Unfounded speculation but it's curious that it's soon after enabling 1M context tokens on the default plan.
I wonder if there are some long-tail load ramifications of this pricing change.
Serious (but not easy) answer:
You can move to a different country that more aligns with your moral standings or interests. You're (presumably) a valuable asset that will provide a net-positive contribution wherever you move, and a loss will be incurred when you emigrate.
It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one.
I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
You don't need to be rich to get a working visa (assuming you are a competent software engineer -- plenty of places in Europe will hire you, and there is a path to citizenship).
You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
Not trying to pick apart your point but I rotate a small set of staple clothes and they’re in fine condition after two years (haven’t had much time for clothes shopping since toddler arrived), despite me abusing “quick wash” and “drycare 40c” constantly on Miele W1/T1 stack for “90 minute, good to fold” laundry.
I don’t buy the cheapest brands, but also don’t buy anything marketed as premium/luxe.
Mostly I gravitate towards stuff with a fairtrade cotton (and good thread count, but that’s from preference of how it feels to wear)
Plus, I may be deluded but I’m of the opinion that polo shirts and jeans/neutral trousers are a multi-decade winning combination.
I might add, I've had some pretty long lasting clothes with Gildan heavy weight 100% cotton, and a few wool shirts I rotate. I think there are a few tricks that I accidently stumbled on to making my clothes last a long time: Firstly, I use mild detergents, and usually set the machine to "tap cold". I haven't noticed that my clothes are less clean. Secondly, I usually air dry on a rack instead of a dryer. I was forced to do this when I lived in an apartment, and suspect that this is a big factor. Thirdly, and maybe the most important, I spent some time learning what colors I look best in. Turns out there is quite a rabbit hole you can go down in terms of styling your clothes to match not what you "like" but what compliments your skin tone, body shape, and so on.
I actually think the last point has been profound, because I rarely _feel_ like buying clothes, because I look good in whatever Is in my closet.
For reference, I cycle through about 7 t-shirts. I wear the same one in the gym. I have a pair of rotten clothes for when I'm farming or hunting, but my daily clothes endure more daily wear and tear than urban living for sure.
This obviously depends on what you are trying to achieve but it’s worth mentioning that there are languages designed for formal proofs and static analysis against a spec, and I have suspicions we are currently underutilizing them (because historically they weren’t very fun to write, but if everything is just tokens then who cares).
And “define the spec concretely“ (and how to exploit emerging behaviors) becomes the new definition of what programming is.
(and unambiguously. and completely. For various depths of those)
This always has been the crux of programming. Just has been drowned in closer-to-the-machine more-deterministic verbosities, be it assembly, C, prolog, js, python, html, what-have-you
There have been a never ending attempts to reduce that to more away-from-machine representation. Low-code/no-code (anyone remember Last-one for Apple ][ ?), interpreting-and/or-generating-off DSLs of various level of abstraction, further to esperanto-like artificial reduced-ambiguity languages... some even english-like..
For some domains, above worked/works - and the (business)-analysts became new programmers. Some companies have such internal languages. For most others, not really.
And not that long ago, the SW-Engineer job was called Analyst-programmer.
Code is always the final spec. Maybe the "no engineers/coders/programmers" dream will come true, but in the end, the soft, wish-like, very undetailed business "spec" has to be transformed into hard implementation that covers all (well, most of) corners. Maybe when context size reaches 1G tokens and memory won't be wiped every new session? Maybe after two or three breakthrough papers? For now, the frontier isn't reached.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter how large the context gets, for a spec to cover all implementation details, it has to be at least as complex as the code.
That can’t ever change.
And if the spec is as complex as the code, it’s not meaningfully easier to work with the spec vs the code.
Depending on the application, I think “without preprocessing” is a huge assumption here.
LLMs typically do a terrible job of weighting poor quality context vs high quality context and filling an XL context with unstructured junk and expecting it to solve this for you is unlikely to end well.
In my own experience you quickly run into jarring tangents or “ghosts” of unrelated ideas that start to shape the main thread of consciousness and resist steering attempts.
It depends to the extent I already mentioned, but in the end more context always wins in my experience. If you for example want to provide a technical assistant, it works much better if you can provide an entire set of service manuals to the context instead of trying to put together relevant pieces via RAG.
