to be absolutely nerve-wracking. Not hard to do but it's just batshit crazy and breaks the whole idea of how web crawlers are supposed to work. On the other hand, we had trouble with people (who we know want to crawl us specifically) crawling a site where you visit
http://example.com/item/448828
and it loads an SPA which in turn fetches a well-structured JSON documents like
with no cache so it downloads megabytes of HTML, Javascript, Images and who knows what -- and if they want to deal with the content in a structured way and it put it in a database it's already in the exact format they want. But I guess it's easier to stand up a Rube Goldberg machine and write parsers when you could look at our site in the developers tools and figure out how it works in five minutes... and just load those JSON documents into a document database and be querying right out of the gate.
What I would want is to GET http://example.com/item/448828 with an Accept header of ‘application/s-expression,application/json;q=0.1’ instead of retrieving the HTML representation of the resource. HTTP is the API.
it felt like this was an opportunity for AI craze to adopt on top of the existing standards, instead they all invented their own stuff with llm.txt and MCP *sigh*
Yep, `useSearchParams()`. At work I built a wrapper to incorporate zod schemas for typesafe search param state. Nuqs is the best for this if your application meets its prerequisites: https://nuqs.47ng.com/
Lots of bold assertions without evidence. Author claims Google's high salaries killed entrepreneurship. Is there any data to back this claim?
Or the idea that democracy can't adapt to social media discourse; not everyone is chronically online. Politicians still respond to public sentiment to similar degree as they always have.
Then there's this:
> AI systems aren't just tools—they're deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications.
If they aren't just tools, what are they? Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications?
Post feels like a fever dream of someone who fell asleep to the Navalmanack audiobook.
Your broader point may stand but that’s not a counter argument if you give the original claim the benefit of the doubt: it can reasonably be interpreted as referencing lifestyle oriented businesses, niche b2b companies, anything small growth with a low ceiling.
Counting unicorns only serves to bolster that point : those are large VC fueled ships which operate on a completely different level. Because it is clear at founding time which type of company they are , it’s reasonable to include that as a qualifier.
Now if the data showed more small-growth companies were started , that’d be a stronger counter argument.
What do businesses need? Startup capital. What’s a good way to obtain it? Having a high salary and saving.
The counter argument is that high salaries enable more people to save and take risk rather than just those that start out wealthy.
The main counter is that people get comfortable and don’t take risks is definitely true, but I’m not sure how much that impacts the amount of entrepreneurship that would have otherwise happened.
This makes sense so long as you define “entrepreneurship” as the act of making a legal entity with the goal of using venture capital to hit a billion dollar valuation as quickly as possible.
In fact since the number of billion dollar valuations goes up by an order of magnitude every few years we are on track for every person on earth to start a billion dollar corporation in a few short decades. This is proof that you could see on Wikipedia that entrepreneurship is doing great
Given the frequent "it's not X—it's Y" type of constructions, lack of researched data, and the em-dashes, unfortunately I think this is the fever dream of a GPU cluster humming away somewhere.
The only thing worse than the author claiming that is you asking for "data". Like what data? This is qualitative. And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke
It’s always kind of funny when people respond to a subjective opinion with “where’s the data?” because unless you’re responding with data it’s pretty much just a way of saying “I don’t like this”
The blog post makes a bold claim about how the rise of tech salaries at Google killed entrepreneurship. The poster could have at least given this a sniff test: how about, for example, showing a graph of Google salaries overlaid with a graph of the number of start-ups from the crunchbase database? As he didn't even go to this minimum effort, it's valid to ask "where's the data" here.
This is a good point. When somebody says something “killed” an intangible thing, they are obviously speaking literally. Honestly we don’t even need a graph, surely if he’s alleging a murder he would be able to produce the weapon, like a knife or a gun
Now obviously someone could mistakenly interpret that sentiment as “incredibly high salaries attracted talent of such caliber that they could have started their own companies but did not” but that simply can’t be possible because there is no graph that shows all of the businesses that didn’t happen, therefore it is literal.
