erm, no? React has painted itself into a usability and optimisation nightmare corner by insisting that components are the most granular level of resctivity.
That's why they need 20 different hooks to do anything.
Tough luck, something is coming from my end at some point this year.
The remix guys are coming with something too.
You won't force me to useReact, sorry... ;D
Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America.
The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else. We can see the economic crisis' in the US first in the 70s/80s with Europe and Japan rebounding, then again in 90s/00s with China and East Asia growing, and now again with the rest of the world growing (esp Latin America, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, etc). Unless US physically invades and devastates China, India or Brazil the competition will keep getting exponentially higher. It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.
In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.
> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.
I assume the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.
The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.
Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted but they forget that there are a large number of fellow citizens in the economically disconnected underclass who never had a good opportunity to learn those basics. As a society we've never done a good job of lifting those people up.
> On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted
I don't see your point.
Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.
This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?
There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.
If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.
As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.
The productive decline of the farms is because of the fast-track land reform. Before 2000-2001, there were no effective national programs to prepare the people to run the farms. The opposition party was gaining ground, and so to stay in power, the ruling party rushed the land reform with no preparation.
Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.
Well, for the reason I said. You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility from everyone involved, but that's just an example of how to reframe things. It's not actually useful.
> You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility
No, the comment you're replying to pretty clearly put the responsibility on the party that "rushed the land reform with no preparation".
And also accurately noted that a nation seizing capital and redistributing it to people who don't know how to use it is rather different from what had been the thread topic of personal skills / useful habits being purportedly unattainable by the lower classes without explicit instruction.
What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.
But we have. The underclass today has much better lives in many aspects than the highest class from many decades ago. The absolute level of wealth has increased, it's simply that the delta between the high and the low is widening.
Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter
> I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.
This is wrong.
The increase in administrator pay began well after the crises cited in OP.
You could cite spending on the sciences (and thus Silicon Valley), but the spending by the US did not accrue to administrators; and further, federal money primarily goes to grants and loans, but GP is citing a time over which there were relatively low increases in tuition.
Edit: Not at home, but even a cursory serious search will turn up reports like this one that indicate the lack of clarity in the popular uprising against money "[going] to administrators"
> For universities, yes. But not for primary education. Administrative bloat is the worst in K-12.
First, where is your data?
Second, this discussion is clearly about post-secondary education ("the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.")
Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.
Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.
>>> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.
>> What does this sentence mean?
> Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.
Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?
Cheaper education? Public K-12 schools, the GI bill, generous state subsidies of higher education (such that you could pay for college with the money you made working a summer job).
Free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support? Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.
> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?
Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels. I work in edutech and our goal is to cut costs faster than revenue. Enrolments are down, students are over burdened with student loans, and new grads can't compete in the market.
Also, do you think kids going to K-12 in the US can compete with kids who go to international schools in China and India? High end schools in those countries combine the Asian grind mindset with western education standards.
> Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.
This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs. "It takes a village to raise a child" is a common western idiom based on centuries of observations. Just because there was 20-30 years of unnatural economic growth doesn't make it the global or historical norm.
Education is a tough one. Like healthcare, it's highly subject to Baumol's Cost Disease. Technology holds some potential but fundamentally we still need a certain ratio of teachers to students, and those teachers get more expensive every year.
Education should be well funded. But at the same time, taxpayers are skeptical because increasing funding doesn't necessarily improve student outcomes. Students from stable homes with aspirational parents in safe neighborhoods will tend to do well even with meager education funding, and conversely students living in shitholes will tend to do badly regardless of how good the education system is. If we want to improve their lot then we need to fix broader social issues that go beyond just education. Anyone who has gotten involved with a large school district has seen the enormous waste that goes to paying multiple levels of administrators, and education "consultants" chasing the latest ineffective fad. Much of it is just a grift.
>> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?
> Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels.
So? That's not really relevant to the historical period you were referring to when you said: "It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs."