As a Brit that relocated to Norway a decade ago, trust me when I say you cannot fathom the lack of organization around identity that the UK (somewhat intentionally) has. (It’s constantly used for political Godwin’s-law fear-mongering)
There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number but this is basically only outbound for PAYE tax and haphazardly correlated to your pension payments in late life.
Everything operates on a “trust system” where you often present paper (!) with whatever address you claim to be living at as proof you are real (e.g. opening bank accounts).
Passport loss is rectified by seeking out “professionals” with government-approved occupations that are not related to you that can vouch you are actually the person you are trying to replace a passport for.
The entire thing is a mess and living in digital-identity-native Europe is a dream come true that you should be extremely thankful for.
>>There is no centralized ID number, the closest is your social security number
Until you find out that due to a cock up years ago the National Insurance numbers are not guaranteed to be unique, and you realize that somehow the best proof of identity British people have is a humble driving licence because DVLA is at least somewhat competent.
It's even worse now: A lot of places now accept PDF's of things like bank statements, since so many people don't get paper copies any more.
It's not that it was hard to fake before if you wanted to, but when you can just get a real PDF as a starting point, and edit it slightly it's just theatre.
It doesn't have to be perfect. This is how financial regulation works in the US too, but it does work. The idea is that every individual step is weak, but it's a crime to bypass any of it. So the deterrence is you can catch things probabilistically and most people don't want to commit a whole bunch of crimes at once because they all have individual punishments.
B-but... if we have an ID card the "government" will be able to track us! /s
It does annoy me how much people get away with scaremongering, I just read a comment of someone who's against digital payments because "then the government will be able to work out how much tax you owe"????
> the execution of JS code it down to the browser rendering the page where it’s deployed. As such it’s practically impossible to get any code to run consistently
Can you elaborate on this part?
I would say one of the strengths of JS is that you can get it to run consistently just about anywhere.
Certainly! Now, I’m no expert and may get some things wrong here, if anyone else knows better I’d be happy to be corrected.
Every browser implements a version of ECMAScript (this is a specification declaring what features of the JS language will be available for the JS engine included with the browser).
This means that every browser on the planet, and every version of them, support different JS features.
For example, let and const are commonly used to define variables, but if someone happens to use an old browser version the use of these would cause an error, which in turn may cause all the rest of JS code to stop executing, resulting in (worst case scenario) your website being rendered useless to that particular person.
On top of that different browsers may use different engines. So even if they define the same ES version the code may still execute differently (this was for example a very big issue with Microsoft browsers in the past).
This may seem trivial, but new JS features emerge all the time. Granted, this was a much bigger problem before ~2015 something, but it’s by no means none existent today.
Thus, you cannot be sure the code you write locally will actually function the same everywhere, and you are unlikely to know how often failures even occur since it all happens client side.
I think with the official deprecation of IE this is mostly a thing of the past since all major browsers are “evergreen” and support a pretty recent standard. This certainly was the case only a couple of years ago, and it’s almost always wise to have a bundler (e.g webpack) that can target a fixed standard as output via transpilation/polyfill just in case you are itching to use the experimental features.
I know you're not entirely serious, but we really had it good and largely figured out with tables. It's probably because using tables for layouts was my native language, but I still sometimes have to mentally translate divs into a table in my mind to picture what is happening, and when default types are change (like block to inline, etc) it sometimes breaks my brain and I have to fallback to experimentation to get what I want. Slight disclaimer though: I'm a backend/infra guy so don't do frontend very often.
Tables aren't even deprecated. IMO you're better off keeping the tables than transforming it into <div> soup. 20 years ago you'd hear it shouted from the rooftops: "Tables for layout are not semantic!". Guess what? <div>s are never semantic. Just use tables if it suits you.
If you want to remove the semantics of table elements, you could set a role="presentation" attribute on all table-related tags. I'm wondering what HTML semantics enthusiasts will say about this. ;-)
You almost got me. After all why not? So I had to go read stuff, and think more about it than I would have. So thanks for this.
So: <table role="presentation"> is probably mostly fine, but not great, and not good practice.
The ARIA spec [1] says:
> 2. Notes on ARIA Use in HTML
> 2.1 First Rule of ARIA Use
> If you can use a native HTML element [HTML51] or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.