It’s not like anybody on here has worked with somebody that could easily have started their own company but chose SWE at a FAANG. It’s just not a thing
> And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke
To me, it reads like a desperate far-fetched argument to deny employees a fair compensation for their work. As if there is any virtue in stiffing people out of their paycheck.
With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise the next generation of influencers.
Yes Google’s high salaries are part of a system that has been reworking entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This has been documented and discussed at length. Did you look for data?
Big tech pays in valuable stock, and salaries can reach upwards of 500k for relative rank and file positions (not rare one offs). Over a decade, that’s $5M. At the same time, VC firms have been holding companies private longer raising more rounds, which often dilutes the employee shares and reduces the “reward” for employees waiting for an IPO. If that new diluted IPO rewards an employee under $5M for a decade of employment, they were better off at Google/Meta/etc. Startups were always a lottery ticket, but if a “winning” ticket is less profitable than not playing, why join at all?
This plays directly into the thesis that the powerful are extracting additional resources at the expense of the cultural expectations and understandings. VC firms diluting employees is profitable for VCs, but it jeopardizes the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem if smart people prefer better compensation. Same with the recent AI aqui-hire controversies like Windsurf. Why join a startup if the CEO will take a billion dollar payout and leave the employees with worthless stock.
>Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications?
I would guess that the argument for wanting a framework for understanding language models’ social implications would be the social implications of language models. Like a phenomenon existing is a valid argument for understanding it.
Do you have data to support this? What does “chronically” mean and why would its absence invalidate the idea of social media impacting how people act and vote?
I wrote a lot more below, but I think you've picked up on two important things here:
1. This post seems likely to have been written with the assistance of a chatbot, which explains this phrase. The "they aren't just tools" phrase is only there because he needed a third example for a "it's not just X--it's Y" paragraph, one of ChatGPT's all-time fave constructions.
2. Another cause is more fundamental: the third "leverage" doesn't really apply to this discussion IMO. It's probably useful elsewhere, but owning a large social media company is just a different variety of capital, not some mutually-exclusive group. All expressions of capitalist power in 2025 have some amount of technological amplification going on.
This is a blog post not a research paper. The evidence is anecdotal and most people with common sense know it by intuition all the facts that the author mentions.
WinterCG is trying to help standardize web APIs to address these concerns. So one strategy when writing server-side js is to stick to standard APIs as much as possible.
If you do want to leverage runtime-specific code you can isolate that code in separate modules, so if you ever do need to migrate off a particular runtime it's easier to identify/replace that code.
Ultimately it's all JavaScript, and since most of these runtimes are open source even if they're abandoned we might see community forks. Though even if your chosen runtime is completely without support, I don't see a migration off being an extremely urgent or difficult task for most projects.
This argument is tired and ignorant. Try building linear.app without a SPA framework. The idea that "Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing," is dubious at best.
This doesn't seem fair to say. Linear is special even among SPAs; it's by far not the norm. No one said "ban SPAs and remove javascript from the browser".
Linear's speed comes from being "offline-first", but I challenge you to name almost any other product in common usage that does it that way. It's just not common. On the other hand if I want to buy tickets I'd rather most of that website be SSR and do SPA where you actually still need it. Or forums, news sites, blogs, and informational sites.
There is so much out there that would be better developed with SSR and then use CSS to make it feel SPA-like than to actually be a SPA.
SPA means single page app. For example, Google docs, Figma, Google calendar, etc. Apps that use web technologies instead of being native apps.
A long time ago some webdevs started abusing the SPA concept to build simple websites. However that is not within the original meaning of the term SPA, because simple websites are not web apps. The author assumed that everyone would just understand that they are talking about SP"A"s and not SPAs, because for a certain subset of webdevs working on websites, the antonym of SPA is MPA, and it's normal to refer to your website as an "app". However for a certain other subset of webdevs, the antonym of SPA is simple website, and what the author is talking about are not SPAs at all.
Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability. In order to claim that "this is fine" you would need to refute the claim that deflation is bad.
> Which is equivalent to deflation, which parent suggests is harmful to bitcoin's viability.
