I agree with the sentiment but I wonder if a sufficiently large amount of sufficiently sophisticated benchmarks existed then I would be surprised if a model would only memorize those benchmarks while showing terrible real world performance. We are not there yet but maybe one day we will
be.
"entirely possible" is a bit of a stretch. You can install some hacky WM and sketchybar but system settings, workspace three finger scroll speed, the finder app, window chrome, login screen etc are not something that can easily be changed. And the default apps are really not that great for power users. Calendar, Mail and Finder are all slow, dumbed down and only very superficially customizable. I daily drive an M2 Pro MBP and I was running a Linux desktop up until 2 years ago and I felt like there were barely any limits to customizing the latter while I have to fight macOS at every step if I want to do something that apple does not want me to do.
Is there a good reason browsers could and or should not support ts out of the box? I think even node does to some extend.
Anyway another thing that kept bugging me when reading this is that web apps and development and performance constraints can be so vastly different that I am not sure this pattern always holds up. What if you have an app that depends on a ton of global state, what if you need web sockets, what if you need a highly dynamic form with partial validation derived from a schema that your drizzle definition spat out. And 2 junior devs that benefit from end 2 end type safety and working in Typescript alone to be productive. Add syncing across tabs, offline first requirements, multiplayer rich text editing, sophisticated auth, caching, accessibility constraints, end 2 end monitoring and logging with open telemetry, animated page transitions scroll timeline animations, pdf generation of certain views and a design team breathing down your neck that has a thousand different extra bells and whistles it wants that are impossible to represent and maintain with tailwind alone. And then the marketing department comes around and wants to track everything, inject their A/B testing framework, wants dynamically updated translations without forgoing SSR and SEO benefits and all of that has to run on a 8€/month Hetzner VPS.
I understand that if you work on software that only needs a handful of those things you can get away with a better stack than what the author seems to loathe. But it you work on a large enough application, then you can’t escape complexity, even if you find some of it remedied by a well suited tech stack.
I would guess that the big reason is Microsoft is the owner of Typescript. Apple, Google, and Mozilla probably don't want to be tied to the whims of someone else's language specification. It's the same reason Dart isn't a browser language, NaCl doesn't exist anymore, ASM.js development wasn't widely adopted but sowed the seeds for WASM.
Web standards get worked on by committee where those four companies each have some pull, and standards are voted on.
Node's typescript support is by default just stripping all of the type information out of the source text. There is experimental support for some transformations behind a flag.
> Is there a good reason browsers could and or should not support ts out of the box?
Yes, there is a reason. Most critical requirement for the "language-behind-web-UI" is to be efficiently parseable (parsing speed and memory). So it should have one-pass compiler/interpreter without the need of building AST (syntax tree). Speed of execution and type strictness is on the third and tenth places correspondingly.
There are proposals with some traction that would enable webbrowsers to parse TS, but simply ignore the types.
I think it's a bad idea, because tooling handles that perfectly well and I think browsers should generally avoid building functionality that could be equally well provided outside it, but I guess enough people have been asking for it, so it might happen.
> Is there a good reason browsers could and or should not support ts out of the box?
Because it’s a Microsoft product and Microsoft still follows Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process. Once every browser supports TS, what prevents Microsoft from revving TS with a license change? Who’s going to take over the TS fork?
I would say you are both right in that if you have two competing variables (on-time for the defence vs calorie consumption), when the main causes of death before procreating were infectious disease and malnutrition before modern times, I would expect some equilibrium to be reached and we have not had that much time to evolve since caloric scarcity in the western world was a solved problem for large swaths of the population.
If in the future we could trade a few hundred extra calories per day for a great immune system (without auto-immune side effects) we would have found a nice cheat code!
This was interesting. Had a 5 minute chat with the outsider from the dishonored series. Just a one sentence prompt and its phrasing was at least 60% there, but less cold and nicer in a sense than the video game counterpart. Still an interesting experiment. But I also know that maybe 12-24 months down the line, once this is available in real time on device there will be an ungodly amount of smut coming from this.
I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.
As much as I dislike invasive tracking, I don't think the blame lies with Marketing on this one. In most cases I think you could implement all the awful surveillance you want with extremely minimal overhead, even on the web. Certainly malware developers are at the extreme of invasive + low-overhead!
Certainly there are cases where some manager says "put this script in Google Tag Manager and don't ask any questions", but rarely have I ever seen that be the bottleneck. Programmers actually just write really bad frameworks, and then other programmers use them to make even worse software, for literally no reason other than "maybe this framework design would be cool".
