thomaslord (u/thomaslord)

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

apsurd · 3 months ago

+1 React DX is really great. It started really great and it got weird and bloated but it's still really great relative to the JS landscape hell.

But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements.

Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in terms of architectural design can it? We're in odd times.

Of course, it's easy to be a hater on the sidelines. I am guilty. Nextjs likely just does too much in it's own made-from-scratch clever way. use-client vs server is just out-of-the gate ridiculous. But then I suppose the real question is "well if you want isomorphic environment, how else are you going to do it?". My answers is "I wouldn't!" but then vercel and the powers that be seem to have won the mindshare of the product crowd. At least for now.

thomaslord · 3 months ago

Honestly I think React DX kinda sucks, at least in some areas. Performance is one of the worst (`useMemo` and `componentShouldUpdate` are way to easy to ignore, constant re-renders are the norm and writing performant React code requires conscious effort to avoid footguns) but it's also just less self-explanatory than the alternatives I've tried.

I started doing web dev before reactivity frameworks were a thing, and I found Vue to be the most intuitive of the frameworks available when I first needed reactivity. To me, Vue feels like HTML with superpowers while React feels like a whole new way of thinking about webapps. I'm honestly a bit surprised that the article doesn't mention Vue, since Vue is (and has been for a while) the most popular "not React or Angular" framework option. Newer versions of Vue even support the "disappearing framework" feature Svelte was built for, which I'm excited to take advantage of when my biggest work project finally moves to Vue 3.

thomaslord commented on Laravel Cloud app.laravel.cloud/... · Posted by u/pier25

9dev · 10 months ago

If there’s one thing I hate about Laravel, it’s the docs. Some things are documented, arbitrary others aren’t; many APIs offer multiple aliases or equivalent ways to solve the same problem, and the docs use them interchangeably. Sometimes there’s multiple paragraphs for an obvious feature, but a single sentence for something complicated, and you’ll have to try for yourself to find out how it behaves.

thomaslord · 10 months ago

It's been interesting seeing several comments like this in the comments, since Laravel's docs may be one of the most highly-praised aspects of the framework. I suspect the divide may be that newer developers get everything they need explained in the docs in clear language, but the more advanced stuff requires some digging.

I use Laravel personally, and I've definitely seen both sides of this myself. For basic "happy-path" API reference, the docs are great. If I really need to understand how the framework is doing something, I pretty much always end up diving into the code. Unfortunately the heavy use of Facades can sometimes make it annoying to find the underlying code.

thomaslord commented on Laravel Cloud app.laravel.cloud/... · Posted by u/pier25

echelon · 10 months ago

Sounds like a great way to get locked into paying for more than you need.

There's a venerable history of this, from Oracle to Heroku. Solve today's problems slightly faster (minus a few days of plateng/DevOps work), and forever be exposed to having the screws tightened.

Hard pass. Infra should be commodity and replete with dozens of like kinded alternatives.

The worst offenders are those fancy JS CI/CD, one-click deploy solutions that cost 10,000x the underlying primitives. Roll your own and save yourself.

thomaslord · 10 months ago

I disagree, at least in this specific context. With Laravel Cloud you build a standard Laravel application which can be deployed anywhere, then use the service to handle DevOps for you. Because it doesn't include any unique services of its own, you can always decide to hire a DevOps team and run all the required services yourself.

You're totally correct in scenarios where you need to build your project around the service, but this service is specifically a DevOps shortcut with no lock-in.

Should your Fortune 500 company use this? Maybe not. Should a one-man dev shop use this? Quite possibly - you pay for the convenience, but it frees up more time to improve your application.

thomaslord commented on The Onion buys Infowars nytimes.com/2024/11/14/bu... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

the_optimist · a year ago

There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate. There is evidence gathering activity which supports or undermines, strengthening or weakening a hypothesis. Ideally, one dispositive form of evidence affirms or denies a hypothesis. It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud, but in any case, other claims are weak evidence.

thomaslord · a year ago

This is true, if you're billing your hypothesis as a hypothesis. The problem is that prominent Republicans billed their "election was stolen" hypothesis as a fact, claimed to have boatloads of evidence in order to convince the public, and then never published that evidence.

In the aftermath of this clearly deceptive behavior, they've maintained the support of Republican voters who still believe the lie despite none of the evidence ever being released.

It's one thing to claim something is true and that you have evidence, then release the evidence and find out that it's insufficient to win in court. It's another thing entirely to make a claim, say you have overwhelming evidence to support it, and never release any evidence at all. In the former case, maybe you got overzealous or maybe you were dealing with an unsympathetic judge. In the latter, the only rational way to interpret the situation is that you were intentionally misleading your audience.

thomaslord commented on The Onion buys Infowars nytimes.com/2024/11/14/bu... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

elektrontamer · a year ago

Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information? Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source. We know policing speech doesn't work, whoever does the policing introduces their own biases, this was clear as day with the hunter laptop story and how the goverment put pressure on social media companies to supress it.

thomaslord · a year ago

It's well established that adults who read incorrect information frequently don't find out it was wrong and become more skeptical of the source. Some people operate that way, but it's a small minority unfortunately.

In particular, it's been shown that people with dogmatic beliefs strengthen those beliefs when shown evidence to the contrary rather than questioning them.

thomaslord commented on The Onion buys Infowars nytimes.com/2024/11/14/bu... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

eastbound · a year ago

> I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees

Left. Censored media leans left. Censored forums, news, communities are censored to give credit to left ideas. Symmetrically, left ideas only thrive by hiding information.

