Good questions. WASM at this point seems more a locus of JS hate than anything practical. To create something cool, novel, and useful should be the goal, not avoid or use a certain language.
There's a pretty stark difference between those working in and with WASM, and people commenting on the sidelines. Almost everyone involved with WASM itself sees it as complimentary, and explicitly is not trying to "kill javascript." Random commenters on the internet do say this a lot though.
WASM isn’t very practical yet because it isn’t fully formed. There isn’t support for DOM access or parallelism, never mind the ecosystem. It’s a really ambitious project, and writing it off as “locus of JS hate” because it hasn’t completely changed the game in such a short time frame is really short sighted. It would be a fairer test to give it 5 years.
I'm not writing it off. I think it's a good idea to bring more options to the web. I tried it last year, but as you state and I agree, it's not ready yet.
In my experience in SF I encounter many never-JSers. Being a JS fan, for certain things, I don't get the hate. So maybe I feel threatened in a way, but I'm not going around wishing for the death of python or Haskell. That's all. I am reading random internet commenters and getting slightly upset. That's on me.
I think you get that with any language. People are very attached to how they’ve learned to solve problems and the set of tradeoffs they tend to value. I like Go and I can’t tell you how often I see even outlandish criticism (for a long time on r/programming, commenting “it is impossible to build a software product in Go because the type system is too weak” was a great way to get upvotes, especially if you followed it with “but I really like <fully dynamic language>”). You just have to try to understand which parts of the criticism are valid and improve your own understanding.
I wouldn't say it's hate towards JS but I think the evolution of JS vs the evolution of web and its use cases have not increased at the same velocity, latter being faster. JS has had to have a lot of scaffolding added to increase its use but WASM now comes in with the understanding of the modern requirements. However, I don't think it's either one or the other, it'll depend on the use-case.
I can't imagine JS will go anywhere anytime soon, especially since it still needs to be called from DOM manipulation,but the ability to code a full stack in a single non-JS language and run it at near-native performance is going to be very useful as more apps become web based and complex. Even from a skills point of view, you can now have backend and front-end developers skillsets are slightly more merged so easier to swap around resources.
You’ll be happy next time you npm import something time sensitive that requires computation, and that you can just use from js for free.
Think about how you would do ML with just python. That’d be insane. And thankfully the packages you need are implemented in c or cuda with python bindings. 99% of ml people never see the insides of np, sklearn or tf. But you’re glad these aren’t implemented in python.
Similarly, you’re glad for webgl if you need to do lots of parallelizable computations (cfd, ml, 3d). But glsl was never bashing at js. Just that using js for these task isnt feasible.
Similarly, now you can use fast code from js. Essentially, you have a bunch of matrices use webgl, otherwise wasm. And orchestrate everything from js. Like ml peeps do with python, c and cuda.
Such hate for JavaScript. To say JS needs to lose for you to win says more about you than it does JS. Just a thought. I see a world where there are many winners and one where WASM and JS and whatever you want can fulfill their need where needed.
This seems like a straw man; I’ve seen relatively little JS hate in this thread. Unless you’re considering WASM’s progress (or existence) to be an attack on JS? I personally don’t see what is wrong with having other choices for web development.
You can opt out of recaptcha by just boycotting the website which uses it.
But of course by "opt out" you mean to remain a user of a service but not the parts you don't like. Whether you are entitled to do this or not is still up for debate.
> You can opt out of recaptcha by just boycotting the website which uses it.
Ah, I was waiting for somebody to make this argument, which I find somewhat disingenuous given how widespread reCaptcha's use is.
With sites I don't care about leaving them is exactly what I do - but there are sites I pay a lot of money to use, and can't really avoid using for business reasons, yet they still subject me to reCaptcha.
The path I've taken instead is to address this with the site owners. Most weren't really aware of how overreaching reCaptcha feels to some, and I've had good discussions. Of course nobody changed their site based on my complaint, but I like to think I raised awareness.
