Notices by Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town), page 3

@graue @zachleat because React.js is already worse than what it replaced. by a lot. for both users and developers

@graue @zachleat for 99% of what react.js gets used for, plain static html and css would be vastly better. and ESM pretty much obviates the need for the build tools we were using to use common js modules

Am I saying Never Use Frameworks?
Am I saying Never Use Components?

nope. I am not. get yourselves a reading lesson.

frameworks are a relic of a time when cross browser differences were so dire you needed some abstraction.

now you kinda only need that for the newer APIs that have differences still like storage, and audio. these APIs didn’t exist at all when frameworks started and aren’t even addresses by them.

we have es modules now. free yourself from the shackles of your build systems

it is okay to just… not use any JS framework. i am sometimes just startled at the assumption from so many pros that you *need* one.

you can just.. write plain JS.
it won’t hurt. I promise.

Constructors should not have side effects. they should only allocate memory, initialise values, and return a value/pointer

things invented by black people:
- videogame cartridges
- bash shell
- crop rotation
- transgender
- GPS
- Stop Lights
- the Lingo scripting language in Macromedia Director
- IBM PC
- VoIP
- Mailboxes
- Lawn sprinklers
- ISA bus
- Supercomputers
- the rendering software used in Terminator 2
- Chemotherapy
- Spectrographs and Spectrometers
- nuclear reactors for power generation
- dustpans
- ironing boards
- light bulbs and telephones - Lewis Latimer (in collaboration with edison and bell)

i understood it to be for situations where your underlying data model is so interlinked, rapidly changing and prone to inconsistency that just hitting refresh on your browser now and then isn’t good enough anymore

using it to render articles that are published once and rarely edited strikes me as the anti-usecase

usually the rationale is “well, we have decided we need this passenger plane anyway, might as well use it to get groceries”

in short, react.js is a framework for building facebook; and whatever your sociocultural feelings on it, facebook has a vastly complex front end that required react.js to make it work at all.

the mastodon and twitter front ends are complex enough to need react or something like it too- notifications, threads, live updating feeds, all interlinked…the expectation that notification count matches the number of notifications for instance…

but why news articles?

i don’t necessarily hate react.js in *principle* but why the heck is it used for *everything*, and mostly stuff that plain static templates would be fine for?
it’s like owning and maintaining a passenger plane to go to the grocery store and back

push notifications are the burning fossil fuels of UI.

seriously, app devs. stop doing this. alert fatigue physically dangerous.

Here's the thing about SQLite:
if you're writing your program in

C

SQLite is a far more robust JSON parsing and manipulation library than pretty much any C library I've been able to find made specifically for that purpose.

SQLite is not just a database, it's a swiss army knife of functionality that is *really* hard to piece together out of what's available for just plain C for free.

A lot of people recoil at the idea of using SQLite, because SQL. Or, especially at the idea of just storing JSON in JSON fields and using SQL as something like a document store- but there has actually been a heap of work recently on SQLite for this exact usecase, and making it way nicer and more reliable to use than most document stores

JSON functions and operators:
https://www.sqlite.org/json1.html

recent json function enhancements
https://sqlite.org/src/doc/json-in-core/doc/json-enhancements.md

json virtual columns
https://antonz.org/json-virtual-columns/

art is intent and context
a machine can’t have intent
the person operating it and curating its output can
i find this argument about the nature of AI art kind of moral panicky. it’s glorified clip art. it looks generally ugly, easy to spot, and those using it when they shoulda paid an artist will be seen as what they are: cheapskates.

that said, intent and context from a human can elevate it, like it elevates readymades and found art

cool APIs don’t change

a search engine with a domain allow list.

they exist but i don’t really wanna evaluate them. has anyone else tried these?

we could of course make our own clients that hook directly into our “generic” server, but i feel like a rocket load of user research has already gone into the tech that is out there, and it would be silly to assume that stuff is irrelevant/easy to replicate. i say steal what we know works

here’s an interesting and fun aspect: requests for information about the UI could be in the form of something like a database query:

SELECT * heading_elements from Window1

not literally of course, but thinking of a gui window as a kind of database table is fun