Babel is both the driving force of innovation and the cause of much of the fragmentation in JS. Babel allows you to use the latest language features and target the oldest environments. The trouble is that there's not a "right way" to package software to cover all of the deployment concerns. Code needs to work on Node going back several versions as well as browsers going back several versions. And for mobile/desktop websites, your code bundle size is extremely important. Rollup and Webpack 4 go a long way towards making this easier but it's nothing close to a "standard best way" to do it.
That's a good summary of the fragmentation and coupling in the build tools, but there's also the libraries themselves - React, Redux, React-Router, React-Router-Redux, etc etc.
Rematch reminds me of Marty.js. I like some of the ideas about providing a createStore wrapper that is more zero-config and using something like redux-actions to make reducers simpler. I have been using my own wrapper around sagas to allow for dispatching effects.
They lose me with their idea of "models" where I have a global dispatch that can be extended, like dispatch.modelName.actionName. That's just old school object-oriented thinking layered on top of redux's functional programming ideals.
The two are just so fundamentally different that you will usually end up with a net negative taking two good things from both worlds. With the parent comment, you lose a degree of composability of the functional world while not gaining any degree of inheritability from OOP.
I've given advice to young professionals in the past in this same vein. I ask, "What magic is it that people love good ideas, yet, you have a good idea and no one listens to you?"
The answer boils down to this: if you have a good idea but people are rejecting it, find a new way to talk about it.
Write an evolutionary ML bot network that trades stocks in 5 minute intervals. Don't try to compete on the nanosecond micro trading end, just try to beat the market by making "good" decisions in a reasonable, human timeframe.
The question your bot is trying to solve is, "should I buy or sell this stock?" And the criteria is, "will this stock be up or down in the next X minutes."
Let the bots play in a fake market until they start to make money. It should be enough to give each bot a pot of money ($10k?) and call it dead when it goes broke or call it "good" when it makes good bets.
This is a good space for ML because the inputs are fairly well understood (stock tickers and a small set of common stock metric values). You can add in some novel inputs, like weather data in all of the trading capitals of the world (NYC, Toyko, etc).
The two tricks are this:
1) You need a community of bots that are all communicating with each other. Meaning, each bot knows what the other bots think, and how much money they have.
2) You need to let each individual bot's neural network evolve. Meaning, let the "best" performing bots "breed" with each other. Also meaning, let the values in the neural network set themselves through evolution/random rather than bothering with backpropagation.
This toy [1], showing an evolutionary neural network "learning" to follow a maze should be inspiring. Or, imagine a version of Agar.io [2] where you had to decide if a pellet (a stock) was a good idea to eat/purchase.
I wonder why? Is the same phenomenon at play with Trump's approval rating? It's been in the high-mid-30s for many weeks now [1]. 80+ consecutive days at the time of this writing. Even outside of Russia-related scandals (like hiring Mike Flynn [3]), he has done some obviously bad things (like the Billy Bush tape [2]).
> [Streaming is] the big asset [movie studios] could build on!
The movie studios likely don't see it this way. Tickets and merchandising are still the two main pillars of the industry. Home viewing is still the bottom end of the market [1]. The embrace of streaming represents a loss of revenue, not a gain of consumer good will [6].
Physical media (DVD/BluRay) are much more lucrative. Studios have an incentive to keep selling a pennies-worth of plastic for $20. Streaming represents a major loss of revenue and the studios will stall and delay until consumer demand forces them to change.
People still buy millions of BluRay movies each year [2]. Now the studios are trying to compete directly with Netflix, rather than embrace the changing consumer landscape. This is largely a continuation of Blockbuster's long, slow demise [3].
In order to feed the lucrative parts of the distribution chain (movie tickets, merch, physical media), Hollywood is increasingly churning out "big" movies. This has spawned a new phenomenon called "super hero fatigue" [5]. Many are predicting the demise of blockbusters altogether in the near future [4].
But don't expect studios to change until it's proven that they can't make money the old way.
> The only competition with the streaming service would be piracy.
Piracy is the only thing that will lead to a consumer friendly streaming option. If it weren't for music piracy, a service like Spotify might not exist. For video, Bit Torrent was popular for years.
Now people are flocking to things like Kodi, which can be installed on a Firestick [3] and, with add-ons, can stream anything for free [1]. In order to fight piracy, the studios will need to make it more convenient for consumers to pay [2].
We know what will happen, though: studios will spend $ on content and $ on their streaming service, and $$$ trying to stifle competition and consumer rights. If they had instead spent $$$ on content and $$ on their service, people would pirate much much less, but somehow they don't see that or can't / won't run the real numbers.
> If all major studios pull their content from Netflix, then it will not have the large library size anymore.
Exactly! It is obvious that Netflix and Amazon are pivoting to be more like HBO and Showtime. Apparently, as they reach out to a global audience they need to rely on original content to avoid costly licensing disputes [1].
