https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

Linus Tech Tips did a review of it, so it's real. I have high hopes.

Then came React. I thought knowing Javascript meant I'd know React. Oh boy was I wrong.

I started around the time that class-based components were replaced with hooks and function-based components only.

That meant I had to work in the latter, while all the SO posts were about the former, so I couldn't find any solutions to problems I was facing.

About three years in, I still couldn't explain to you wtf a hook is. I've looked at countless tutorials, used countless hooks from various libraries, but I've never felt the need to make one. Which tells me that I still don't know what problem is fundamentally solved by using / making a hook specifically.

All I understand is writing a function that returns a value or a function that returns a bunch of JSX. I've never needed some sort of mystical third concept that somehow requires me to call it 'use'-something, before I'm allowed to call other things called 'use'-something within it. I wish I could somehow wrap my head around it.

Anyway, learning React, I felt I spent more time trying to work out why things sometimes got updated and sometimes not. It felt insanely arbitrary.

Then comes the joy of trying to force the incredibly non-deterministic rendering of the stack of components into something reasonably deterministic. If you have to call multiple endpoints and track the state of those calls and ensure a component only renders when that data is available in its correct form (which has to happen in a specific sequence), you will spend what seems like an insane amount of time forcing something that is inherently non-sequential into executing sequentially. Seems wild to me.

The amount of time some component tries to access 'undefined' is just astounding.

How about closures? It took me so long to finally understand that useEffect doesn't have access to updated state variables unless they are in the dependency array. So much time spent banging my head against the wall, wondering why my variable is always 'behind' by exactly one state update.

Let's assume you've managed to set all this up, you suddenly find out that React literally re-renders the ENTIRE tree of components sitting on top of any child component, every time anything changes.

Let's imagine a form with multiple inputs:

That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content.

As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view.

I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?)

But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.

That behaviour wasn't documented when I got started with NextJS 13...imagine the fun I had trying to work out why I can't get updated data from the server. It was nuts.

I guess with Tinder, that's not necessarily how it works? Do they have ads on there? No idea. But again, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of data collection / trading going on. But who knows, I have no evidence of this and wouldn't want to badmouth Tinder just because it's trendy to bash big platforms. Please consider this an attempt at making a more balanced comment :)

So for about two years, I was there, on OKC as sooooo many brand new people discovered it, in a huge city, in my mid-twenties. It was an incredible time. I met so, so many interesting people, who were so similar to me. I couldn't believe it. It was all free, too.

No lasting relationships ever came from it. I met my partner of 10 years at work eventually.

I've never been on Tinder or any other online dating platform, but it sounds like the industry (it is now an industry...) has gone through the same cycle of VC-driven monetisation, removing all incentive for the platform to function correctly in the user's interest, much like any big platform nowadays.

So, I guess we'll need some kind of online dating fediverse to fix this. I'd recommend copying exactly how OKC worked. It was the best approach I've ever seen. But also the only one ;)

His stuff with the London Symphony Orchestra is bonkers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggl_pWkbEoc).

All of his recent stuff isn't quite my cup of tea, but that's just the nostalgia factor speaking. I guess anyone who discovers a musician during one of their eras may not necessarily like their other eras...which is more of a condemnation of the listener, rather than the musician, perhaps :)

And this is where things get hairy. The Next.js documentation is sparse. So you either get lucky and someone else has done the guesswork to figure out how to do the most basic things in Next.js (for example the transition from 12 to 13, aka pages-router to app router was ROUGH...you could only find SO issues related to 12 and all the libraries and structures you were used to had all changed in subtle ways).

Caching is another one of these things. There are fetch calls in some routes in my app that get cached no matter what. I've tried every which way to get the damn thing to stop them caching (the most obvious one being the no-store header), but to no avail. It caches and I can only get it to stop by redeploying. And no, purging cache from the Vercel dashboard doesn't fix it either. Only a redeploy will get me updated data from the DB. It's bizarre.

And so the story goes on. It's super easy to get up and running. There are many 'aha' moments, where you can see that a ton of work has gone into DX. So much so, that I really try to use Next.js where I can. However, when you run into problems, they are usually more difficult to solve than with React. And they are subtle and not infrequent.

Don't get me started on debugging. Since Next.js is sort of 'backend' to a large degree (which, in Google's and Cloudflare Page's case means edge-functions), trying to tease a meaningful log that isn't severely character-limited out of either service is very difficult. Error messages in the frontend are useless to an astounding degree.

So, it seems there's a lot of work to be done. Tread carefully, as it's very enticing to have this quick-start, but I'd hesitate to use this for anything too serious, as things will break for no reason and there will be issues that are nearly impossible to solve and I wouldn't want clients emailing me while I'm dealing with BS I simply wouldn't have had on any other stack.