I am baffled by this take that I've been seeing all over the internet recently. A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
This is always the same age-old discussion: Can you separate the art from the arists? And unsurprisingly, different people have different views on it. Even if you disagree, you should be able to understand why people don't want to use a product if their usage of that product makes the owner and CEO more powerful (and they think them being more powerful is a bad thing for humanity).
Edit to add a simple example:
Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
> A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?
Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
> Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
This is called micromanagement :-)
I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
Most people in the company do what they are told to, because they are there to get money for the living. That is just about shifting responsibility to the upper level in hierarchy. So they are definitely affected by the decisions of the upper management.
Whenever there is a decisions to be made about increasing profits, for example, someone needs to judge based on moral weight. Outsource to India? Do something gray and think legal matters later? Maybe there is no moral, and the company should operate based on the risk assessment of fines breaking the law and negative PR. In all cases, "what person is", highly influences the outcome of these decisions.
In a well-functioning organization, the upper management set the vision and the goals for the company and for the product(s); and then let the people who do the actual work use their best judgement to move towards those goals. The upper management, of course, may decide that it would be more profitable to lay off the employees and to outsource to India; and that, of course, would have a direct impact on the work of those at the lower rungs; but I don't think that is the kind of concern that people have when they complain about Vercel's CEO.
It's just that if I were using Vercel or Next.js (which I don't), I would be viewing my relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis. If they were giving away for free something that I needed (React or Next), I would take it. If they were selling something that I needed (Vercel hosting, if I were reckless enough to tie myself to it), I would pay for the service. If they charged too much for the service, I would investigate alternatives. It wouldn't enter my mind that I were "supporting" them. I would rather imagine that they were "supporting" me. And I wouldn't give a monkey's who they have for a CEO.
Do you think a person of Palestinian origin should also continue seeing their relationship with Vercel on a solely transactional basis? Given that their families are likely affected and Vercel's CEO publicly supports it? I'm just trying to point out why people might have a different view on this.
I can't, of course, pretend to know what goes on in the mind of such a person; and of course I accept that people have different views; this is very plain to see. What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
Let me give you a couple of different examples for comparison. Github blocked all users from Iran. Pnpm cut all traffic from Russian ips, whereas Linus Torvalds affirmed the removal of Russian maintainers of the Linux kernel. These are real adversarial actions, the like of which could impact my decisions about a company or a technology, if I were on the receiving end of those. Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just an undignified behavior that is ultimately just noise.
> What I lament is that people with those views insist that everyone should cut ties with people with other views, rather than accepting that different people may have different views.
It's only natural to think that way because these particular decisions are based on ones moral framework. It isn't like choosing a favourite tea. People will be pissed at each other when moral frameworks don't match.
> Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just repulsive noise.
It comes down to what you said before. People have different views. It's noise to you. It isn't noise to others.
Haha, came here to mention the light grey text on white background as well. This is a great example of poor accessibility. It should be obvious to a human eye that this is bad; but in case it weren't, one could open up Chrome dev tools, find the styles for this text, click on the color picker, and observe that Chrome reports the contrast ratio for that text to be 1.17, whereas a comfortable (accessible) contrast ratio starts at 4.5.
> Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end
If people want a mechanism of connecting with their friends who are far away, why not create a dedicated forum for this purpose? Either with something like discord, or even with something like phpbb?
Because most people don't know how to do that. Mainstream social media has huge reach and monetisation opportunities, so that's where most people go.
What's needed isn't a nostalgic return to the 90s, blogging and all, but a completely non-corporate internet, probably using a separate set of protocols with novel reader/browser tech - self-hosted and/or distributed and/or torrented, simple enough for anyone to set up a server at home, no ads, no tracking, no corporate hosting or influence of any kind. And no "open source but impossibly complicated for normal people to use."
It doesn't have to be fast, it just has to be available with minimal friction for set-up and content management.
Let ten million private sites bloom and see what happens.
> Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
> React isn’t just "winning by default" It's winning because at the core it's just JavaScript function composition.
