Any company with sufficient size will fail to incentivise the things they claim at the top, unfortunately the impacts of decisions (especially during austerity) are poorly understood, so even the supposedly best intending will fail once you reach a size
That's not the nicest way, nor is it the most honest or accurate. I actually do care (and I know I'm not the only one) and even find myself firing up ladybird from time to time. It's probably more accurate to say "few" people care, and caring comes in degrees. Just in case it needs to be said: popularity isn't necessarily a great measurement of salience either.
You're 110% right. Why would any company care about competition from it? Its years away from being real, then it can start trying to build name recognition like Firefox had to. And once all that's done...does it actually do anything different fundamentally that could lead to a qualitatively different experience, like Servo?
There's a certain set of topics that are beyond my ability to explain exactly why they have an aphrodisiac-like appeal to enough commentators that they can't be discussed.
It's dangerous because if you read the threads, all the signal you'd have is "these are important, noteworthy, well-known projects that even get funded!", and anyone making decisions about their own career based on that would be gravely mistaken.
So, you're left with impressions and no facts: you have no idea that its a web browser that you have to compile to use, most people talking about it aren't using it, even as a toy, even one-off.
The multiple engineers hired to help came from a one-off grant from pandemic-era Shopify that thought it was 10x'ing in size, & it was given for absolutely no reason, strategic or otherwise. That would fund, in actuality, roughly 1 engineer for a year, whereas it's lauded as funding that enabled hiring multiple engineers for the long-term.
I waited days to reply to you, because if I voiced anything remotely straightforward on the topic, it'd be downvoted to invisible, which would have just further reinforced the ideas in a reader, it'd look like I was making inaccurate claims.
* quick try: appeals to 'oh it wasn't that hard' we all meet somewhat regularly while programming. Then add the "I could build Dropbox in a weekend" effect. Then throw in "big tech companies suck", and "all web browsers suck", and you want this to succeed. Then throw in "man this guy sure has an awesome personal story, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and recovered!". Without any counter discussion, which is verboten because of the personal story, you're just getting absolutely bombarded with messaging that appeals to your common HN confirmation biases, you can do it, you can break bigco and fix the web/computers/etc.
By 2019, typescript was for some time dominant over flow and had won the js ecosystem, so either the author was naive to this or isn't quite portraying the story well.. I think it should be fine for the author to say they had personal preference over something like flow and so you developed tools to their own preference
I'm dubious that a constraints system would ever be considered, CSS has so far had some strong goals around it's predictably on layout cost.. that said, Houdini layout proposal is the closest to your comment, offloading layout to an isolated js context https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini-drafts/blob/main/css-layo... .. but honestly flex and grid, plus other things like containment have solved so many things for folks now that there's just far less demand for improvement than the days before flex
Oh man - I remember attending a CSS meetup in like 2014 at the Google offices in Sydney where someone from the CSS WG presented Houdini Layout. I would be surprised if that ever ships.
If sub-quadratic architectures (eg Mamba) become a thing, it will become feasible to precompute most of the work for a fixed prefix (i.e. system prompt) and the latency can be pretty minimal. Even with current transformers, if you have a fixed system prompt, you can save the KV cache and it helps a lot (though the inference time of each incremental token is still linear).
I think this is the crux of it, if something works for awhile then actually that's fine, as an industry we over index and scare new developers towards complexity. The counter is true too, what works at scale doesn't at non scale - not because of tech, but because holistically your asking for a lot, a lot of knowledge, a lot of complex tech to be deployed by a small team.
I'm not entirely sure what parasitic upper class is, but getting paid over 2 million while the company you are in charge of dives, and then in response saying you should be earning 5x more.. truly nobody needs that kind of money.. maybe this isn't 'parasitic upper class' but it's certainly what's wrong with the world
