People will say there is more to it than that, I mean, ethics is a big branch of philosophy, but I think "you feel bad when you do something wrong" is what makes you a moral subject.
I'd say that animals are moral subjects in that they are sensitive to ruptures in relationships and expectations. The first time I fell off a horse the horse was a lot more shook up than I was. A cat doesn't feel guilty about killing a bird (not against the values of cats) but does seem to feel guilty about breaking a vase.
Accountability is especially beautiful when self directed. It isn't us holding the cat accountable for the vase. That is pointless. The cat holding itself responsible, that is what makes our relationship with them possible.
When you get into "animal morality" I think there is near-consensus now that "animals can be moral" but huge disagreement over exactly what that means!
Like whether they are cued by your feelings (I don't think so in that case where I found falling off a horse often isn't very painful or scary, like the geometry is usually favorable for you and it's not like you are falling in free space but you are in contact with a body that can slow down your fall... and you might very well smack it in the mouth with the bit or yank its head with the reins) or a violation of the script, or maybe just "common sense" empathy.
It's a running gag in our family that people are writing papers proving horses, dogs, cats, corvids and other animals have various cognitive-social capabilities, particularly regarding "theory of mind" because if you have dealings with animals it is pretty obvious that they're socially intelligent, probably about as much as us. Doing the experiments are hard though because of things like
I love the story of Clever Hans, which says so much about humans and so little about horses - I get the point that it makes these experiments very difficult.
How does it --if it does-- relate to your idea of "affordability porn" :)
That line (between your other values?) was uproarious; I apologise for not u*voting it, partially because I couldn't vocalise my peculiar fetish att (+ "gnarliness-pornstar" doesn't sound nearly as enticing as "AI-affordability-pornstar" X)
Sounds like they got sick of if after working on it so much. It's really frustrating and tiring when you get everything essentially right but it doesn't work out because of slightly off timing or for some absurdly complex set of reasons that you can never pin down. That's the recipe for burnout.
(1) Tried to bring back the old symbolic AI in 2010s on my own account but people kept knocking down my door because they needed help with one or another neural net. I got an autoencoder in front of customers as part of a highly successful product.
(2) Worked for a startup trying to teach RNNs to read clinical notes; people typecast me as the idealist but I would have preferred the cynical business plan of a product for medical offices to "rebill" insurance to maximize revenue, like the value is clear and nobody dies if it screws up.
(3) Worked at another startup that was training CNNs to read all sorts of documents and datasets you see in corporate environments. That summer I had a methodology I called "predictive evaluation" and a sheaf full of notes that proved that variations of the system we had wasn't really going to work (but they did get it to work enough for one at least one customer) and there was that meeting when we talked about BERT and I said "that seems to avoid all my objections" but the team was through with developing new models and my methodology would have underestimated what BERT could do because it didn't give credit for getting the right answer by the wrong method! Turned out transformers also fixed problems those RNNs had too!
... been that way for a real long time. Somebody ought to start a startup for an AR app that replaces those billboards with other billboards you might find in some other kind of city, say Boston or Philadelphia or Atlanta so people in SV can have a little empathy for "the rest of us".
which could be read as an expression of 1970s environmentalism or something like 2001 A Space Odyssey where a crew member runs amok instead of the computer.
Oddly a lot of people just don't see things like that, just like my boomer relatives didn't seem to notice that SDTV TV programs looked stretched out on an HDTV. (Did this normalize obesity?)
Funny I have modals on my mind this afternoon and boy does it drive me up the wall that mainstream React frameworks still aren't using the <dialog> element and without that you will fail WCAG because all the other schemes that are supposed to hide the rest of the page don't.
It isn't even that hard, like I've been able to update the parts of MUI and reactstrap that my applications use even to calculate coordinates for portalized flyovers correctly. I could send but I just don't want to do the 5x work to do all the other components I don't use and then face the politics of a community that probably doesn't care if disabled people can use their products or even if they can check the boxes and pass WCAG. <dialog> is easy to use with HTMX and just a touch awkward with React because React insists on being level-triggered in edge-triggered situations but once you have it coded up <DialogsThatReallyWork/> just work.
I tried to use <dialog> and found it to be a pain.
I wanted to close it when clicking outside, but Safari doesn't support closedBy.
Some Safari versions on iOS broke when trying to style my backdrop with tailwind.
The tailwind CSS reset didn't include <dialog>.
I get the allure of just using a position: fixed;
WCAG is lot lot more than just using <dialog> and unless you do a thorough review with a professional in this field, <dialog> won't solve anything. Do you know how many other WCAG guidelines your app or your site misses. No one knows that.
We do pretty good on Siteimprove and similar checkers although these are frequently wrong and in some cases I think think the specs are actually wrong or miss important things for political reasons. We have customers who send us bug reports and we fix them, we catch others preemptively ourselves.
It is a problem that the experiences of disabled people are erased by the current regime, I haven't once seen an organization actually ask a disabled person if they can use the site or how it can be better.
