> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work
I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
> to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid; for that you want something along the lines of an n95 respirator.
The main actual point of controversy was whether it was airborne or not (vs just short-range spread by droplets); the answer, in the end, was 'yes', but it took longer than it should have to get there.
> In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid
Yes, exactly.
If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.
Basic masks work for society because they stop your saliva from traveling but they don't work for you because they don't stop particles from other people saliva from reaching you
Putting just about anything in front of your face will help prevent spreading illness to some extent, this is why we teach children to "vampire cough". Masks were always effective to some degree. The CDC lied to the public by initially telling them not to use masks because they wanted to keep the supply for healthcare workers and they were afraid that the pubic would buy them all up first. It was a very very stupid thing to do and it undermined people's trust in the CDC and confused people about masks. After that masks became politicized and the whole topic became a minefield.
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster
But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?
Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably.
A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI.
So even if you are a craftsmen, your colleagues aren't. They will never care, they have no incentive to, because management doesn't care.
I've totally given up with it and I can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
> I've totally given up with it and I've can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money.
> Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
I've just explained why. What part didn't you understand?
> Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money
I do (I like to know my code works). That doesn't mean other people will.
Much like site performance unless there is an emphasis on quality, then many developers won't bother writing tests.
I've had people copy and paste tests, then jig the code around so they got the green tick in the IDE. The feature didn't work at all. The test was complete nonsense. I have colleagues that put up PRs where the code doesn't even compile.
As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection, all I want is your site flows to make sense and any actions I take to be reliable and clearly handle errors. For things that are truly critical I want 99% of my UI to be precached by a native application, so we're only talking in data (and yes, keep that data small).
There are lots of good reasons to make your website faster, but given the number of sites I've seen that fall over and die if you block Google Analytics, I don't feel that it's the biggest issue most websites have.
> As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection
Sure, I get it. The same argument can be applied to web accessibility. Most frontend developers are young and healthy. Should they care about accessibility of the sites they build?
It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd. Some should. However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
> It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
A web page and a native app all suffer from the same issue. It frequently needs to talk to a server somewhere. No you are downloading the UI/Logic, but often it needs to talk to a server.
> The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd.
I worked in a large company and we did optimise for some random guy that was in Spain on a crappy 2G/3G signal (this was a real customer). It was a good test case of how the app responded with a poor bandwidth & signal. As a result the application would behave well when having poor signal.
Large companies such as google pore huge resources into optimising, that why YouTube (both their app and their mobile site) will work on a flakey connection on a train going through the countryside and something like kick.com won't.
Often It isn't the bandwidth that is frequently the issue. It is the latency between requests and stability of a signal. Sometimes a request can fail, the phone goes to sleep and sometimes that can suspend the browser thread. This affects higher bandwidth connections such as 4G and 5G.
If the web site/web app or even native app is coded poorly often you will get into a state where you have to reload the app.
Also downloading an app could be relatively large compared to a web page. If you just want to check the train times / bus times / closing time of a shop or similar it will take longer to use the app as you need to download the whole thing first.
> However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
Things like this do happen. I've bought vehicles from farmhouses in the middle of nowhere in the UK. Bank transfers, road tax I have literally done in someone's garden.
> Are you going to pay extra those two engineers of your company for doing something that is clearly outside what they were hired for at beginning or outside their competences?
Why is it outside (and not just outside, but clearly outside) of what they were hired for or what their competencies are? Engineers work on the product. Engineers review each other's code. Engineers are a stakeholder in this whole process — after all, the candidate may become their future colleague, and engineers are best positioned to know what they want to see in a prospective colleague. Engineers can appreciate whether their peers have the desired skills.
Why does this activity require a higher pay than developing a new feature with your teammates?
> I've got this feeling that the endless feature creep of Github has begun to cause rot of core essential features.
Tangential, but... I was so excited by their frontend, which was slowly adopting web components, until after acquisition by Microsoft they started rewriting it in React.
Matteo Collina says that the node fetch under the hood is the fetch from the undici node client [0]; and that also, because it needs to generate WHATWG web streams, it is inherently slower than the alternative — undici request [1].
I did some testing on an M3 Max Macbook Pro a couple of weeks ago. I compared the local server benchmark they have against a benchmark over the network. Undici appeared to perform best for local purposes, but Axios had better performance over the network.
I am not sure why that was exactly, but I have been using Undici with great success for the last year and a half regardless. It is certainly production ready, but often requires some thought about your use case if you're trying to squeeze out every drop of performance, as is usual.
A BBC article from a couple of days ago lists about 150 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, dating back to 1988 (which is, btw, when North Korea recognized it). I don't know what kind of action it implies.
Doesn't this count? Been there for several years.
https://github.com/oddbird/css-anchor-positioning