Then go ahead and write vanilla JS and raw HTML! No one is asking you to use any of these bad "state of affairs". If you do build a 100+ page SaaS app without any framework, let me know, I'd love to see how it works.
My clients are. I do web dev for a living and I use these frameworks day in and day out. It’s not even that I dislike the dev ex on most of them and I’ve seen a lot of good code and bad code and I don’t even wanna blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in. I think my comment was more of a dig at the world we live in than anything else.
To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.
To be fair to the conversatives in the UK who have engineered this situation, some have recently said that the £100k threshold is too low. I detest them but I have to give them this.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
So it is just the right wing neoliberal playbook then. Protect the rich and put everyone else against each other so we don’t focus on them. I want this to stop.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy.
And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often create regressive tax regimes despite knowing they aren't very good systems.
It’s easy to understand, but not easy to live under. If the worst case is I lose 25% of every “extra” dollar in some range, I have to think about it way less than if I lose the entire benefit for being 1 unit of currency over a limit.
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
First off, the following is not meant to combative but I think this confuses me. If there was no cliff there was nothing to do administratively on that front, no new checking at all. We already have progressive tax systems in many countries. Adding 1% at the top end can’t be that difficult. My health insurance (in Germany) raises prices every year and most people don’t have a choice there either. Property taxes increase all the time. If we had a wealth tax and a higher (at the top) progressive capital gains tax it seems to me that the pitch would be politically even simpler: there are 5% that will pay a little more percentage wise from now on while retaining vast amounts of wealth and 95% that will pay less or much less. Genuinely I have heard that we can’t raise taxes on rich people because they will evade them but it also sounds like a lie repeated so often that we just take it as the truth. Didn’t a lot of countries or US states have higher marginal tax rates without seeing mass exodus of millionaires? Can’t lawmakers focus on plugging the loopholes rich people use? I mean our government is currently trying to go out of its way to make sure that unemployment benefits are only paid out to people who „really deserve them“ by tightening the rules around that and the political debates I see put incredible amounts of emphasis on „fairness“ and that we „have to do something about those who just profit off the system without contributing“ when it’s about that topic. The fervour is clearly not applied symmetrically.
One thing I've become obsessed with is people trying to solve problems in the wrong domain.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah
Genuine question: How does it happen that a heart surgery costs 100k? 2 surgeons (200$/h) + 6 nurses(100$/h) for 10 hours would be 10k. Where do the other 100k come from? Is it the equipment cost? Consumables? After care? Or are the margins just ridiculous?
Lots of equipment, consumable and facility costs. Catheters with realted imaging and machines to place it, meds, anesthesia, cost of the building, specialized HVAC, liability coverage, etc. Margins can also be bad since they'll charge some people more than others.
Malpractice insurance? One insurance premium is high in order to pay for the cost of another insurance premium?
This seems… suboptimal.
I'm in Germany, I don't know what we spend money on here because I'm still integrating myself and have not mastered the German language to the level of having opinions about the Krankenversicherungsbeitragsentlastungsgesetz, but I do know we spend about 2/3rds per capita as the USA for better outcomes:
Interesting story. I want to agree with the general advice not to use it for that - especially if that is how you use it. And I want to preface this with: Don’t take this as advice, I just want to share my experience here. I tend to do it anyway and had fairly large success so far but I use the LLM differently if I have a health issue that bothers me. First I open Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT in their latest, highest thinking budget installment. Then I tell them about my symptoms I give a fairly detailed description of my person and my medical history. I prompt them specifically to ask detailed questions like a physician would and ask them to ask me to perform tests to rule out or zoom in on different hypothesis about what is might have. After going back and forth, if they all agree on a similar thing or a set of similar things I usually take this as a good sign I might be on the right track and check if I should talk to a professional or not (edging on the side of caution). If they can’t agree I would usually try to get an appointment to see a professional and try to get sooner rather than later if anything potentially dangerous popped up during the back and forth or if I feel sufficiently bad.
Now, I live in Germany where in the last 20 years our healthcare system has fallen victim to neoliberal capitalism and since I am publicly insured by choice I often have to wait for weeks to see a specialist so more often than not LLMs have helped me stay calm and help myself as best as I can. However I still view the output less as a the output or a medical professional and try to stay skeptic along the way. I feel like the augment my guesswork and judgement, but not replace it.
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