Maybe it depends on who you work for, but that was my experience.

On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.

I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:

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The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.

As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.

It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.

I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.

If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.

Not surprising. The FFI boundary is always a bottleneck. If you can eliminate it, you will see where the WASM JIT shines. You have far more control over mechanical sympathy with C/WASM than JavaScript (though far from perfect).

Also, consider publishing your findings and ask for reviews for optimization opportunities.

The main branch remains compact with a linear history without the commit noise. Deleted branches can be restored, commits that otherwise do not exist in the history can be interacted with, and so on.

I - being old as dirt - was also around for it. Circa 2002 or 2003, we were writing CMSs in PHP which were already well beyond the simplistic concept of rendering HTML tables from database columns. Smarty templates were pretty common back then. It's hard to treat these templates as "writing HTML by hand" because the templates are a higher level of abstraction.

Rails was quite popular, but I never got into it. I went from PHP to Python (avoiding Django) and then to nodeJS. At the time, the MVC architecture was making a comeback, but the mapping of HTML/CSS/JS was never 1:1 with it. Small fragments of HTML and CSS where always littering the JS or PHP/Python. The clean separation was never fully realized. For this reason, JSX was seen as a real win.

The reason I chose to focus specifically on "templates and DSLs" in my original comment is because once the level of abstraction is raised to the point where HTML becomes a compilation target, it is no longer HTML by definition. The browser cannot render the template or DSL without the preprocessor (XSLT is about as close as that ever got). This is especially true with client-side templates. For example, using pre-made widgets like jQuery date pickers is so far removed from writing HTML that a reasonable conclusion is that jQuery developers do not know HTML or JavaScript as a matter of course [1]. But yeah, this was all burgeoning in the early/mid 2000's, and really kicked into full throttle with jQuery.

> It was very easy back then to browse most of the web with JavaScript disabled.

It was easier, but not fool-proof. Client-side rendering wasn't in full swing, but Java Applets, Shockwave, and Flash certainly were in the years leading up to it.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-people-who-know-jQuery-b...

Oh, you're saying it's all getting automated. I see. So acceleration to AGI, ASI, and beyond is just a couple of years away. Good to know.

1. People dislike X, so a small amount of water being used for X is bad.

2. People like Y, so a large amount of water being used for Y is good.

You can't draw any conclusions from this, apart that people dislike some things and like other things.

The argument establishes no relation to water usage. That makes the argument against AI "an ethical one because of water usage" just a trope.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford is a comically short book. React: The Good Parts would be shorter still.

And if you needed to manipulate strings to generate HTML, you'd be doing so with some kind of template mechanism, like string concatenation or substring substitutions. John Resig, author of jQuery, wrote Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja in 2008 [1], offering a small templating engine that does exactly that. The first commit in the Underscore library credits this book for their `template` method [2].

I think your chronology is skewed or confused. "SPAs" have been brewing in some form since the mid-2000's, when people stopped writing plain old HTML and CSS. Everything was jQuery UI widgets and AJAX, Prototype and Underscore templates. HTML died a very long time ago.

[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/secrets-of-the-javascript-ninj...

[2]: https://github.com/jashkenas/underscore/commit/02ede85b539a8...

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/article-29913

Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by scrum.

- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.

- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.

I have been out of the tech startup labor market for many years. But when I was doing hiring in a startup around 2017, we had to put specific, conscious effort into accepting inexperienced candidates. The default mode for hiring is finding like-minded individuals whose experience overlaps with the existing team.

Using AI as a scapegoat for hiring freezes or layoffs is just more FUD. Like all propaganda campaigns, the purpose of fatigue is to induce an amnesia effect.