That's because simpler is easily more accessible. ARIA is last resort, when all else failed. ARIA is complex and not always well implemented, or implemented at all, and when it is implemented, interpretations can differ. Your content will be more accessible to more users / for more browsers if it doesn't rely on ARIA to be accessible. And more often than not, you can do more harm than good by using aria attributes, because it's easy to misuse them, which is worse than not using them at all. Now, ARIA is still very useful and should be used when it improves things over what HTML/CSS supports by itself, but table-based layouts have readily available HTML/CSS solutions.
My opinion is that there's no good reason today to use tables for presentation. One of the reasons is always the same: separation of concerns. Structure your content, in the simplest possible way, and then style it. Structured content, with a structure that's as simple as possible, is more easily accessible. Add divs if really necessary for styling (which don't really change the structure, since they don't have meaning - keeping in mind that they are a compromise).
It's funny how everyone seem convinced by the principle of separation of concerns, except for HTML/CSS/JS.
You could use divs with display:table(-row|-cell) for the same result. Although CSS flex or CSS grid would let you achieve the same thing with a simpler structure and will allow you to have a responsive design. Fat tables with side menus are unwieldy on small screens and your <table><tr><td>-based structure will make it more difficult to offer a usable design to them.
Table layout are also not great on text / terminal-based browsers. Letting the content flow from top to bottom will be way better. You have this for free if you don't use tables, because usually terminal browsers don't understand CSS.
I would then reverse the question: why use tables when you can use display:table, CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid? What are the benefits? Especially when they are simpler as soon as you learned once how to do your favorite layout using these "new" things. I won't be convinced by any answer that sounds like "I don't really want to learn this stuff" because if we are trying to answer "What is the most correct way to do this", we should seek to use the better version, not the one we are familiar with.
It seems to me "Why not use <table role=presentation>?" is a bit like "Why not use this carafe labeled 'this is a glass' as a glass?". Sure, why not, it will work, but if you have a glass now, even if you need to pour the water into the glass before you can drink it, isn't it better? (of course, maybe not the best analogy, I'm not good at analogies, but I hope it can help understand my perspective on <table role=presentation>).
I also believe role="presentation" or role="none" is a code smell. It has legitimate uses (I guess), but the use better be clearly justified.
one is a table the other pretends to be a table. There has to be a lot wrong for the table to forget what it is. try disabling style.
css also gets complicated much faster than html. I like to offload complexity to less complicated areas.
a practical example: i look at each row and set rowspan for duplicate values. a series of rows might have week 22 as their first cell and multiple with monday as their second.
How about "one pretends to be a layout, and the other is a layout"?
I don't understand well what you are saying, but:
> a practical example: i look at each row and set rowspan for duplicate values. a series of rows might have week 22 as their first cell and multiple with monday as their second.
This seems to be a case of using a table as a table, which is fine. You should use tables when you are trying to represent tabular data.
This seems to fall under the unconvincing "I don't really want to learn this stuff". This seems to be the only reason people are tables for layouts today.
People doing this are probably not interested in the rhetorical efficacy of the justification. In other words it probably doesn't matter whether you find it convincing.
Counterpoint: no semantics is better than wrong semantics. If a screenreader thinks your layout is a (data)table, it makes your visually impaired users sad.
I lost out on a front end job about 15 years ago because I marked up a business’s open and close hours in a table during a coding test. I was told that my skills were clearly out of date.
If you use tables for what they were intended for or you have no problem with them, keep on truckin. But they sucked when they were the only way to do things.
Table are used when tables are needed. Excel like overviews. No reason to not use tables.
For site layouts (multiple columns etc) you would better use divs in a flexbox or something.
Who needs Flexbox's inscrutable 1-dimension language when you can use ASCII diagrams in CSS Grid for clever 2D things easily? CSS Grid Kids are truly spoiled.
It is almost a shame modern browsers no longer support all the fun layout patterns of ol' FRAMESET. There was a layout tool to cut your teeth on (possibly literally the way it was made out of browser chrome).
Not that I necessarily advocate for frameset insanity, but you know what? That is a shame. My controversial (?) opinion is that browsers should literally never break anything that was once a part of the web platform unless there's simply no other choice. If the size of it is getting too big... first, stop adding more shit. (And then maybe, implement some old features in terms of some newer ones. Not really "web platform" but I am a huge proponent of what Ruffle is doing for the web.)
I’ll go a step farther: improved frames and datasource-aware tables and lists with a few very basic features found in almost any other UI kit out of the box would have given us 99% of the actually-beneficial stuff AJAX did, but better.