With complete transparency, people lean right.

thomaslord · a year ago

Moderated media leans left. At least some of the reason it ends up that way is that many of the people who violate incredibly reasonable rules are conservative. Certain groups of hard-right people will say some incredibly bigoted shit that's absolutely out of line and makes it impossible to have a civilized conversation, then they complain about getting banned and drag a bunch of moderately-more-reasonable people with them when they leave. Once those people leave, normal everyday non-asshole conservatives realize the platform has less conservative content and leave in search of spaces that they feel respect their viewpoints more. In some cases entire topic-groups get banned (/r/the_donald is a good example) for legitimate reasons that frequently involve a small extremely-active group of members, and the rest of the members will also leave the platform because all they see is that a group they were part of got banned.

People who lean to the left tend to believe that it's bad to do some of the things that get you justifiably banned (such as intentionally using language that demeans people based on immutable traits). Because of this, it's much easier for them to avoid being deplatformed.

thomaslord commented on The Onion buys Infowars nytimes.com/2024/11/14/bu... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

eastbound · a year ago

Polls are twisted to return falsehoods from gray information. It’s hard to fathom that you don’t notice neither the methods nor the results. It’s a bit like living in Beijin and saying that Tiannenmen is conspirationist storytelling, or a coin flip on whether it happened or not. It did. 100% chance.

“It’s 50% probability. Either it’s true or it isn’t.” — what meddlers pretend when they’re not happy admitting the high probability of their enemy candidate being elected. It wasn’t a coin flip.

thomaslord · a year ago

Assuming that random factors like "it rained" or "voters got in car accidents and couldn't make it to the polls" aren't a significant factor, there's always a 100% probability of one specific candidate winning since everyone has made up their minds before the day of the election. What polls do is not telling you the real-world probability, it's telling you the likelihood of a given outcome given known data.

Polls always need to be skewed in some way to be accurate, since not everybody will vote. You can't just get a random distribution of the population's preference and assume the more-preferred candidate will win. Polls can never be truly accurate because people will lie about which candidate they're voting for and whether they're planning to vote, and sometimes people who genuinely intended to vote never make it to the polls. There are a huge number of variables to consider when trying to predict the outcome of the election, but it's important enough that it's still worth trying.

thomaslord commented on StabilityAI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5 tomsguide.com/ai/stabilit... · Posted by u/s-gonzales

scotty79 · a year ago

By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing. Even if it's published openly on the Internet and you don't have to pay to access it.

Did you pay for all the content you used to create your comment? If not how did you dare to write it and publish it?

You've stolen the fraction of their income because after reading your comment I don't need to go read your source if I'm only interested in information you stolen and shared.

What if you cause the demise of those sources with your (and your copycats) shameless theft?

This is silly. Technology evolves all the time. Things die and they should die. Other arise in their place to fill the gap.

thomaslord · a year ago

Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?

Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.

Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.

thomaslord commented on Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions? neon.tech/blog/why-does-e... · Posted by u/davidgomes

noirscape · a year ago

Because the actual process of upgrading Postgres is terrible.

I say this as someone who absolutely loves using it, but the actual process of upgrading Postgres is something that takes significant downtime, is error-prone and you're often better off just dumping all the databases and reimporting them in a new folder. (A good idea in general since it'll vacuum and compact indexes as well if you do it, combining a few maintenance routines in your upgrade path.)

It requires having the previous version of Postgres installed, something which can mess with a number of distro policies (not to mention docker, which is the most popular way to deploy software that will typically rely on Postgres), and unlike most software with that issue, Postgres is software you want to be managed by your distro.

Therefore, most people only upgrade by necessity - when their distro forces the upgrade or the version they're using reaches EOL.

thomaslord · a year ago

I'll confess - I have a project that uses Heroku's managed Postgres and my preferred upgrade method is to set the maintenance window to the middle of the night, create a backup, and be awake at 1am to make sure that nothing is broken after they force the upgrade. Their auto-upgrade process hasn't failed me so far, but there's no way to manually trigger it.

thomaslord commented on Terraform Provider for Dominos Pizza registry.terraform.io/pro... · Posted by u/freeqaz

tbrownaw · a year ago

Seems a bit convoluted.

Compare for example, event sourcing. In that case, you keep a log of all actions taken, and determine the current state by replacing that log.

Here, you have an action that you want to take (order a pizza). But you can't just do that directly, because it's too simple. So instead you tell yourself "I currently have 0 pizzas" (the initial empty state file) and "I want to have one pizza" (your configuration), and you ask it "how do I get there from here".

And then after that is where the real trouble starts. You eat your pizza. You now have resource drift. If you try to correct that drift (does this provider even implement that?), terraform will think it needs to order you another pizza, because it still thinks you want to have one pizza. If you don't fix the drift, then next time you want a pizza you'll have to tell it that actually you want two pizzas. Because what you actually want is an action, but you have to work backwards from the current state (or rather, what terraform thinks the current state is) and what state to tell it you want in order to make it calculate they action.

All of which is more or less the opposite of event sourcing. Instead of wanting a state and having to apply a sequence of events to get that state, you want an event and have to calculate a sequence of state diffs that will produce that event.

thomaslord · a year ago

Proposal: Apply a ceiling function to your pizza-counting algorithm and always leave the last slice in the freezer. Then simply throw out that slice when you want a new pizza!