I'm still yet to be convinced React Server Components are anything but a disaster to the developer experience. Mixing backend and frontend without a clear boundary is terrible for any codebase beyond a handful of contributors.

But it is so cool!

I really don't understand why people complain about Spring or ASP.NET annotations, and then go running to Next.js with its useXXX and import magic.

Spring is a very good analogy to what useX hooks were to react. Thank you for this.

A different dsl inside Java or js implemented with duct tape in a dynamic way. React was screaming for a real typed functional language like elm imo, instead of a kludge of abstractions enforced by linters and weekly-changing best practices. React should have been "finished" like jquery. It is possible to develop something solid in it of course, but elegant it is not. Full of leaky abstractions.

The prime motivator for it is a certain user experience. I'm not sure they've found the best developer experience for providing that user experience, but I'm also not sure that a better DX is possible - the whole concept has quite a bit of inherent complexity, I'm afraid.

(The conclusion could, of course, also be that it's just not feasible to create that kind of user experience. Luckily, traditional patterns still work just as well.)

If you look at the origins, the primary motivation was finding a way to get a good data loading developer experience without having to adopt Relay and GraphQL.

I personally don't agree, and my experience is that RSCs embrace the inherent complexity of building websites. All websites span the server and the client to some extent. Giving you the tools to wield those boundaries is actually a bid for developer autonomy and flexible control over user experience.

It is complex because the domain is complex. Though it requires a deep understanding of the web as a platform, most high-level websites could net-benefit from the ideas behind RSCs. I don't find it to be quite as much of a footgun as most people would suggest, but if you don't understand both server and client in a deep manner it is, of course, confusing.

Happy to dig in deeper for anyone who wants to have an honest discussion about the benefits and drawbacks without dropping into FUD. Even if you decide it's not for you, all web developers could glean something from their model.

It's also always worth noting that RSCs don't require a server, and still bring value without one.

Did delivering quality really get easier? I'm certainly not seeing it in the software I use. Delivering scale doesn't mean the mission was executed well.

Judging from everyone I know, it will take people a lot of time to learn and accept a lesson from decades ago(one from before some of us were even born and I'm in my mid 30's): lines of code is a shit metric. Sloppers tend to believe that something seemingly working = production ready = good execution. And the metric, of course, is lines of code or "tokens". Until then, the list on this website will keep growing exponentially.

Does it seem like even senior developers are forgetting this axiom? Or do we feel as though it's been obviated by LLM grokking swaths of text for us?

TBH I'm so arrogant, I always suspect there's redundant nonsense in any code module I haven't myself inspected. LLM code is no different.

> I always suspect there's redundant nonsense in any code module I haven't myself inspected.

I don't think this is arrogance in the sense that it's probably correct. It is however pretty easy to take that line of thinking into an arrogant attitude though, which is the real issue.

Seniors are no different and that infuriates me even more. The few times I felt lazy and let an AI do a simple function for me, all hell broke loose. I'm starting to think that many people were never that senior to begin with: Writing the code accounts for very little of what development requires and is often the easy part. Understanding the problem and finding the sweet spot/optimal compromise, edge cases and how you can break it is what has always been difficult. Seeing github explode with slop and github(microsoft/openai) themselves push even harder should be a wake up call for anyone that understands what development is: not writing the code but having someone else go through it, analyze it, understand the problem you are trying to solve and why you made the decisions that you made - that pretty much always takes a lot more time than writing the actual code. And then I see someone push 20 commits in a day, each being 5000 lines, jam packed with emojis and other slop and tell me that they carefully reviewed all of them? Yeah, that's bullshit, mate.

I'm easily pushing 20 commits a day, but I won't pretend to have reviewed it all, let alone carefully. What I did was design it all carefully.

But, for some projects, yes—I still do line-by-line code review with a colleague.

Then again, a lot of my efforts are explicit refactor aimed at reducing LOC and tidying the codebase with, eg DRY.

> The few times I felt lazy and let an AI do a simple function for me, all hell broke loose.

This is confusing, because LLMs are more than capable of implementing "a simple function." How did you spec it out?

I once worked at a fairly large corp that considered itself tech-forward (it was a retail ecommerce company), and at one point they just decided to demote all engineers one level because they somehow finally realized that everyone they had been calling "Senior" were definitely not at that level.

Takes me back to the week we all thought room temperature super conductors might be a solved problem.

That served a useful purpose- it let you objectively identify how gullible everyone you know is.

There was more than enough skepticism and cautious optimism too. While it sounded too soon to be real, it wasn't unlike carbon nanotubes, graphene, or solid state batteries — previously unachievable material-tech getting validation in the lab, with a 20yr pipeline for global production. With even nuclear fusion being achieved in very specific / limited instances in the last decade, it's not inconceivable to hope that maybe RTSC are just around the corner.

It also served the purpose of finding out who the cynical Debbie Downers who have no hope are as well!

The joke is, more or less, you can reduce everyone into two piles. But that's almost assuredly wrong.

It's very very hard to have what most people would call "autistic" levels of rationality in discourse in this world. But if you hold yourself to high standards, you quickly compute the logical argument OP is making (people who were excited were gullible marks etc. etc.) and realize it's wrong in several different ways (happy to explicate if unclear).