The Web is a ton worse because we decided to build apps on it but never built the tools to do it right, even though the building blocks were right there.
IMO the biggest problem with the way frames works is that it doesn't work well with navigation. I think unfortunately that this is just a design flaw with frames and it needed breaking changes to mitigate.
I think I would've rather seen it go that direction, but it's hard to say. Without a crystal ball, we can't really compare the outcomes, and it's hard to imagine what would've happened in this hypothetical. I mean, I don't think in 2004 I would've been able to guess (or stomach) what the web was going to become 20 years down the road.
I can't agree with this, because it creates a "barrier of entry" for people building new browsers. Old things should deprecate when new things do them better, and deprecated things should phase out.
Otherwise, we're stuck with Chrome Forever. I'd rather not.
Disagree. Deprecating things like <frameset> will not make it easier to build new browsers. Shadow DOM and WebComponents are significantly more complicated for browsers to implement than any old "deprecated" technologies. If you don't want Chrome forever, what you want is not removing old technologies, it's preventing more new technologies from becoming a part of the web platform.
We'll get better at building software. Even with huge engineering teams, we can only build the browsers that we have today due to improvements in large-scale software engineering.
Framesets still work as far as I know, they're just no longer recommended for a few reasons. Browsers already try very hard to never ever break anything, at least not anything that's been commonly supported for years or has made it into a standard. The main places browsers have broken compatibility with old content are related to plugins like Flash and Silverlight, which were always controlled by a single vendor instead of being open standards.
> at least not anything that's been commonly supported for years or has made it into a standard.
It's more: has made it into a standard and was commonly supported.
Sadly, the browsers aren't trying hard enough not to break anything. They are trying hard not to break anything standard, but the problem with that is that the standards can change, or that some things can be claimed to never have been standards all along. A bunch of IE/Netscape things have broken already such as BLINK and MARQUEE, despite being common enough to "feel" standard even though yes they were never actually standards. Also, as we've seen with the MathML battle in recent years, even standards aren't guaranteed to be kept in browsers if not "commonly supported".
The MDN deprecation warning on FRAMESET:
> Deprecated: This feature is no longer recommended. Though some browsers might still support it, it may have already been removed from the relevant web standards, may be in the process of being dropped, or may only be kept for compatibility purposes.
The browser support table says that every browser still currently supports FRAMESET with simple COLS and ROWS, but as I recall FRAMESET used to also support more complicated layout tools. My brain recalls it as being very similar to TABLE layout at one point in time that you could also have (limited) COLSPAN and ROWSPAN options. Such things may also have been IE/Netscape era "non-standards". If I had examples, they are probably lost to time. Similarly, with nearly no way to easily search in today's indexes for things specifically from the 1990s I can't think of a good way to find old examples either. It's also possibly my memory is just failing me on this and the crazy things I recall doing with framesets were just table layouts after all and maybe iframes, but I do recall doing some crazy things in the 90s that certainly aren't "standard" today and I know wouldn't work in today's framesets.
Yeah I don't really count Flash or Silverlight as parts of the "web platform" personally, though I will re-iterate that I am still very pleased with the Ruffle project nonetheless. From a practical standpoint, Ruffle does a lot of good even if Flash always was proprietary and not really a part of what the web platform really was at its core.
I hope <frameset> continues to work into the future. I'm sure eventually it will wind up on the chopping block, and personally I think that'll suck.
Although there is some degree of silliness to suggesting table layouts in 2024, it frankly really is not that bad. To me personally, the era of float: left and clearfix and 10 layers of wrapper divs was significantly more of a mess. "Oh look, I got my layout working on IE6! Oops, it's now broken in Opera..." Anyone remember using invalid CSS to write browser-dependent styles? How about using Microsoft's proprietary DirectX filters to make PNG transparency work? In the era of taking crummy PSDs full of graphics and chopping them up into images for an HTML template, these were the tools of the trade.
Not that tables were perfectly standardized or anything, because I do remember Netscape and IE not totally agreeing on how to handle column widths, but they sure were, well, simpler.
Yeah, but HN uses tables in a really dumb way. Each comment is in a separate table with the width of the first column set to provide the correct amount of indenting.
If the comments were properly nested you would just have a standard left margin and the tables would be completely unnecessary.
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