At the time, Americans already had many of the things you're saying they should've invested in to get. How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?
> This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs.
Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?
I think you should be more explicit about how you think things should be for families. Because going on an on about how the times when things were easier was "unnatural" may create the wrong impression.
Also keep in mind where talking about human society here, the concept of "natural" has very little to do with any of it. What were really talking about is the consequence of the internal logic of this or that set of artificial cultural practices.
> How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?
By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. By 1955 there should have been alarm bells ringing as Europe re-industrialized. Same with 70s oil crisis but the best that US could do was to cripple Japan with Plaza Accords.
Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.
> Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?
Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.
> By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. ... Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.
That's not realistic, except in hindsight. Most people everywhere pay more attention to their immediate environment and living their lives. Not speculating about what is the global economy is going to look like in 50 years, and how would those changes affect them personally.
You're talking about stuff only some PhD at RAND would be doing (or would have the ability to do) in the 1960s.
Without the democratic pressure of common people either 1) having a need or 2) seeing things get worse, no changes like you describe would happen.
> Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.
What's natural?
And more importantly: how do you think things should be for families.
Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US.
China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment.
GCC = global consulting companies, the bane of innovation. Outsourcing of all kinds (even domestic C2C) should be banned.
That & the differing levels of patent application per capita across Europe suggests that patent applications are directly related to work/life balance & perhaps some sort of infonomic aggregation & doesn't seem to support any correlation with quality of life.
You don't understand what's happening in China. Advanced cancer treatments are generally not even available to poor people. Instead of becoming homeless due to medical expenses they just die. The US healthcare system has serious problems with access and efficiency but it's at or near the top worldwide in terms of cancer survival rates.
Chinese society is more "metastable" than really stable. The Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre weren't that long ago. Chinese history going back millennia is full of violent revolutions and civil wars. Xi Jinping has been able to keep a lid on things lately through brutal purges of all other potential power centers but times may get "interesting" again when he leaves power.
Were there a lot of imports at that time in terms of materials or labor or food? If not, I don’t really see how money flowing in from abroad actually changes the economy in this area. If the wood is harvested in America and the workers are in America and the wood and workers are available, then any amount of money value generated by everyone else will be sufficient to pay them, unless there is a significant stream of imports that need to be paid for (which I’m not aware of in this time period).
What could have made a big difference is if foreign competition arose for American materials and land, which it did. But that is under our control, we collectively can choose whether to allow them to buy it or not, and whether to let people in at a rate that outpaces materials discovery and harvesting capabilities.
We also restricted materials harvesting quite a bit during this time period, for example I believe a lot of forestry protections were not in place yet.
So you're saying that working-class living standards are a zero-sum competition across capitalist countries, even negative-sum as competing national economies grow their total output and hourly productivity?
>The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else.
The US just renamed "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" and they seem willing to go to any extreme to "Make America Great Again". Threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama already in the first few months of the current administration. Using US military on US soil. There's no line they won't cross. WW3 isn't off the table at all, unfortunately.
> Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America....
> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.
So, what's your point? That the plebs shouldn't expect that much comfort?
A common maxim across all cultures is to "manage expectations" for happiness.
And while comparing societal standards expand the time horizon to 100 years, not nitpick one specific unnatural era of history.
An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.
The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.
Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.
> An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.
> The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.
You know were not really talking about top-end positions like automotive engineers in Detroit in 1960. I think we're talking more about automotive factory workers in Detroit in 1960.
> Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.
You need to be more explicit about how you think things should be for the common man.
I hope you understand the concept of relative prosperity - The current equivalent would be a factory worker at Boeing. In 60s cars were innovative in US, now Nigeria can outcompete China in cars.
Times change, standards rise, competition increases. If America wants to remain competitive globally you need to work in the top 1% fields like you did back in 60s, not expecting $25 per hour for flipping burgers (which should have been automated with robots by now).
