What I'm reading 07/07-07/27

2025-07-27

"We have witnessed high-cost, low-quality JS-stack rewrites of otherwise functional HTML-first sites ambush businesses with reduced revenue and higher costs for a decade. It is no less of a scandal for how pervasive it has become."
"Everyone in the room was implicitly expected to use their employer's money to adopt all of these technologies, rather than reflect on why all of this has been uniquely necessary..."
"If we're going to get out of this mess, we need to stop conflating failure with success. The entire point of this tech was to deliver better user experiences, and so the essential job of management is to ask: does it?"

"Don't get me wrong, though. I love speed. I especially love free and cheap speed. It's just that I'm not willing to trade things that are of real, enduring value to get more of a nice-to-have once we've long since reached Good Enough."
"Ruby is a luxury in the most egalitarian sense possible. It's a luxury that the 99% can afford, but the 1% might struggle with."

"Mortality slippage means accidentally classifying someone as lower-risk than they actually are. It's ridiculously expensive."
"If we assume about 65% of people who start GLP-1 medications quit by the end of year one, that creates a big problem."
"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy."

"These response headers can be used to trigger client side actions on the target element within a response to htmx."

"In a sense, there is a massive private sector stimulus program underway in the U.S."
"The irony: AI is driving mass job losses well before it has been widely deployed."

"A recent paper by Stanford researchers found that leading chatbots being used for therapy, including ChatGPT, are prone to encouraging users' schizophrenic delusions instead of pushing back or trying to ground them in reality."

"It's clear that CGI is fast enough with compiled languages that it can be used for real work, even if it's almost never going to be the highest performance option."