"The Browser" has turned out to be a pretty terrible application API, IMO. First, which browser? They are all (and have been) slightly different in infuriating ways going all the way back to IE6 and prior. Also, a lot of compromises were made while organically evolving what was supposed to be "a system for displaying and linking between text pages" into a cross-platform application and system API. The web's HTML/CSS roots are a heavy ball and chain for applications to carry around.
It would have been great if browsers remained lightweight html/image/hyperlink displayers, and something separate emerged as an actual cross-platform API, but history is what it is.
It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.
Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.
When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.
I envy your pure soul. I am one of many who has had, at times, been coerced through financial strain to write some front end code. All I ask for is, when the time comes, you try to remember me for who I was and not the thing I became.
Look at caniuse, if you see green boxes on all the current version browsers. Than you are good to go. If not, wait until the feature is more widely supported.
I see a lot of this sentiment amongst developer friends but I never could relate. Its not that I'm against it or something but it just doesn't move me personally.
Most things I create in my free time are for my and my family's consumption and typically benefit immensely from the write once run everywhere nature of the web.
You can launch a small toy app on your intranet and run it from everywhere instantly. And typically these things are also much easier to interconnect.
Are you talking about the "engineer talked to a customer and now both are mad at each other" trope?
While I have seen this happening it usually has nothing to do with engineers and more with that fact that talking to customers and identifying requirements is a task that requires respect and practice to become good at. Procentually I've seen more junior MBAs alienate customers than I have engineers seen do it.
The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.
Exactly my point. All that (and all the other things needed) did not just materialize out of thin air. It took decades and dozens of failed protests to get to that point.
Isnt that a bit dangerous in its own? If the merge process can complete without conflicts being resolved, doesnt it just push the Problem down the road? All of a sudden you have to deal with failing CI or ghost features that involve multiple people where actually you just should has solved you conflict locally at merge time.
The conflict is no longer an ephemeral part of the merge that only ever lives as markup in the source files and is stomped by the resolution that's picked, but instead a part of history.
I think it is also not true that there's only one correct answer, although I don't know how valuable this is.
For committing let's say yes, only one correct answer. Say the tool doesn't let you commit after you've merged without resolving conflicts.
But continuing to work locally you may want to put off resolving the conflict temporarily. Like person A changed the support email to help@example.com and person B changed it to support@example.com - obviously some wires go crossed and I will have to talk to A or B before committing the merge and pushing, but I can also go ahead and test the rest of the merge just fine.
And heck, maybe even committing after merging is fine but pushing requires resolving. Then I can continue working and committing locally on whatever else I was working on, and I'll only resolve it if I need to push. Which may mean I never need to resolve it, because A or B resolve it and push first.
> The conflict is no longer an ephemeral part of the merge that only ever lives as markup in the source files and is stomped by the resolution that's picked, but instead a part of history.
That has roughly been my MO as well and it works great for groups where identities have settled.
But one has to keep in mind that, in our currwnt "more woke" times, if you go this way in a new group you run the risk of being labeled an array of things. So tread carefully there.
I don't think it quite means that - happy to be corrected on this, but I think it's more like what percentage it can still pay attention to. If you only remembered "cat sat mat", that's only 50% of the phrase "the cat sat on the mat", but you've still paid attention to enough of the right things to be able to fully understand and reconstruct the original. 100% would be akin to memorizing & being able to recite in order every single word that someone said during their conversation with you.
But even if I've misunderstood how attention works, the numbers are relative. GPT 5.4 at 1M only achieves 36% needle retrieval. Gemini 3.1 & GPT 5.4 are only getting 80% at even the 128K point, but I think people would still say those models are highly useful.
It seems to be the hit rate of a very straightforward (literal matching) retrieval. Just checked the benchmark description (https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/mrcr), here it is:
"The task is as follows: The model is given a long, multi-turn, synthetically generated conversation between user and model where the user asks for a piece of writing about a topic, e.g. "write a poem about tapirs" or "write a blog post about rocks". Hidden in this conversation are 2, 4, or 8 identical asks, and the model is ultimately prompted to return the i-th instance of one of those asks. For example, "Return the 2nd poem about tapirs".
As a side note, steering away from the literal matching crushes performance already at 8k+ tokens: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05167, although the models in this paper are quite old (gpt-4o ish). Would be interesting to run the same benchmark on the newer models
Also, there is strong evidence that aggregating over long context is much more challenging than the "needle extraction task": https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08140
All in all, in my opinion, "context rot" is far from being solved
No it is not. Anything combustion related certainly isn't, as has been proven ad absurdum. All non BEV non combustion alternatives are, optimistically phrased, in their infancy. So yes, BEVs are the future for the next 20-40 years at a minimum.
This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar panel industry in China and Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this.
It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose to put the question up to the "free market", completely disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where heavily subsidizing those industries.
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