technobabbler

"Ally" is probably too weak a word for the relationship we have with Israel. Probably no other country has this much influence on our politics. Not even the UK or Canada, who we share close cultural and linguistic bonds with.

Israel is like the Taiwan of the Middle East, meaning it's a useful partner to us in terms of maintaining a separation between the West and some perceived enemy (Muslims in this case, the Chinese in the case of Taiwan). But they also cause us to have more enemies than we otherwise would. In an open letter, Bin Laden specifically called out our support for Israel as one of their justifications behind 9/11.

Spying between allies is a relatively normal thing, but when someone screws up and lets the public see it happen, usually there is at least some mild chiding. Israel doesn't even get that tsk tsk because of how much influence they have.

Also, Israel has a very effective propaganda machine that purposely tries to paint any criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitism. It's hard for our politicians to openly discuss them without risking their ire, and that of many influential Jewish Americans, and the powerful AIPAC lobby.

Frankly, Israel has us by the balls. Less an ally and more a dominatrix.

In America, kids are only allowed to play with real guns.

I think this is overstating the case a bit? In Next.js, it's pretty straightforward (and useful, really): the page gets its initial data injected at build time and served as HTML. It's static and stays that way until and unless you purposely add in dynamic elements on the page using useEffect or similar.

It's not really any different than, say, using PHP to generate the HTML and then using Javascript for clientside interactivity, with or without AJAX. That's been the paradigm for decades now. What NextJS gives you is the ability to do use that same paradigm in a single language, React.

Architecturally it's not really all that different, but in terms of dev experience, Next.js + Vercel is SO much better than having to maintain a LEMP stack. Just code the frontend against some CMS or other data store, push to git, and done!

Yeah, but with the Nolan Batmans in particular, I rewatched them again at home with subtitles on and got a way different (better, IMO) experience than the unintelligible garble at the theater.

When I first saw Batman Begins, I didn't at all understand that there was some connection between Henri Ducard and Ra's al Ghul (both played by Liam Neeson)... was really confused why Batman's apparent friend/mentor suddenly became the villain, and then somehow a bunch of other villains showed up and wanted to do something to Gotham (but couldn't understand what). At first watch, all I got was that "Batman went through some hard shit before Gotham". It didn't at all prepare me for the plotlines of the subsequent movies and none of the characters made sense until I could rewatch it with subtitles on.

My understanding is that Nolan chose that unintelligibility for some artistic reason, but as a moviegoer, it just means I miss most of the entire plot of his movies. That's especially the case when you combine unintelligible dialogue with fast dark scenes... just a lot of blurry fists and wheels that's incredibly hard to keep track of.

Also Interstellar... first time I watched it, all I really got was "corn farmer goes to space and gets betrayed". None of the intricacies of the Bookshelf of Time™ got through because it was all unintelligible. Argh.

Yikes! That seems like it'd a real PITA for anyone sitting behind you, constantly seeing flashes of light from the projector if you happened to hold it the wrong angle for just a second.

> Yet I don't think that precludes the possibility of pre-loading information and injecting it at runtime.

Can you explain?

Do they have an alternative?

It may have been possible to contain it early on. Way too late now. It's here to stay forever, with new strains constantly evolving.

What if new variants inevitably emerge given global mutations and lackluster vaccinations?

In the Next.js/Vercel world, this hybrid architecture is primarily (I believe) an issue of cost savings (for them and you). For $20/mo Vercel will host your hybrid Next.js side, yet do all of the backend configuration and maintenance on your behalf, configuring not just NPM but Lambda and Cloudflare Workers, along with nginx and caching and CDN mirroring and invalidations, all seamlessly.

So as a dev you can just code against the Next.js docs and not have to play devops. That's a LOT of time savings for $20/mo, and you can afford way more page hits this way than a barebones $20/mo NPM VM would get you. Yes, backend it's super complex and fanned out to different providers, but Vercel manages all of that for you.

I imagine Gatsby and Netlify are similar, but not sure. Next.js was designed around Vercel specifically (sadly) and there's a lot of vendor-specific lock-in features.

