Where do you draw the line tho? How many kilobytes and how much future maintenance work is avoiding a potential slight visual inconsistency with a radio button worth? Is it worth to lose the x amount of people who have bad network connection?

Use this approach everywhere and the actual content of the page (you know: the stuff people came for) suffers.

All I can think about is a quote by world famous video artist Nam June Paik: When to perfect, Gott böse ("God gets mad when too perfect", the original isn't exactly a full sentence and mixes English and German).

Based on profits of many webapps, there is no line. What eng here forget is that they are oft not the targeted consumer. The hypothetically perfect website doesnt sell as well as a colorful fat choncker does. It is like fast food, not every cares about farm to table.

> It is like fast food, not every cares about farm to table

I mean, a "colorful fat choncker" website is literally the opposite of fast food - its slower to arrive, and focuses way too much on appearances.

In this analogy, the website using these ridiculous abstractions is more like Salt Bae or whatever idiotic trend has replaced him. All glitz, zero substance, slower, and for no apparent reason.

The fast food equivalent is stuff like the Google home page: it doesn't validate, is actively harmful to you, the community, and the planet but is immensely popular.

Everyone always says slower and bloat and bad etc etc but it is all relative. Not everyone is an eng who scoffs at waiting another 100ms.

I do like your analogy tho. It is better. Most people want that trendy experience or fast food. Still, both exist because the market demands it be so despite how much it tilts a subset.

Except the correct way can be just as colorful, and it takes more effort to implement the bad way.

This is objectively not true, if it were the path of least resistance would mean everyone uses the option that is fastest and best.

It takes far less effort to implement the bad way. I think people take their own skill for granted. Maybe you can but most others cannot. Maybe they will learn or maybe they are happy to put food on the table and go home at 5.

When I say "implement" I mean the big pile of code in the library. I do not believe making that entire custom mechanism was easier. There's so much to it.

Everyone else following along and merely using it I blame less, but they shouldn't have picked such a bloated library.

The bad ways effort was already paid by someone else, though.

In my book it is the duty of a democratic state to keep its population educated to make educated decisions. If you look at countries with more direct democracy like Switzerland not all the decisions are perfect, but they are by no means worse than if you had replaced the public vote with politicians that are heavily lobbied by corporate interest and have a time horizon that ends at their next election.

In fact you will find that in many cases the population will even vote for unpopular measures if they are discussed and understood well ahead of the decision.

But in the end that requires a decent education of the masses, a well functioning and uncaptured media landscape and a certain amount of democratic practise, all of which are missing in big parts of the US.

Democracy is something everybody actively needs to work on, otherwise it withers. If you want to have a nice village it works best if everybody perceives themselves as an agent of creating a nice village. If you want a shit village, you best give everybody the impression it is somebody elses task.

I have an interest in econophysics and what people think of as "economics" is mostly bullshit.

David Ruelle put it best in 1991 when he summed up economics as "We don't currently have the tools to properly study this subject". 35 years later we only have slightly better tools.

Many people, especially in the US today, dont understand that non-violence doesn't mean passivity or even a willingness to compromise. It just means you do anything you can without actually punching and killing people.

And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.

Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.

Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.

Essentially "good-cop-bad-cop" on a political level?

This is a wonderful example how people live in the inverse-world.

Marketing is in the end a way of trying to get people to listen, even if you have nothing substantial to say (or if you have something to say, potentially multiply the effect of that message). That means you have to invent a lot of packaging and fluff surrounding the thing you want to sell to change peoples impression independent of the actual substance they will encounter.

This to me is entirely backwards. If you want people to listen focus on your content, then make sure it is presented in a way that serves that content. And if we are talking about text, that is really, really small in terms of data and people will be happy if they can access it quickly and without 10 popups in their face.

Not that I accuse any person in this thread of towing that line, but the web as of today seems to be 99% of unneeded crap, with a tiny sprinkle of irrelevant content.

If you don't like a thing and share that dislike, care to elaborate your reasoning so others can profit from it?

Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.

It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.

But the person controls the product, and the product will continue to develop, so the person's character is relevant to the quality of the product.

You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.

I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.

It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.

Yes, if the community would not be influenced by the guy, he wouldn't be influential.

You can fork, but will you want to fork and spend time and effort, potentially in huge amounts, on that fork? There are reasons to be wary. Choosing an alternative, where that particular reason for forking might not exist, is a valid choice to make.

No they don't, it's permissionless technology. Read the web site.

Thinking that good reputation in a law translates to a good lawyer is just as mature as thinking that a bad reputation translates to a bad lawyer, just two sides of the same coin. Credibility can be so cruel, it can make a brilliant mathematician like Terry Tao preemptively decline to read your mathematical arguments basically forever.

In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.

Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.

Is this true? My understanding was that Twitter was not really moderated, because of Dorsey?

Tariffs are devastating for the smaller market and highly dependent on whether you can sell the stuff that is tariffed elsewhere in the world and whether the other side can buy the stuff that is getting tariffed elsewhere in the world. The stuff the US gets from Europe is pretty specialized and given the US tendency to continuously isolating itself while others are making trade deals, the others could just decide to do world economy without the US at some point.

If the US didn't had the singular role of the USD it would have been in dire trouble a while ago. Now the incentives for keeping the USD are getting less and less.

If Trump was an agent to hurt the US position in the world, he wouldn't do anything differently.

I wonder if we should make littering a offense in the internet instead.

Nah seriously, how much longer can we afford to waste the energy of the planet and of humanity on such bullshit?