> But of course by "opt out" you mean to remain a user of a service but not the parts you don't like.
Specifically, a part of user verification. I'm still not sure why they feel they need to verify my humanity - they've got my credit card details and everything.
> Whether you are entitled to do this or not is still up for debate.
Let me ask the opposite question: is the owner of a website entitled to sell my privacy for their own (debatable) convenience?
This is totally disingenuous, especially in a thread comparing to Tesla.
With Tesla, I'm directly buying their product or not, and they do have competitors that I could choose from (not particularly great ones yet, I'll admit, but they do exist today and they're going to get there eventually).
With Google's ad tech and captcha, my data is being siphoned off to them by third parties. I'm looking at totally unrelated service X, and suddenly I'm faced with Google. The burden of boycott becomes much higher than in the Tesla case, which makes it reasonable to state that opt-out is "not [practically] possible".
The situations would be comparable if upon encountering a Google captcha I could choose to solve somebody else's captcha to access the same service.
> my data is being siphoned off to them by third parties.
they are not "third-party". If a site uses google's products (like analytics or recaptcha), then you could reasonably consider them partner sites to google.
Indeed, google is difficult to boycott - no one is diputing it. However, google obviously isn't very offensive to a large number of people, because there are very dedicated groups who dedicate time and energy into boycotting companies like nestle (which is _very_ difficult to boycott). May be a lot of laymen just don't think that their data is worth protecting (whether they are right or not remains to be seen).
Google users are not the only target of Google's data mining, so this is extremely disingenuous. I'm not even sure how to define a Google user.
Furthermore the comment seemed in reference to the origins of fascist political ideology in Europe and their relation to what happened when data mining was weaponized against a population.
When I hear this, I hear jobs and the most revolutionary green company are not welcome. If that's the case, Berlin is lost.
There is good and bad to gentrification. You don't hear stories of the people who bought their house for 50k in 1980 who then sold it in 2010 for 1.3MM. Or the people thankful they don't have to walk around in fear of gangs for themselves or their children.
TO me the biggest problem is the State. In SF, among many many other things, it's their zoning policies that caused the housing crisis. But they run education and media. So people blame the most revolutionary green company, or others bring wealth to the area, instead of the State.
You’re making it look like it’s either the ghetto or the yuppies, but there is a clear middle that people don’t want to sacrifice either. Having a bunch of people paid 5 times what you are coming to your area is never fun.
> Having a bunch of people paid 5 times what you are coming to your area is never fun.
It's probably a net positive overall though, especially if the money these people are paid (and spend locally) is coming from other parts of the world/country.
Nah. German people can live in the hipster area we are talking about here without a job requiring a 4 year degree. Google in that area would be a net negative for them.
> When I hear this, I hear jobs and the most revolutionary green company are not welcome. If that's the case, Berlin is lost.
If there is not enough housing and you keep adding jobs then those jobs will be lost. It's better to "lose" a city than an entire country like USA did.
You couldn't buy your house in 1980 when the houses are owned by the communist GDR state. A lot of the issues in Berlin result from the conflict between 1) the very cheap property in the east that became available when the wall fell and 2) the huge shift in lifestyle for people that have lived in the area for any length of time. The massive fluctuations in wealth (not to mention currency) are but one point that make people averse to change.
Something shocking something Germans were always evil patriarchs. For all of time. The study is titled "Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe." I question this study, which is behind a paywall. So the idea is women go off on their own to find mates? And they studied 104 bones(?) using "deep regional approach" to determine this. Seems a very small sample size to make this generalization about the past. How is it that academics always find in the past that which validates their present views?
>"We apply a deep micro-regional approach and analyze genome wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany."
Wait, things are not as bad as has been crammed down our throats for years? Imagine my surprise. But, yet many armchair doomsayers will still only find the negative. Yes, this isn't perfect. But neither am I. Or you. Peace
