I think shopping gets this in spades too because not all shopping sites are meant to be particularly sticky.

It's one thing to browse the catalog at my leisure on gigabit networking, a 5k display and 16 CPU cores. It's another thing when I'm standing in Macy's or Home Depot and they don't quite have the thing I thought they have and I'm on my phone trying to figure out if I can drive half a mile to your store and get it. If you want to poach that sale your site better be fast, rather than sticky.

> Anything not related to rendering should be made async,

The thing with DOM interaction is that if you try to make it synchronous then it gets really fucking slow (reflow and friends). So you want it linearized for sanity reasons, but probably not sync.

The irony is that CSS works fairly okay for the small number of UI elements and web games that are decidedly not documents. Or perhaps that's not so much irony as filling in the gaps.

fairy okay is the key word.

Everything works fairly okay on modern hardware. I'm sure someone could build a 3d rendering engine using only table elements and css and it would run decently well.

There are hundreds of tools in the belt, people can use any of them to tighten down the screw, but it doesn't mean that they are the most efficient or best to use.

I would also say that a lot of web games are closer to documents than you think. A chess board could be seen as a document, it has tables and rows, the characters are just shaped different than the characters we write with.

Something like a racing sim again could be implemented in css but someone who actually understands how to use canvas is going to have a more efficient way to represent it.

The reason I'm a backend dev at the moment is that I looked at the React model and decided I didn't want anything to do with this insanity.

I've been appalled by how long and how broadly the mass hysteria lasted.

And what's crazy is with ai the percentage of apps developed using react in comparison to all other frameworks has INCREASED over the last 3 years.

It is truly mass hysteria, I would say that 95% of developers, project managers, and CTOs do not truly understand how these systems work under the hood, or at the very least are too scared and comfortable to try other systems. They just repeat the same things they hear and tell each other "react has a big ecosystem" "react is industry standard" "everyone uses react" "react was developed by facebook" "we will use react" "Developers only know react, how could we hire for a different framework?"

In my mind its clear that the alternatives are massively better. When i visit certain websites I often get a random tingle that it uses svelte because its way faster and has better loading and navigation than other sites and when i check the devtools I'm almost always correct.

I also get the same feeling sometimes when I hit a laggy slow webapp and I open the devtools and clearly see its a nextjs app.

A dev team could be trained on svelte or vue in literally 3 days, and so long as they actually understand how HTML, JS, and css work under the hood they would increase their speed massively. People just don't want to take the risk.

It is very hard to avoid when you have Vercel doing partnerships with SaaS cloud providers that end up supporting only React and Next.js on their SDKs.

Even if other programming stacks are supported, they tend to be 2nd or 3rd class versus anything React.

Look into the ecosystem of headless products that have jumped into the whole MACH architecture hype cycle.

Then you have to justify to upper management, and partner support when problems arise why you are not using their SDK.

To add, the other dominant force is Angular, very popular in enterprise settings. I don't understand why per se, it's very... verbose, every component needing a number of files. It (and also React) gets worse if you add a state system like RxJS.

My theory is that it's popular with back-end / OOP / Java / C# developers, because they're used to that kind of boilerplate and the boilerplate / number of files / separation of concerns gives them comfort and makes it "feel" good.

But also, like React, it's easier to find developers for it, and on a higher level this is more important than runtime performance etc. And continuity beats performance.

(I can't speak of its runtime performance or bundle size though)

There's 3x more React libraries and code out there to reference. AI agents do _a lot_ better with React than, say, SolidJS. So productivity > performance is a tradeoff that many companies seem to happily take.

People have no idea who they are hiring, so they hire people who have no idea what they are doing.

> they actually understand how HTML, JS, and css work under the hood they would increase their speed massively.

Indeed, Svelte is built directly on web standards so knowing it strengthens your command of core JS and the web-platform itself - not just a silo-specific layer like React.

Also Svelte acts as a compiler: it outputs just clean, highly optimized JavaScript with no virtual DOM, that uses native web-APIs and results in minimal runtime overhead, smaller bundle sizes and overall excellent performance and DX.

I managed to avoid learning React long enough to become a manager.

I'm not saying I won't ever end up in engineering and won't ever have to learn it, but at least right now, it feels kinda like I got away with something.

Unfortunely it is hard to avoid when doing backed development with SaaS, iPaaS products, where JavaScript is in many cases the only extension language for backend widgets.

I am kind of alright with Next.js, as it is quite similar to using SSR with more tradicionla backend stacks.

Also at least node's C++ AddOns give me an excuse to occasionally throw C++ into the mix.

I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.

It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.

Now that you mention it, whatever I was watching that talked about this, also addressed the negative impact on the local textile industry.

So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.

I hear this one. I tend to catch patterns in tempo as much or more so as timbre and this is awfully close on both accounts. I don’t hear the Chris Fisher comparison that was also posted.

So I would say that where there is smoke there is sometimes fire at this point.

I don’t agree with this one, which puts me at one yes and one no.

But it is always possible that this is what Chris sounds like in his own head. Nobody listening to audio will hear it the way he does.

I can't image we're listening to the same voice then, the piece starts with an intro, then the NotebookLLM part starts with a male, then a female, and then the cloned voice enters.

But as said, this is an old example, there have been many since (which I am too lazy to look up) that are also very clear voice clones.

Well remember that how your voice sounds to you isn’t what other people hear.

But I’m the guy who blurts out how the voice actor for the gate guard played the brother in that movie with that guy. And I can hear what he’s complaining about. There’s a lot of elements of his voice and the tempo is pretty close.

)usually it’s the tempo and certain phonemes that give people away to me when they are doing a different accent)

The rate of the mistakes versus the rate of consumers and testers finding them was a ratio we could deal with and we don’t have the facilities to deal with the new ratio.

It is likely over time that AI code will necessitate the use of more elaborate canary systems that increase the cost per feature quite considerably. Particularly for small and mid sized orgs where those costs are difficult to amortize.

Or maybe this is a SaaS opportunity for someone.

Humans who fail to do so find the list of tasks they’re allowed to do suddenly curtailed. I’m sure there is a degree of this with LLMs but the fanboys haven’t started admitting it yet.