zethraeus's comments

This is already here and embedded inside Adobe products.

If you write your library in typescript, not JS, do you still have any of these problems?

If not, it sounds like one core issue is 'adding types to an existing untyped codebase is hard'. This checks out. :)

(And of course FRP setups have to iterate! They're refining the model to declaratively represent 20 years worth of UI convention!)

> since all our languages are essentially procedural (functional, OO) that means expressing the UI as a procedure (function/method).

I understand 'functional' to be used as the direct contrast to 'procedural'! Is that not your understanding?

> So what is the actual innovation? It is more or less directly and visibly expressing the UI in code.

The 'visibly' part here doesn't really actually hold true, does it? Once you've componentized your <swiftui/react/html/[VFL](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...>, it's probably not super visibly understandable.

The best definition i can think of for declarative UI frameworks is probably something closer to 'frameworks that optimize for your ability to make a pure function representing state'.

(After all `[[UIViewController alloc] init]` does indeed purely say 'you have view controller' — that's just not super granular!)

In this light, isn't SwiftUI just a setup more optimized in this direction

I spent a while trying to approach this post with an open mind. In the end I was disappointed.

rel/to title: yes. (just say scroll position. fine.) But also I think this is pretty well understood! (No?)

- In declarative UI / FRP / whatever, you model your basic UI state through a pure mapping from your business logic 'model'.

- But (as in procedural programming) the UI has its own state — that's not necessarily part of your initial business/domain/model.

If you want to model it, you'll have to understand it, read it, and add it to you model. That can be annoying—especially if the APIs for getting or setting the state are bad.

This doesn't really sound like a fundamental flaw conceptually to me. It's just an API with defaults you don't have to deal with unless you need to.

- don't care what your color is? fine. system default for you.

- don't care what tab a link opens in? fine. user default.

- don't care how scroll position is managed? fine. system default.

- want to handle any of them? cool. you can.

It sounds like progressive disclosure of API complexity to me. Great.

> It's totally out of place with the rest of the Swift programming language. They had to add new crap to the language to accommodate its declarative style, when Swift is (was) unapologetically imperative syntax-wise. It's an obvious bolt-on and leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Woah now, that's interesting! In my mind swift has had awesome support for functional programming paradigms since launch. I understand it to be leaning in about as far as it can given that it's built with first class support for Obj-c oriented frameworks.

What makes you feel like it's unapologetically imperative?

There’s a pretty good argument for functional monopolies facilitating innovation! We like our transistors and all that.

The argument’s about societal wastefulness, not FB’s business acumen.

I.e. It’s nontrivial to be more wasteful than it would be to have multiple teams duplicating the same product.

(Strong disagree on your suggestion that the centralisation generally makes them less stable/secure, but granted on the tail risks.)

FWIW State granted monopolies are a common pattern for infrastructure.

Strong +1 on the ensuing twisted incentives.

> Where's the advantage of instagram, whatsapp and Facebook belonging to one company?

Common-ish arguments for monopolies, as applied to this situation:

* potentially the interoperability you indicate

* infrastructure investment leading to stability

* similarly: best in class client side software

* security / privacy guarantees (yes. I know, ironic, etc. but the fully distributed multi-company alternative is likely worse on these dimensions)

* single point of accountability for the state and law enforcement. (yes. not likely a HN concern. Still valuable to the state and potentially regular consumers.)

* general pro monopoly argument: fewer resources are wasted in competition, and so can be applied to product development and research. i.e. bell labs

IDK how I feel the scales tip in this case, but treating it as cut and dry feels a bit naive.

I'd love any pointers to precedent for how this plays out from here.

1. The acquisition was >1 year ago. (And there's some question of whether FB followed the correct process.)

2. The antitrust concern is in one major market with a ton of political and regulatory power — but still one of many. (Are there international trade agreements that inherently make this ruling impactful outside of the UK?)

3. The acquired company was very unlikely to find a better outcome, and would have been fairly likely to require costly restructuring for lack of this one.

I don't take this super seriously — because giphy feels replicable and, well, it's gifs. But curious if anyone else sees impactful competitive/strategic concerns, or if the matter at hand is really just political precedent setting.

Mostly I feel bad for giphy people. Hope they're nicely contractually protected.

> I want this to be the start of a forced breakup of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

okay

> There’s zero benefit to consumers, and a lot of harm.

There's a ton of potential societal benefit in centralization and/or monopoly in theory. There's also a ton of potential downside. What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?

This is the newly-normal software subscription package or a stipend to bootstrap a project. Both feel pretty normal!

Even if it is the former, updates & improvements take work. And they seem likely to be necessary here.

I could never set up my own radio station :).

The point of spotify moving into podcasts is to make a netflix-like channel that 1) attracts user and so 2) attracts more publishers. In turn, Spotify can do dynamically targeted and unskippable advertising which attracts more advertisers, and so more publishers.

As users and publishers leave the open, rss based, podcast world will have significant downwards pressure.

Just like how the blog-web died with walled gardens.

TV shows were always centrally distributed.

...and this is how podcasting dies.

This is a lovely essay. Wonderful layers-of-reality analogy to quantum mechanics.

    "Airbnb announced today that Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners will invest $1 billion in Airbnb in a combination of debt and equity securities."

What does this mean relative to a private stock purchase?

Ah, the great assertion of disruption:

  their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities

I resent the length of my time the author spent, verbosely and banally, telling me that he resents the length of his time Wallace spent through banal verbosity in Infinite Jest.