• can AI replace the job of a real programmer, or a team of software engineers? Probably not for a long time.
• can manager abuse the fantasy that they could get rid of those pesky engineers that dare telling them something is impossible? Yes totally. If they believe adding an AI tool to a team justifies a 200% increase in productivity. Some managers will fire people against all metrics and evidence. Calling that move a success. Same occurred when they try to outsource code to cheaper teams.

The first pass of elm ecosystem solved it. Before elm, it was also solved by other frameworks. But people wanted to be able to reuse their components and not rebuild new ones. React provided the ability to reuse css, and dirty js code in the middle of your application. You already had an way bigger ecosystem because you didn’t have to learn and built a complete new system again.

Personally if I had the choice I believe a new start should start at the browser level. Stop supporting HTML/CSS/JS. Create a new app-centric DSL and not a document centric one like html/css/js.

Ideally something inspired from cocoa layout. And I am dreaming but not accept generic code on the client side and only support a small controlled API. It would solve so many security issues. Sure, the creativity in such an ecosystem will be severely reduced. But we will have a so much improved UX.

If you don’t want to go full Cloudflare you can mitigate DDOS using these kind of technique locally.

https://blog.nginx.org/blog/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-nginx-and-nginx-plus

Cloudflare will be a lot more effective in case of attack. But I don’t think most people need more than a few mitigation rules. If DDOS really come, there are very few things you could do to mitigate anyway.

I think unlike Google, there are still many pure engineers that need to contribute to open source to be motivated and are still have some power.

I feel, but I am not sure, that for Google, thing have switched more and faster to the side of Big soulless corps.

Generally speaking my experience is that even in these big soulless corps there are positive and passionate people. But quite often they do not have enough decision power to have a positive impact.

S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn’t know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).

Just for anyone thinking you are serious; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression I love how S-expression existed.

McCarthy had planned to develop an automatic Lisp compiler (LISP 2) using M-expressions as the language syntax and S-expressions to describe the compiler’s internal processes. Stephen B. Russell read the paper and suggested to him that S-expressions were a more convenient syntax. Although McCarthy disapproved of the idea, Russell and colleague Daniel J. Edwards hand-coded an interpreter program that could execute S-expressions.[2] This program was adopted by McCarthy’s research group, establishing S-expressions as the dominant form of Lisp.

I would suggest Helvix or Helvim

Technically, sleep sort is O(n), so faster than the theoretical optimal sorting algorithm O(n.log n) … not so bad ;)

I would use reagent and reitit if I had to start a new project. But the best tools are generally not the most popular (unintuitively).

Can a line be a cat? I love kittens.

I don’t see how this could be prevented.

There are already many “small web” movements. With different proposals. Like gemini, sub-set of currently supported web standards (typically no-js, no-css, no POST, etc…)

But the monetized web is doomed to reach a point were it will be controlled in such a way that you will not be able to block ads, not be able to hide your pseudonymous identity.

I remember reading an article many years ago about the cat and mouse game between ads publishers and ad-blockers. The conclusion were that in the end, ads blocker will lose the final war. And with these kind of system we are closer and closer to reach it.

I think we need to collectively find a way to have sub-nets. For example declare that our website conform to certain sub-net properties.

• no-ads
• privacy (no cookie/no js/no user-agent header/no canvas, no css)
• etc…

The small webs are different for everyone. It would be very nice if we could put an HTML header that would list which small webs pattern this page is compatible with. And have a browser that would adapt to your preferences and also a way to filter your small-web preferences in search engine.

The closest to this we have today is probably gemini. But this a very small but friendly web. I am sure we could find other solutions to create an alternative “respecting his users” web.

“Do the right thing” in corporate speak generally means to obey some business conduct to prevent any risk for the company to be sued. Mainly, take care of interest conflicts. Do not personally contribute to hide such issue and there should even be an internal team taking care that if you tell the truth your managers could not retaliate.

Mainly, “Do the right thing” is about protecting Google. Not “Do the right thing for the world and strive for progress”.

Google stopped to try to create progress. Instead they just need innovation. This is what they are after. Innovation, not progress anymore.

“The congress” is coming closer.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/152795-the-congress

I understand why some people might not like this movie. But I think about it a few times a week. And one major part of the scenario is about a famous actor giving her digital copy to a studio and the unforeseen consequences.