Deflation is built into Bitcoin by design and is one of its most notable features regarding its coin growth schedule. This pros and cons of that approach have been discussed ad infinitum in the crypto community.
I wonder when did cypherpunks started to discuss this kind of mechanisms for digital currency. Was it obvious from day one or an idea that came later in the design phases.
Cypherpunks were discussing digital gold and Austrian economics in the 1990s. I wouldn't say there was any kind of consensus but the ideas were out there.
The finite nature of btc, low transaction volume, and increasing cost of mining made deflation a given. The original designers simply did not solve this problem. BTC’s dominance in the crypto community suggests that this trait was advantageous for BTCs growth as existing holders are incentivized to add additional use cases/transaction volume.
Not only were they already discussing it when I joined the list in 01992, cryptocurrency was a major, if implicit, part of Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto which I think he presented at Hackers in 01988: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...
He wasn't specifically calling it out as having a fixed money supply or even fungible tokens, though. And it wasn't until Satoshi figured out how to do without a central issuer like Xanadu, Digicash, or e-gold that we realized it was possible. At the time that Satoshi cut the knot, we were all convinced it was impossible because of Zooko's Triangle.
Chaum founded DigiCash in 01989, incidentally, based on a paper he wrote in 01982 presenting a cryptocurrency design for untraceable payments, but backed with dollars by a central issuer, like Tether.
However, there was always a strong association between cypherpunks and right-libertarian free-market ideology, which is where you find gold bugs and Austrian economists. You may remember that one of the minor plot points in Atlas Shrugged was that Galt's Gulch went back to specie money (tiny pennies stamped from gold) because its value wasn't dependent on government fiat.
There were early attempts at inflationary cryptocurrencies too but they didn't catch on; all other things being equal, people prefer to hold currencies that gain value over time, not lose value.
Given the context, "this is fine" is obviously an ironic reference to the cartoon dog sitting on a chair at the dining room table with a mug of coffee in a burning house meme.
Normally I would say you're right, but I read the context opposite to you; I read the "fine" as a straight/literal statement: the author of "this is fine" is disputing the author's parent's statement that "this can be considered [a bug]".
Ryan's post explaining the decision to trademark node seems pretty reasonable to me. Does Oracle have a similarly credible justification for maintaining the JavaScript trademark?
AFAIK Sun gave Netscape free use of the JavaScript Trademark purely to side with Netscape against Microsoft in the browser wars, language wars, etc. I would think there is still something related to the original agreement.
It looks like JScript is still trademarked by Microsoft, why not ask them to do whatever the community thinks is right for ECMAScript names and then we can all refer to the language a little faster?
This is not aligned with how most Americans view higher education:
- Democrats have a more positive view of how colleges impact the country
- Democrats have higher confidence that professors act in the public interest
- Republicans are more likely to view higher education as moving in the wrong direction
- Democrats are relatively unconcerned about professors bringing political/social views into the classroom, compared to republicans who are very concerned
> If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.
Hierarchy is a natural consequence of variation in skills, experience, and work ethic. Meanwhile, the author's definition provided for "left" is so squiggly as to be nearly meaningless. It almost sounds like the mythical, non-totalitarian brand of communism that just hasn't quite worked yet:
> "Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life.
In other words, "left" has hierarchy, but only begrudgingly, and other than that we're very virtuous.
It's truly difficult to get past this opening argument. If you're going to make a shocking claim (higher ed is right wing), you can't start with such a shaky foundation. What would a non-hierarchical University system even look like? Harvard being more prestigious than my local community college does not make higher education right wing.
I'm unconvinced. The article cites Airbnb and "the internet" as evidence:
> After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools.
One company's redesign + random proofs of concept does not indicate a real trend, and the idea that LLMs make designing with dimensionality in mind more accessible is dubious.
Good design requires consistency. High dimensionality makes consistency harder to achieve. LLMs perform better when there are fewer design nuances to consider. Additionally, we can expect LLMs to reinforce existing trends, as they're all trained on what exists today.
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