nikitaga (u/nikitaga)

nikitaga commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha

nikitaga · a month ago

This is great news, nice win for Scala.

It's a great language, I've been working with it for 10 years now. Full stack Scala with Scala.js on the frontend is so very nice. My experience is mostly in fintech & healthcare startups where the language helped us get correctness, refactorability, clarity, and high velocity at the same time without blowing up the team size.

Initially I learned Scala on the job, but I've been writing open source Scala for years since then. It's a cool language to learn and explore ideas in, since it has lots of elegantly integrated features (especially FP + OOP).

Scala may not be the #1 most popular language, and that's fine. Popular stuff surely gets the benefits of funding and attention, and sometimes lacking such support is really annoying, like a few years ago when Scala 3 was first released, the IDEs took a looong time to catch up. But I still choose Scala despite those occasional annoyances, even though I also have years of experience in JS / TS and other languages. It's just a much better tool for my needs.

nikitaga commented on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala scala-lang.org/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/bishabosha

Boxxed · a month ago

Yeah I love it when people start defining their own operators all over the place and give them all inscrutable names. "Dude just use the eggplant parm operator: <<=-=>>"

nikitaga · a month ago

^ This meme is from 10+ years ago when Scala was at the peak of its hype driven by the FP craze. Nobody seriously writes cryptic-symbolic-operator code like that nowadays. Scalaz, the FP library most notorious for cryptic operator/method names, hasn't been relevant for many years. Today everyone uses Cats, ZIO, or plain Tapir or Play, all of which are quite ergonomic.

nikitaga commented on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results 9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/ip... · Posted by u/ksec

madeofpalk · 2 months ago

macOS absolutely, definitely, 100% has ads.

Buy a new Apple Watch and notice that the settings app with have a [1] badge trying to upsell you to buy AppleCare+. They obscure dismissing these by clicking the "Add AppleCare Coverage" button and then having a button that says actually no.

nikitaga · 2 months ago

My MacOS "100%" does not have any ads. But I don't use Apple watch or Apple online services, so that's the difference I guess.

You don't need to buy a Windows Watch to get ads on Windows though. They'll be right there anyway, and more of them.

nikitaga commented on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results 9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/ip... · Posted by u/ksec

runjake · 2 months ago

I've been getting intrusive first-party ads in Apple's OSes for at least the past 3 major OS releases. News+, Fitness+, Music, Apple TV+, etc etc.

nikitaga · 2 months ago

Surely we can distinguish MacOS – the operating system – from the online services provided by Apple that happen to have a native app?

If you are choosing to use Apple online services, sure, you'll get upsells I guess, as with any other online service. I don't use any of Apple's online services, and never see those ads.

nikitaga commented on American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de/publicati... · Posted by u/47282847

lovlar · 2 months ago

> "Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education

I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.

nikitaga · 2 months ago

I know all about their business models, yet I couldn't care less how much money Facebook gets from ad clicks. Them making a profit is not directly harming me.

The things that are harming me are a lot more complicated than that, but people don't have the attention span to be educated about such complex issues. It's easier than ever to spread "education" now. The fact that it doesn't stick is not some grand conspiracy – most people simply don't care.

nikitaga commented on American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de/publicati... · Posted by u/47282847

lovlar · 2 months ago

One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.

If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.

The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.

What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.

nikitaga · 2 months ago

The main reason for populism is that the incumbent governments do a consistently poor job satisfying their constituents' preferences and interests, so people get desperate to find something / someone different that might work better. Always has been, always will be, social media or not.

Example: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4230288

We haven't invented a governance structure yet that would be immune to this, although some are better than others. I'm sure the current social media algorithms are harmful as well. You can ban viral algorithms, but the hostile actors whose literal job it is to drive polarization / populism will just find other strategies to effectively deliver their message.

"Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education, not to mention the many limitations, taxes, and bans. I mention smoking as an obviously-bad-thing that everyone knows is bad. Education succeeded, and yet, here we are, still puffing poison. But you can also look already-polarized political topics. There's been no shortage of education on those topics either, but if that worked well enough, we wouldn't be decrying populism right now.

nikitaga commented on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results 9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/ip... · Posted by u/ksec

lapcat · 2 months ago

What has Nadella done for Windows users? It appears to me that Windows is becoming every bit as enshittified as macOS, if not more so. And isn't Microsoft experimenting with advertisements in Windows?