Most people pay north of $100/mo for cable TV [1]. Depending on your bundle you may pay as high as $150 (anecdotal from friends who have Comcast). If you pay $50/mo for your internet connection you could afford 5 or so $10/mo services on the same budget.
Arguably, right now Comcast Xfinity has the most/best streamable content if you pay for HBO. This will likely change soon; this has been a long time coming. Cord-cutting is increasingly popular [2] and the studios are adapting.
Disney is gambling that they own enough content to make your top 5 list of streaming subscriptions.
It is worth noting though that those figures are American, but Netflix and the Disney decision are global. The US is a bit of an outlier in terms of both the cost and popularity of cable TV. For example in Australia, a country very similar to the US in terms of pop culture and entertainment, only around 25% of homes have cable TV and the most popular package is US$39. In the US the cost can be looked at as '5 services to replace cable TV' but in most countries it does instead look like broadcast-TV content being moved behind new paywalls, with increasing costs to watch the same shows.
High-quality public television tends to make cable and satellite TV less attractive. SkyTV has been far less popular in its primary markets than DirecTV has been in the US.
In the US, Comcast and Verizon are more analogous to the BBC in England -- TV is less expensive (as an individual monthly cost) when it is publicly funded.
Interestingly, the BBC is investing heavily to compete with Netflix [1]. If you live in an area that the BBC serves, you will likely need fewer streaming services to get the content you want.
Tesla's big advantage is that most other car makers have publicly ridiculed electric cars [1] and heavily promoted the roar of gasoline engines [2]. Electric car sales are widely expected overtake gasoline cars in the next 30 years [3]. Recently, car makers have had to eat their words in the wake of dieselgate [4]. Old school car makers will have to retrain their audience to embrace electric cars [5]. Meanwhile, Tesla benefits from being an early adopter.
Also, don't forget, regarding that thing about the "roar" of gasoline engines, that some car makers have opted to fake the sound of the engine's noise with audio systems. [0]
Yeah, it's a trade between experience and authenticity. If you value the experience for its own novelty and stimulation, the fakery isn't a problem. Those who seek authenticity derive pleasure from a completely different source and rationale.
> Electric car sales are widely expected overtake gasoline cars in the next 30 years
I'd go one step further WRT trends in the next 30 years. Sales won't matter much and car ownership is going to nosedive. Self-driving cars make too much sense as shared resources and are wasteful to own individually. Electric vehicles, absent the expense of an actual driver, are just way too inexpensive. Internal combustion engines, by comparison, have a lot higher TCO on a per-mile basis. We're seeing the nascent stages of the AWSification of automobiles. Today's cost considerations for automobiles are currently MSRP/monthly payment, $/gal gas, $/mo insurance and $/service. In the future, only $/mi will matter and Tesla/Google are best equipped to comfortably break $0.10/mi/passenger.
Tesla is building towards a future where dealers, customer preference and the entire sales process is largely obsolete. Traditional car companies have a lot invested in these areas. They have diverse lineups of vehicles (economy, sedan, crossovers, SUVs, etc) targeting all consumer preferences. Their chief advantages are in matching consumer desire for vehicle type, manufacturing that diverse lineup of vehicles, and distributing them to consumers.
Tesla is building towards a future where none of that matters. Where no matter whether I want to go across town or the entire state, I pull out my phone and hire a car. The color and style of the car don't matter. The range and charging time of the car don't matter...there will be intermediate charging locations along the way where a fully-charged car is waiting to resume the journey (think modern day post horses.)
And his vehicles just drive off the assembly line and into service with no intermediate sales process. Just running some SWAG numbers, if he can get to a $25k/vehicle with a useful life of around 5 years and around 400k miles @ $0.025/mi in electricity costs and those miles average half-full occupancy at $0.10/mi, each car will return around $45k in profit over those 5 years, or roughly 23% annual rate of return. For as many vehicles as he can churn out. That's a lot of money, especially considering many of those numbers are really conservative. As a consumer, run your own numbers on a $/mi basis with amortized purchase price/lease cost, gas, insurance and service factored in. It'll be much higher than $0.10/mi, so Tesla will probably have room to charge even more.
And I believe Musk's vision goes beyond that too...with his Boring Company, he'll be building congestion-free conduits full of nothing but self-driving vehicles to all but guarantee travel times. If you think about our road networks like our internet networks, he'd be building an Akamai- or Google-like CDN where only the last-mile traverses the public network and the long haul is private.
If you're looking for a reason to be long on Tesla despite all the money they're burning now, this vision is it. I believe that traditional car companies are myopically focused on building the kinds of cars that tomorrow's consumers will want to buy while Musk is focused on getting tomorrows customers to where they want to go. One of these visions is going to be very wrong and Tesla's makes more sense to me.