This is, of course, very easy if you were A) excited and B) didn't think it'd come to pass. Also observing that A does not imply B and vice versa is the minimally sufficient observation to rule out OPs comment being rational*

* n.b. "rational" means something akin to "not affected by a psychoactive disorder" in everyday discourse. In philosophy / logic class, it means, the statements x conclusion are internally coherent. "The moon is made of cheese because it is yellow" is rational, "The moon is made of cheese because Teddy Roosevelt likes cheese" is irrational. "The moon is made of cheese because the Pope likes cheese" is rational with the implied premises "God controls all, and he loves the pope"

Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?

Asking since we've managed to increase superconductor temperature several times in the past, right? (to ~ -130 degrees celsius right now IIRC). Why is our current temperature of, say ~30 degrees celsius special?

If you look at a list of known superconductors and their transition temperatures - it appears that the difficulty of getting a material to superconduct is proportional some unfriendly power of the absolute temperature.

Superconducting does seem much easier under a few hundred GPa's of pressure - but that's less convenient to maintain than liquid helium cooling.

> Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?

Disclaimer - all I know about superconductors, I know from high school physics, and I left high school some 35 years ago so I know the State of the Art is waaaay over there somewhere now, and here I am still playing with my mercury cuprate stuff.

Anyway.

You have a car. It's similar to my car. It has a 200bhp engine, weighs about two tonnes, and tops out at about 100mph. How would you make that a 200mph car?

Well, you'd need more energy, for a start, but E=1/2mv^2 turns into sqrt(2E/m) right, so you need four times as much power for twice the speed. This is okay. You're not getting 800bhp out of the engine you have now but it's doable. You can buy cars with 800bhp engines, these days maybe you'd be looking at some electric motor.

But you're still not doing 200mph because the drag increases as the square of the speed too, so you'd actually need 1600bhp to get to 200mph, which is still doable but opens up even more problems because now everything needs to be heavier to cope with the power.

So all else being the same you're actually onto about 2400bhp or so before you crack 200mph.

Which you achieve just as you either run out of road, or more likely petrol, at £1.50 a litre, so you're not taking too many attempts at it.

Anyway, the tl;dr - it's not just one thing that's stopping you getting that transition point higher, it's a bunch of stuff that interacts in weird ways.

Its not at all clear that room temperature superconductors are impossible, it's a materials problem. If someone was to find one that is probably how they would do it - testing materials for some other property and finding it accidentally.

Room temperature is totally possible. Room temperature AND room pressure is another story. Superconductivity acrose a couple nanometers inside a diamond anvil is not very useful even if at "room" temperatures.

An AI video trend on Instagram as been Han from Tokyo Drift with different cars. People still want to share those on the platforms they are already locked into with their friends.

It kind of seems obvious that people would rather share their content on the pre-established platforms.

I believe OpenAI didn't actually want to create an alternative platform. Instead, they wanted (and needed) to be in control. This is really due to the experimental nature of the technology and platform. They wanted to do market research yet retain the power to pull it at any time.

Arguably they were successful in that given that they now have the ability to stop it.

You can hedge the position via options without having a taxable event on passive investment.

Because post 4.0 dropped the sycophancy?

I'm not seeing that at all. I'm seeing more markdown text being produced by AI but nobody wants to read it because the signal to noise is low. AI doesn't yet have a context window wide enough to have the judgement capability to filter the gold from the fluff for a moderate sized org.

Yeah I don’t think yet. But keep generating and tooling will arrive that can better connect it. We have the nodes (markdown files) but not the edges of the graph.

Has anyone done the math on how much liquid methane and oxygen this would take to launch on Starship? Seems like an impossibility alone without digging into the numbers.

Over promising is fraud. The hyperbole doesn’t help your argument at all.

What part is hyperbole?

Too many to quote but https://elonmusk.today hosts an intensive list of his lies.

Making predictions that don't come true is no fraud. Calling it fraud it hyperbole.

And Jesus some people have more time on their hands than they know what to do with making a site like that.

Imagine if they put their efforts into productive uses!

It's called fraud, the editor was a victim of fraud. At least he clued on late I guess..

>Is it fraud if he paid $0 for non-existent roadsters?

Is it fraud if you worked for a startup that promised you options, and then refused to honor/issue those said options? After all, because those options never existed, you also "paid $0 for non-existent [options]"?

> Leveraging an existing monetised readership for referral credits isn’t “work”.

> Is it fraud if he paid $0 for non-existent roadsters?

How do you think readership gets monetised in the first place? The biggest way is ads, which includes referrals.

Do you dismiss paid ad placement the same way you dismiss referrals? If not, what makes it different?

> Referral credits are legal fictions

A promise for $100 of stuff isn't exactly the same as a promise for $100, but it's close. Debt is a "legal fiction" but that doesn't mean it's not legitimate, or that you can pretend it doesn't exist.

> Do you dismiss paid ad placement the same way you dismiss referrals? If not, what makes it different?

The contract

Referrals usually have a contract. I don't know what went wrong in this situation, but in general those systems are just as legally binding.

There was no guarantee of Roadster delivery date.