Everywhere else being destroyed doesn't raise your standards of living. The main difference is the difference between post-war East Germany and West Germany. One got socialism and the other capitalism.
This could be because of developer fatigue and the trend of forcing backend devs to do fullstack.
Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.
I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.
But react is where developer fatigue is most endemic. Since it only does one thing, that typically means you have to import a dozen other libraries that are mostly "flavors of the month" captured in time. You can easily tell when a react project was started based solely on it's dependencies. This is bad because it typically means no two react projects will use the same dependencies.
These dependencies are the root of the issue.
FWIW, I've only ever professionally work with react on the frontend. For nearly 10 years too. My first job I was doing react.createElement() before classes were shortly introduced afterwards.
It's time that we move on to something better, and the react foundation being controlled by private entities while not being an actual democratic foundation is a good omen of what to expect.
> Since it only does one thing, that typically means you have to import a dozen other libraries that are mostly "flavors of the month" captured in time.
By weird happenstance I got a job writing in a half-dead, compiles-to-JS language 5 years ago. There's one way to handle state in it. My view on the libraries you need to handle everything-but-view in React has been "I'll come back to these when the dust settles" and it just never settles.
Google does - Google search and maps have gotten objectively worse over the past 2 years. At least in Canada.
I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.
Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.
Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.
Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?
It IS unreasonable to trust individual humans across the globe in 100+ different jurisdictions pushing code that gets bundled into my application.
How can you guarantee a long trusted developer doesn't have a gun pointed to their head by their authoritarian govt?
In our B2B shop we recently implemented a process where developers cannot add packages from third party sources - only first party like meta, google, spring, etc are allowed. All other boilerplate must be written by developers, and on the rare occasion that a third party dependency is needed it's copied in source form, audited and re-hosted on our internal infrastructure with an internal name.
To justify it to business folks, we presented a simple math where I added the man-hours required to plug the vulnerabilities with the recurring cost of devsecops consultants and found that it's cheaper to reduce development velocity by 20-25%.
Also devsecops should never be offshored due to the scenario I presented in my second statement.
You've presented your argument as if rebutting mine, but to my mind you've reinforced my first paragraph:
* You are trusting large numbers of trustworthy developers.
* You have established a means of validating their trustworthiness: only trust reputable "first-party" code.
I think what you're doing is a pretty good system. However, there are ways to include work by devs who lack "first-party" bona-fides, such as when they participate in group development where their contributions are consistently audited. Do you exclude packages published by the ASF because some contributions may originate from troublesome jurisdictions?
In any case, it is not necessary to solve the traitorous author problem to address the attack vector right in front of us, which is compromised authors.
I'd be interested in smarter ways of doing this, but currently I just use my CLAUDE.local.md to serve as the index.md in my example. It includes the 'specialist' .md files with their relative paths and descriptions, and tells Claude Code to use these when planning.
I also have explicit `xnew`, `xplan`, `xcode` and `xcheck` commands in CLAUDE.md that reinforce this. For example, here's my `xnew`:
## Remember Shortcuts
Remember the following shortcuts, which the user may invoke at any time.
### XNEW
When I type "xnew", this means:
```Understand all BEST PRACTICES listed in CLAUDE.md.
Your code SHOULD ALWAYS follow these best practices.
REVIEW relevant documentation in .agents/ before starting new work.
Your code SHOULD use existing patterns and architectural decisions
documented there rather than creating new approaches.```
I used to love getting to know the interviewer and doing things like that but IMO the market has shifted fundamentally on both ends for this to be effective anymore for most SaaS roles. This is anecdotal for US/Canada tech market over the past 10 years so YMMV.
Developers Side:
Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.
Companies Side:
On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.
TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.
I meant the “grind”, short term profit mentality of SWE market has become similar to professionals in those fields, not that any of these fields are similar.
All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.
IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.
Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.
I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.
It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.
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