nikitaga · 2 months ago

How is MacOS as enshittified as Windows? It doesn't have ads, doesn't push AI on you, their online services are trivial to ignore once and never think about again, etc. I haven't tried Tahoe, and sure, its new glass UI is shit, but merely incompetent UI design is not "enshittification" and is not in any way equivalent to what Microsoft does in Windows.

nikitaga commented on A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator larslofgren.com/codesmith... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

A_D_E_P_T · 5 months ago

"Nested comments sorted by upvotes" is, for free and frank discussion, inherently far worse than non-nested in-line comments. With the latter there's no hive-mind effect, no consensus-seeking, no dopamine/approval-chasing. Also, traditional forums tended to encourage longer-form posts (which you can still see in places like Spacebattles), which naturally contained quite a lot of technical detail and pictures, whereas Reddit (and HN) are optimized for very short comments. In Reddit's case, smarmy one-liners, usually.

But the main problem, to repeat for emphasis, is that the upvote/downvote system (even if it's fair and used virtuously, and it usually isn't,) stifles disagreement and debate.

nikitaga · 5 months ago

> stifles disagreement and debate.

When I append "reddit" to my google search query, I'm not looking for "disagreement and debate". I'm looking for specific information on non-political topics, such as repairing my car, finding a good product in the sea of garbage, or learning new techniques. Such topics are typically discussed cooperatively rather than adversarially. For this stuff, consensus-seeking is a feature not a bug, and where the consensus appears inadequate, I'm well capable of looking past the top post. Reddit's format is not perfect, but it's better than having to read through a 30-page thread in which most messages are irrelevant to most other messages. Such threads are linear only artificially through a UI that hides the structure of the underlying conversations.

If you don't like the upvotes aspect of reddit, we could settle on the same nested format but without sorting by upvotes. But with forums, we don't even have that.

Reddit's comments aren't one-liners because Reddit's format encourages that, it's because it's the most popular site where everyone goes. If forums were as widely popular, they would see the same people making the same comments there too.

nikitaga commented on A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator larslofgren.com/codesmith... · Posted by u/SilverElfin

A_D_E_P_T · 5 months ago

Most topics still have old-fashioned forums, they're just even harder to find these days.

And there are still lots of blogs. Not all of them are SEO blogspam. And there's always libgen...

Reddit is pretty much the last place I'd go for reliable information, especially if we're talking about anything that's a commercial product.

nikitaga · 5 months ago

The authenticity of old fashioned forums is often outweighed by their poor UX and in general terrible ergonomics. It's no wonder that so few people want to use them anymore. Reddit's "nested, collapsible comments sorted by upvotes" format is simply superior.

20 years after Reddit started, the best that the forums can offer is perhaps discourse.org, which is barely any better than traditional forums – sleeker UI for sure, but it's still fundamentally the same unworkable linear format. It's like sticking to magnetic tapes in the age of SSDs.

Even Facebook, one of the dumbest discussion platforms, has nested comments. Terribly implemented of course, but how does the platform designed for the lowest-common-denominator kind of user have more advanced discussion features than forums made for discussion connoisseurs? It is utterly baffling.

nikitaga commented on React is winning by default and slowing innovation lorenstew.art/blog/react-... · Posted by u/dbushell

WA · 6 months ago

I get your point. I'm fully with you that it makes no sense to use React and write React apps if you can achieve the same without React. I hate the fact that many great frontend components only work with React, especially considering that React didn't properly support Web components for ages, whereas almost every other framework had no problems with them.

However, out of the box, Web components don't come with almost anything. Comparing React to Web components is comparing apples to oranges.

Lit is great, but Lit is a framework. Now you're comparing React with Lit. Different story than React vs. vanilla Web components.

nikitaga · 6 months ago

> Comparing React to Web components is comparing apples to oranges.

I mean, yes, but you're the one making this comparison, saying that WCs lack reactivity etc.

Web Components are an extension of the DOM – a low level browser API. They are similarly low level. That's expected. I don't need or expect them to be something more.

I am happy that I can use any reactivity system I want to implement a Web Component. That's a feature, not a bug. Having implemented a reactivity system myself, I know that there isn't a perfect one, the design is full of tradeoffs, and I'd rather not have a blessed implementation in the browser, because it will inevitably turn out to be flawed, yet we won't be able to retire it because "we can't break the web". A blessed implementation like that would benefit from network effects just like React does, and would have all the same problems as React, plus the inability to rapidly innovate due to the browser's unique backwards compatibility concerns. I'd rather ship an extra 3KB and avoid all those problems.