Also I think accessibility tools are trash. If I start NVDA on my dev machine I have to power cycle it to get control back. Microsoft Narrator sorta works but the more you use landmarks and other aria-markup the more it starts blurting out things like "LANDMARK NAVIGATION LANDMARK!" in the middle of reading something even thought Siteimprove thinks it is all peachy. Is it a fail? Or did the tool fail? My tester or myself can look at an application as a sighted user and test it in Firefox/Chrome/Safari and say "it works" but it is not clear at all what the "definition is done" for testing with screen readers.
I hear JAWS is better than the others but it costs about as much as a car. In the meantime though I know when we don't use <dialog> we fail and I've seen a lot of third party modals that don't use <dialog> that all fail.
It's just plain easy. It boggles my mind that nobody uses it.
But then again it boggles my mind that you can pass WCAG with those "is this a motorcycle?" things or that stupid anime girl you see on Linux pages or a GDPR popup and you can. People will say "what if you have to support WCAG and GDPR?" and I say "sometimes you have to make a choice", I mean a11y work is damned if you damned and damned if you don't, just damned all the time and personally the EU screws up my life a lot more than Iran ever did.
I'd point to that being a particular bad example. For one thing, you are going to have to enforce that business logic on the back end or your data structures will get shredded.
If one thing drives me crazy about the current situation it is the techniques you found on the most advanced web sites in 1999 are effectively lost, like the techniques used to build the Egyptian pyramids. Redrawing the whole page can be amazingly fast over a fast network (LAN/localhost which is a real situation in the enterprise) if you aren't loading 50x more CSS than you need and not loading 300 trackers or having a real time auction with 10,000 bidders for ads -- that kind of app can feel more responsive than many desktop and mobile applications today.
I have no doubt whatsoever that you could make an issue tracker with HTMX which would embarrass JIRA.
What amazes me about React though is that I can literally walk around inside a React web page, see
and when I look at things like Vue and Svelte I see a lot of things that "look like a good mental modal for everyday web applications" but with React I can "draw anything I want" Thing is that people mostly want to make form applications and the framework that would serve them best is something like react-hook-form with a simpler substrate than React underneath it.
Right now I am working on biosignals demos where I might have a radar that reads respiration and a heart rate monitor and a myoelectric sensor and it is really easy to snap together a few components in JSX and write a little bit of code that fetches data from the devices and uses a library of functions to process it for the components. It should be just as easy to drag and drop a few components from a visual palette and configure them on the fly but React is not good for that.
Back in 2006 I was working on Javascript systems such as decision support applications and knowledge graph editors that were that flexible and... the rest of the world just hasn't caught up.
The HTMX route that this article is advocating has some value.
My YOShInOn RSS reader works that way and I think it is great -- but it is my own thing and I don't have customers and managers coming to me with requirements and I can build everything with that architecture in mind.
As I see it the basic front end problem is that you click on something and then the page is updated and this updating could be really simple (like you are typing into an autocomplete box and search results appear under it) or it might impact a large number of elements spread all over the page and some applications might be very dynamic and updating dependent on the UI state and can't be figured out ahead of times (imagine a developer tool which has lots of property sheets and tool windows)
HTMX is very simple for the simplest cases, requires some back end framework for harder cases (like a page might have 20 partials in it when it draws for the first time, 3 partials need to be redrawn when you click on something, you need to format a response packet that draws those 3 partials in the right place) and breaks down for the hardest cases. Part of the React puzzle is that we often use React for apps that don't need its full power but hey, even for something CMS-adjacent why fight with unintuitive Markdown (face it!) when you could write
<MyElement attributeThatMattersToMe="yes">Here's the content</MyElement>
which conforms to your needs.
As much as I love HTMX, I got into it when my dissatisfaction with React was at its peak, more recently React is my go-to for anything from whimsical personalized landing pages to biosignals application that use Web Bluetooth, USB and Serial. Why? I use it at work all day and know how to get things done. I can draw anything at all, even 3-d worlds with A-Frame. That frustrating build system is clearing up.
I am picky about what shoes I wear because I have toebox trouble. I used to like Brooks the best but the price has skyrocketed and I think they are going in the direction of fashion over quality. Now my mainstay is Pumas but I have a pair of New Balance shoes I am carefully breaking in that might enhance the gait of a character I play but also put a lot of stress on my legs.
Once in a while I find a $35 shoe at Walmart that is compatible with my feet and looks great and lasts about half as long as $70 shoe but most of the time Walmart doesn't have them in stock which is sad.
People will say there is more to it than that, I mean, ethics is a big branch of philosophy, but I think "you feel bad when you do something wrong" is what makes you a moral subject.
I'd say that animals are moral subjects in that they are sensitive to ruptures in relationships and expectations. The first time I fell off a horse the horse was a lot more shook up than I was. A cat doesn't feel guilty about killing a bird (not against the values of cats) but does seem to feel guilty about breaking a vase.
See also
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
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