This might be just a rationalization. React might be "winning" (whatever that means), because it was the first proper component-based library, when its competitors (Backbone, Angular, Ember) were large, slow, and clumsy, and still struggling with the concept. Plus, developers back then were easily impressed by the word "Facebook", which meant a large tech company that probably knew what it was doing, and served as a guarantee of good quality. So it had a tremendous head start and good marketing. If Vue, Svelte, Solid, or Lit were there first, who knows if React would be "winning" now.
All that build-up, only to culminate in a slight dig at react?
> React piles concepts into your mental backpack: rendering models, hooks, state libraries, routing, and a build pipeline. Say no to it, and suddenly you’re the “neckbeard stuck in the ’90s,” outside the cool-kids club.
Out of the list of the piled concepts, only 'hooks' would be react-specific. The rest are the concepts that a front-end developer will need to think about anyway if he builds a standalone client. If the client is built using non-web-standard languages; or even if static file names need to be stamped with hashes for proper caching, developer has to think of a build pipeline. If the client is decoupled from the server, developer has to think of routing. If things happen on the page in response to user interaction, developer has to think of rendering and of client-side state.
React isn't guilty of any of this. There are plenty of things it is guilty of; but these aren't the ones.
I am probably being stupid; but aren't install commands run relatively rarely by developers (less than once a day perhaps)? Is it such an important issue how long it takes for `x install` to finish?
CICD is a major usage. But dependencies version bumps are also a big part of it. In the python ecosystem I’ve had poetry take minutes to resolve the ansible dependencies after bumping the version. And then you see uv take milliseconds to do a full install from scratch.
In the novel Tom Brown's School Days [0], published in mid 19-th century and depicting a public school in the first quarter of that century, there is a scene describing how students those days used "vulgus-books": collections of previous years' students' homeworks in Latin that new students copied from for their assignments in Latin composition. There was a boy named Arthur in that story who refused to copy from other students' essays, and worked on the compositions himself. He also tried to convince his friends to abandon that practice of copying, and to write their assignments on their own.
This is what this article reminded me of. The student writes how her classmates use help from AI as if she cannot decide for herself to do the work on her own if she cares about learning. She writes as if she is devoid of agency.
The Atlantic published a post on reddit about this article, titled "I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education." [1] And yet, it is the other students that the author primarily focuses on. Why does other students' cheating demolish _her_ education?
That's an interesting point, but one way I can think is that as AI generated homework is completed by AI, "all natural" student performance may seem abysmal in comparison. The students who use AI to do the "grunt work" like paper writing will have more time to do things like attend office hours, befriend professors, network, get internships, or whatever other useful things they can do with their time.
It makes me think of the rampant cheating culture in the PRC. Cheating generally isn't considered immoral, or, it may be, but the attitude is basically "well everyone cheats, so you better do it too or you'll be left behind." University becomes a performance, and all thoughts are turned towards how to present the best in that performance. If you ask someone that buys into this system about the value of, idk, writing a paper so as to learn the material, they'll be very confused. What's the point of learning the material? The only thing that matters is getting the best grade possible. Then you can get the highest paying job possible. That's all that matters.
This is of course not universal, the PRC is a country with a gajillion people in it, but this is what I experienced at university there and when I returned to the USA and was the defacto "PRC student tutor" at my university because of my Mandarin and time spent there. I must have been offered money to write essays for people over fifty times.
So, I can imagine this happening with AI. What does it matter if you learn the material? You use AI to get a good score and then you use AI to do your job anyway so who cares. AI written emails summarized by AI, replies written by AIs, reports generated by AI, sent, summarized by another AI...
No. Could you try to put your finger on what exactly in this text gives you the vibes?
Also, a sibling comment suggests that "those tiles" is some sort of slop; but I find it no more sloppy than "this little web app" in the preceding sentence. Both are handwavy markers of imprecision common in oral speech. A comment on English Stack Exchange points out that this feature is referred to as the "indefinite this" [0].