It's a cost thing... a lot easier to CDN static HTML files and only make edge calls as necessary.

In our Next.js setup, for example, all pages are served static by default and cached around the world, but every revalidation period (60 seconds or so?), one edge worker will check the data source against the upstream CMS, and rebuild that one page if needed.

That means our max edge worker and API call is 1 per minute, regardless of whether there are 10 visitors or 10 million. The others will just get the cached CDN files.

That makes it a lot more affordable.

If you had infinite budget and could pay for edge functions to re-render the page every visit, with or without caching, then more power to you. But not everyone can afford that.

Edit: Also, a secondary benefit is accessibility. Since most of the content is served as a flat HTML, those with outdated browsers/misconfigured ad blockers/javascript turned off can still see the most important part of the content. Maybe they miss some interactivity, but they can still at least read the gist of the article since that's just HTML.

Depending on your specific edge function configuration (i.e. whether it needs web workers or web sockets or such) some browsers may not load that correctly. Dangerous for that to be the only delivery mechanism. But if your edge function just masquerades as a web server and returns plain old HTTP, that shouldn't be a problem.

FYI, most of the big theater chains can provide subtitles in their theaters. There are two types of devices they'll give you... one is a personal two-line LED display that fits in your cupholder and sits around eye level, the other is a pair of electronic glasses that overlays them onto the picture. Both sync to a wireless signal that gets broadcast in the theater itself.

I can't watch movies without those anymore. You just have to go to guest services and ask for them; sometimes the frontline staff won't know they have them, but a manager almost always knows how to get one and set it up for you. It's free.

I dunno, Batman spans the gamut from "campy bang pows" to "lite morality plays" -- not quite to the extent of, say, Joker, but some of the Nolan Batmans were way more existential and dialogue/monologue-driven than the older Batmans.

Maybe a more similar distinction would be the X-Men/Wolverine movies vs Logan, where the latter is a more introspective take on the character, and so the story is relatively more important than the action sequences.

Some speakers (Sonos comes to mind) have a "night mode" that basically does that, compressing the dynamic range. There is also a dialogue mode that emphasizes the human speech frequencies.

I think the common, simpler way is to make the component itself (<AuthenticatedNav>) state-aware. So it always returns that component, but the component itself renders differently (`isLoggedIn && <NavBarSubComponent>`) depending on some upstream state passed as a prop or a shared context via a context provider.

If you return two different tags like the author did, React won't know how to properly inject that into the DOM. They are different elements, after all.

Yeah, there are a bunch of ways to turn them off if you're a frequent user. But as a fresh install, you get bombarded with all sorts of useless recommendations and ads. It reminds me of the MSN start page.

I see the fresh installs often because I only use Firefox to test occasional browser bugs (it's always Firefox), and then delete it a few weeks later when I no longer need it, then reinstall it later when I need to test it again. Every time it gets more annoying.

I'd argue that presenting partner extensions as though they were a user-friendly feature is a dark pattern in and of itself. "Check out this shiny new feature you'll love!" Oh wait, it's just more Firefox spam. Stop wasting my time.

If the semantics bother you, feel free to call it something else... an anti-feature, perhaps.

Every time I open Firefox it's different, and annoying in some new way. It's really gone downhill in the last decade.

> All of this combined is still less "dark" than Chrome automatically combining Chrome logins with standard Google accounts, and logging you into the browser account whenever you log into your Google account.

I actually find that a very useful feature that keeps my settings and logins in sync across multiple computers and accounts.

> To say nothing of things like FLoC, new web APIs that just so happen to be excellent ways to track you

Still falls into the "it just tracks you" category... basically the only major downfall, which isn't a big deal to me. Everyone tracks you these days, and mostly an adblocker negates the effects.

> AMP integration

Yeah, AMP and its ilk (FB Lightning pages, etc.) were good ideas evilly implemented. Good thing AMP is on its way out.

> neutering ad blockers

That would be a big deal if and when it comes to pass (seemingly soon, perhaps?)

The thing is, aside from the ad blockers, most of those supposed downsides have had little to no impact on my user experience, vs the constant hassling of Firefox. I get annoyed every time I open Firefox. Chrome just works and actively makes my life easier with its syncing and auto logins. To you those may be downsides, to me they are helpful and unobtrusive.

