> Any web application with a UI _requires_ a frontend build for CSS/JS.

Except it really doesn't. Core web technologies have gotten so much better since the jQuery/pre-SASS days that you can absolutely get by without a build step.

- http/2 makes bundling a questionable choice

- polyfills are pretty much no longer a thing

- CSS now has most (all?) of the features that people used SASS for (variables, nesting, etc.)

- es6 modules work

This has been a big talking point in the Rails community lately — one of the big selling points of Rails 8 was the fact that you can, by default, ship a whole webapp without a build step, and that this is considered the "happy path".

In web application terms, the "build" is everything that needs to happen to get your application running into production. That means a runtime and dependencies. Speaking of dependencies, does your perfect frontend simply not have any of them? Is every tool you will need to use perfectly packaged with vanilla CSS and ES6 modules? Browser support for import maps is around, but its nothing I would build a production application on. And god help if you if you work in a context that requires support for older browsers.

Maybe in 5 years this will be a practical approach, but there's a reason that old ways of doing thing hang around: they're well-documented and reliable.

I mean, people ARE doing it, and like I said it's mature enough to be the default way to build Rails apps. There's tradeoffs, no doubt, but this is absolutely a valid, productive way to write (certain types of) web apps.

Anecdotally, the same seems to apply to the output format as well. I’ve seen much better performance when instructing the model to output something like this:

  name=john,age=23
  name=anna,age=26

Rather than this:

  {
    matches: [
      { name: "john", age: 23 },
      { name: "anna", age: 26 }
    ]
  }

markdown works better than json too

I think the industry got caught up in all the cool new stuff that SPAs enabled. There’s a category of web apps that you simply can’t build without putting most of the state on the client (Google Docs, Figma etc.) and that category happens to contain most exciting web-based products that have been built lately. Not using an SPA was (is?) basically an admission that your website is and always will be “boring”.

We’re starting to (re-)discover that you can build interesting, profitable products that are technically boring.

Fun fact, this is actually illegal here in Sweden! That is, merchants aren't allowed to adjust prices based on payment method. Not sure what the reasoning is.

Because the main purpose of cash payments in small businesses is tax evasion - not just VAT but also paying family members in cash and thus dodging even more.

Fun fact, credit card merchants successfully made it illegal in the USA too, but that legislation expired and now it is legal to charge more for credit card usage (though credit card companies prefer that you offer a "cash discount" than an equivalent "credit card fee").

I wrote my bachelor thesis on something tangential — basically, some researchers found that it was possible in some very specific circumstances to train a classifier to do author attribution (i.e. figure out who wrote the program) based just on the compiled binaries they produced. I don’t think the technique has been used for anything actually useful, but it’s cool to see that individual coding style survives the compilation process, so much so that you can tell one person’s compiled programs apart from another’s.

Do you mean the whole binary or just the text segment/instructions?

Because I think this gets a lot easier if you can look at the symbol table, strings, and codesigning certificate.

This got me thinking of Ender’s Game, where they basically tricked a kid into committing xenocide by telling him he was playing a computer game.

I immediately made this association too. Although thinking back on it, the connection is rather strenuous.

Maybe we simply keyword matched on "video games" and "simulations". Or, perhaps more cynically, we're foreseeing a future in which AI agents don't care to differentiate between shooting at the enemy combatant in Call of Duty verses shooting at us in real life.

Seems to be an undercurrent of the release - that they're training it in a 'sandbox' by using 3D games for safety, as if the military-industrial complex doesn't have a huge incentive to implement them into our 3D space once they're done playing games.

I am fairly certain that ClosedAI has shown that training agents in robotics simulation generalises to reality rather easily.

Here they are tricking the public into thinking this technology is "just to make the machine learn to play videogames".

Or in Arrested Development when Buster joined the army as a drive pilot and thought he was playing a video game

Beautifully designed website! I still don’t know how it’s supposed to work though, the whitepaper has zero implementation details in it.

Thanks :) It's a basic centralised idea - I'm working on a second version of the whitepaper to be more pragmatic with defining the solution, the current one is just conceptual.

Look at professional bodybuilding to see how this ends. Being competitive means taking years (decades?) off of your life expectancy, and nobody wants to see their heroes die in their 50s.

No OP but I think there’s three parts to really getting TCP/IP:

- Read the spec(s)

- Learn the OS APIs deeply

- Look at a bunch of real network data in e.g. Wireguard

> Look at a bunch of real network data in e.g. Wireguard

I think you probably meant data in e.g. Wireshark?

But another good suggestion (or maybe what you meant) might be to look at 'real' (production) networking code in e.g. Wireguard, I imagine.

Yup, this is me too. Married with two kids, met when we were 17, went through uni together.

For me, having a small social circle is just a matter of preference. I don’t know why. I don’t feel uncomfortable in (most) social situations and I have a lot of acquaintances that I’m friendly with. Sometimes I’ll hang out. Most of the times I just don’t want to.

Most of the socialising I do nowadays has a “purpose”. Beers after work, play dates with other parents, tech meetups and so on. If it’s just a random hang out session, I’m sorry but I’d rather hang out with my wife and kids.