I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything

The blockchain hosting companies like infura live by offering API access to ethereum, solana, binance smart chain, etc. I’d say they are now rather hosting companies because these blockchains are huge and a PITA to host reliably, but back in 2017 it was possible to host them on a personal computer

Am I the only one thinking that going back full circle to server side rendering, but to a way more convoluted way of having it, is actually a regression rather than evolution technologically? We had SSR since the times of Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and even express. But in a way more straight forward way of doing it: here’s some HTML, with some db queries that takes data, puts it in said HTML and sends it to the browser. Today we have react components that can be executed both on the server and on the client, we need at least 2 servers - one for the frontend and one for the backend, we have to hydrate the components when we render them server side, but not when rendering them in the browser, etc. I feel like we’re inventing stuff just because we can and there’s a huge cohort of engineers who complicate their development experience just because.

You are not the only one thinking this. A couple of years ago I was working with some people who were using next.js.

For some feature they wanted, they explained to me how nextjs has this great "feature", which was "really exciting" and allowed all kinds of fancy stuff that I've been doing since about 2003. They were going to turn on next's server-side rendering.

My immediate reaction was to point out "congratulations, you've just reinvented PHP, only with a much much worse language and two extra servers".

A lot of these "solutions" use three servers, not the two you mention: you use one server you don't have any control over, e.g google static hosting, to host the "compiled" static stuff - then you have that point at a server running node and another copy of all your terrible javascript, and then finally a third server running some more sensible stack, which could easily and more cleanly do the job of the other two using tech that isn't trash.

It's called "progress", and people like you and me just need to get with the times, it seems.

It has been full circle indeed. React is great for front-end development but with the need for having some pre-rendering (e.g. SEO) it's understandable why server-side re-entered the picture. However, with Next it has been slower build times and various twists and turns (a lot of the same things PHP was always bashed for). That's why for SPA apps we now default to Vite + react-router for a 10x speed up in build times on the same hardware.

It’s primarily the react crowd specifically who have been off doing their own thing for many years at this point and never seem to look outside their ecosystem and are stuck in this bizarre infinite loop of just reinventing the wheel constantly, never really improving anything just chasing one new buzzword after another. It’s really unlike any other dev or engineering ecosystem I’ve ever seen in over 25 years.

I used to be a hard core stackoverflow contributor back in the day. At one point, while trying to have my answers more appreciated (upvoted and accepted) I became basically a sychophant, prefixing all my answers with “that’s a great question”. Not sure how much of a difference it made, but I hope LLMs can filter that out

Chess puzzles work quite accurately IME to assess my mental capabilities for the day. Especially the puzzle storm on lichess. There are enough puzzles there to not repeat themselves too often and they are rated so they have similar difficulty for the same rating. In my good days (lots of sleep in previous nights) I have way better scores than on my bad days (30-40% better)

Getting big Taravangian vibes here.

A bit unrelated, but try having l theanine after a night of drinking: it makes you wake up fresh and without a hangover because it speeds up alcohol processing and it metabolites by the liver and also prevents alcoholic liver damage. Me and all my friends who tried it say “i wake up totally fresh after theanine”. There’s also a study confirming this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16141543/

But once that bubble (and any other one) burst, it never reached new highs again. The bitcoin bubble burst multiple times and got back higher and higher

flowers and digital currency are not the same.

I think “puzzle storms” on lichess can be considered a way of fiddling with chess instinctively. I found it also helps with not giving pieces for free when playing full games and also seeing the blunders your opponent makes way faster

I read some time ago on twitter something along the lines of “if you run enough A/B tests, you’ll end up with a porn website” and I guess that’s what the future of high-engagement-web reserves us