These are all great points.

Frankly I do miss the IE6 days, when everything just mostly worked. NetCaptor, an IE-based browser using Trident to render pages, had its own ad blocker, tabbed browsing, quicksearch, etc. -- most of the best features of Chrome -- without all the compatibility issues of the browser wars.

Disabling ActiveX and Java (not Javascript) and having Just One Browser made for a remarkably clean and simple experience, the likes of which we haven't seen since.

For all the modern innovations, I don't think the fundamental premise of the web has changed all that much -- hyperlinks, text, and media -- but the user and developer experience has gotten a lot, lot worse over time as more and more money competed for eyeballs.

Edit: As for "work as hard and dedicate as much budget"... I hope they don't! A circa-2000s feature freeze on web browsers would be wonderful. Stop "innovating", i.e., creating trash features that only help huge enterprises selling trash advertising. The web doesn't need to be this complex; we're feature-rich and content-poor as it is. What started as a network for academics and info sharing ended up being a marketer's wet dream and a nightmare for everyone else.

Stuff like this (not my post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416956

I just remember that every time I reopen Firefox (to test it for something), some new annoying thing like Pocket or some other trendy extension I didn't ask for has suddenly appeared. And it's always bugging me with CHECK OUT WHAT WE ADDED popups. I don't CARE about your new features, just let me browse the web and stay outta the way, damn it.

> with the added trust of Microsoft

lolololol

Does someone on their marketing team actually believe that?

> Firefox, for all it's modern faults, is the only browser that's actually different in any substantial way.

That's the thing. I don't WANT a browser that's actually different. The web is a duopoly between Apple and Google, and everything else is a second-class citizen. The era of an "open" web came and went, passing us by as capitalism took over. Firefox offers no meaningful freedom when all the content it's supposed to consume was designed by and for big companies targeting other big companies' products and customers.

Using Firefox introduces a lot of headaches and subjects you to frequent, meaningless UI updates that add partner extensions against your will and show you recommendations that I don't want to see... Mozilla is desperately trying to stay relevant and has introduced a lot more dark patterns than Chrome has, all while adding no value beyond some vague, lackluster appeal to a libre web... too little, too late.

Google, for all its faults, makes a darn good browser. The only downside is that they track my habits. So what? I'm not particularly exciting, and the only real cost I've noticed, beyond needing an ad blocker, is that my Google News feed gets cluttered with shit I don't care about derived from my browsing history. But other than that Chrome is just wonderfully simple and clean compared to the bloated Firefox (and its lookalike clones, Opera and Edge).

That's a great idea.

Cloudflare functions kinda like a private security company. They don't go around blocking sites willy-nilly, site owners have to specifically choose to use their service (and maybe pay for it), configuring the bot blocking rules themselves.

That's not really Cloudflare's fault. Someone has to do it, whether it's them or a competitor or sys admins manually making firewall rules. Cloudflare just happens to be good enough and darned affordable, so many choose to use them.

Hosting costs for small site owners would be much more expensive without Cloudflare shielding and caching.

Nice in theory, but as far as I've seen, most home routers and devices don't utilize those, and most users don't know how to configure them, and the up/down ratio is so vast (like mine is 1000/20, a 50x difference) that it's hard to saturate the down without first maxing the up in a torrent. The exception to that is it you happen to get some phat-piped seeds who are willing to send to you super fast even if you're uploading at a trickle. But in that case, plain old HTTP would've worked better anyway.

At the end of the day the bottleneck isn't at the protocol level, but the asymmetry of home cable connections. Torrents are great when you have symmetric fiber, but very few homes do right now.

For the lazy geeks out there, the service diffy does this easily and for cheap: https://diffy.website/

I tried to convert those units but all I got was an imagemagick error

Poor Google, however will they survive

Gzip does that, chrome mobile will proxy and recompress things in data saver mode, cloudflare will minify pages and scripts and recompress images and lazy load things for you if you let it.

You can also just run an ad blocker and most of the weight goes away