For America is a similarly odd comparison.
- The US has a massive gap in pay and prestige between public and private sector developer jobs. It’s not that this means “worse” people work at public jobs, but in general they start less experienced and can wind up in a non-learning cycle as they don’t get mentorship/guidance from more expert folks, and if they do get good independently they leave. It’s really hard to convince people to take a pay cut to work these jobs, and many of the few willing to do so instead go to CFA, USDS, etc because they want prestige and avoid all the other inefficiencies in public jobs.
I could go on about the structural problems leading to this, but suffice it to say that blaming React and other JS frameworks is a miss. For some services it’s lucky they are online at all, and a slow web page is still orders of magnitude faster than physical mail or god forbid going to a physical office. The sites could definitely be better but this is not fundamentally a problem of technology choice.
I'm sorry, but I really don't understand the point you're making here.
Frameworks have evolved over time, as we've identified better ways of doing things and as the browsers have implemented native solutions to problems that frameworks were invented to address.
For example, we don't use dojo anymore. Or ember. Or backbone. The list of once-popular frameworks that have faded is long.
The point that I (and and increasing number of other developers) have been making for a while now is that React has hit this stage. Many of the problems it was invented to solve are mostly not currently relevant as native solutions have become more widely adopted.
This has caused React to evolve into bloatware in an effort to maintain mind share. I think that evolution has had the opposite effect. I think it has driven many developers to seek simpler solutions.
I think it's completely valid to recognize framework's strengths and (especially) weaknesses. You can call this "blame" or just a justified critique.
I agree with your point that lower-skilled developers can make a mess out of any technology, but one of the supposed benefits to adopting a framework is to provide guard rails against this. If that's not working, it makes you question the fundamental value of using a framework at all.
Or it implies that society and technology have advanced in the meantime, expanding the scope of what the government is expected to do. For instance, at the end of WWII we did not have the federal highway system but the nation is much better off for that on-going expenditure. Most government interaction is now possible online which requires expensive staff and infra to maintain, but is certainly an improvement over having to do everything in person.
And to use your direct comparison, can you imagine what the data would look like if the US economy actually pivoted to a war footing with the existential urgency akin to that during WWII (which was vastly more expensive than WWI even)?
> For instance, at the end of WWII we did not have the federal highway system but the nation is much better off for that on-going expenditure.
The federal highway budget is $60 billion. It probably isn't spending the money particularly efficiently, but it's also only 1% of the federal budget.
> Most government interaction is now possible online which requires expensive staff and infra to maintain, but is certainly an improvement over having to do everything in person.
Shouldn't this result in lower costs? You need a $100,000 system administrator instead of two dozen $40,000 clerks, but that doesn't sum to a larger number.
> And to use your direct comparison, can you imagine what the data would look like if the US economy actually pivoted to a war footing with the existential urgency akin to that during WWII (which was vastly more expensive than WWI even)?
It's not obvious that it would dramatically change, because the US already maintains an enormous standing army, and much of the other expenditures are in the nature of assistance for low income people, which would be displaced by those people getting drafted into the war, or obviated because they're meant to offset e.g. high rents, which would decline with local demand if 10% of the population left the continent to go fight in a foreign land.
> Most government interaction is now possible online which requires expensive staff and infra to maintain, but is certainly an improvement over having to do everything in person.
This is the sort of rhetoric from pro-waste activists that just sends me over the edge.
Actually, no. The federal government today is less pleasant to interact with due to the online systems. However, the online systems are supposed to make it cheaper. If you're saying we're paying more for worse service, then we should axe the online systems. Duh.
The few times I've had to interact with the feds, I now just escalate direct to my house representative and get a person on the line who can actually fix something directly. Much more pleasant. And if that's cheaper, we should do that.
"welfare" [1] is generally a distinct concept from "public goods" [2]
Welfare is typically ment to mean policies to alleviate the hardships of poverty. These can be wealth transfers or socialized insurance policies to reduce the variability of outcomes.
Public goods are services like roads, courts, or firemen.
That’s a pretty glib stance. Plenty of people have difficulty finding a friend group and not everyone can be an island until they do (see the loneliness epidemic). Perhaps consider that there are other people with different life situations than yours for whom demanding individualized treatment does not work, and they may have much less choice about what technologies they have to use as a result.
You need app Foo on your phone for work (like Slack, maybe). Foo is in the App Store and worked great on your iPhone but decides they want to install via their own store so they can monetize employees’ data (location, whatever) to make more money. The new store launches, the new app version abuses private APIs, and the App Store version stops working. Your company announces that all employees need to download from the new source. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Sure, neither your company nor Foo should suck, but we all know plenty of companies that don’t care about employees or users.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?
Those examples all sound like issues that should be dealth with by appropriate laws instead of hoping that the maffia ends up protecting you from worse criminals.
You can't install lineage OS on an iPhone. The answer to gaining control shouldn't be to buy different hardware when you have perfectly good hardware capable of also offering that control.
You can't install it on an iPhone and on Android it doesn't pass SafetyNet, IE. no more payments, no banking apps, no national ID apps, no drivers license app, etc.
Given that GraphQL makes much more sense for big orgs, I wouldn’t be surprised if much of that code is locked up in private repos that LLMs can’t get to.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish isn’t a saying because it’s a total rarity. Plenty of people follow “common” practices that seem positive but are actually negative.
Cash is much easier to steal from your employer, let alone miscount, misplace, or even accidentally destroy. You’ll see most if not all of these outcomes occur if you work a service/retail job.