This is why I love old tech like my 40 year old car (bmw e30 325is) and analog camera and whatnot. You have way more control because of less external dependencies and simplicity, and the prices are still decent compared to what you'd get now for vastly more money. $70k dogshit unwrenchable SUV or $10k 80's car that works like a dream and is built like a thinkpad? It's so relaxing working with older things. Hearing old peoples stories are wild, like just crossing the border with a 6 pack of beer no passport no nothing and having a good time on the weekend. Now my asshole is getting scanned down to the submillimeter and sitting in a palantir database just so I can go on a vacation.
Maintenance is great. I've only had to do minor things to it. Since I'm 6'5 I did have to re-weld all my stalks to be 30 degrees back and do a bunch of work on the steering column and wheel to bring it forward 8 inches and up 2, some stuff on the throttle body from coolant leaks, but other than that it's been great. I've put 100k+ km on it in just the past two winters since I live up in the boonies. I'm alerted of oil changes by the lights in the centre of the dash as well. I haven't done much of any work at all except what I mentioned since buying it and it's been smooth sailing for multiple winters now. The M20B25 is built like a tank. I have it sitting on B8's on H&R sports springs so the handling couldn't be better, and I did some minor ECU tuning on it to give me a little more power on the low end. The idle has remained at a perfect 750 as well, and I can get it down to 6.8L/100KM if I baby it. It's the perfect car [0]. I've even binned it a few times and it's still going strong.
I've also got a period correct radio in there from bmwradios.com (radio wizard from estonia) who gave it bluetooth functionality along with a period correct panel in the console for a microphone, so I can talk hands free while I'm driving. He also modified the radio for me to read out the different GTA 3/4/5 radio stations and I can switch them around as I only listen to GTA radio and commercials when driving [1]. Besides it being 900kg with no airbags, it's the perfect car.
Between e30zone, the bentley manual, and realOEM [3] amongst the other infinite amount of resources it's impossible not to do your own work on it and it's usually easy. It really is a thinkpad in car form. Most parts are still produced and if they aren't you can get any number of things from third party shops like e30garage.no [4] if it's not on FCPEuro. Lot's of parts are also plug'n'play between different BMW models like steering racks which are quite easily swappable.
I live at a 36-hours-at-a-time rhythm and it's absolutely brutal seeing as its 5:30am and I should have been in bed a long time ago. Going to give this a go and report back. I did the lucid dream thing for awhile but holding a heavy object in my hand and then dropping it got quite annoying (to train yourself to be more aware of when you enter a hypnagogic state).
I play a looping mp3 of "agent, advisor, assistant, human" when on a robocall and just wait for it to pipe me to a person. Talking to an AI is beneath me.
I've been experimenting with various TDD methods with AI and it cannot do frontend work. Frontend has too many ancient illogical incantations and ways of doing things that it has no clarity on, you have to handhold it every step of the way. When I let AI go off the rails and build a frontend it's an absolute mess and it frequently chooses the hardest and dumbest way to do things. Stellar for low surface-area work though.
Once AI has cheap real-time eyes it might get slightly better, but all the logs and browser MCP tools and yadda yadda in the world will not get it to produce anything remotely efficient.
Been there done that lol. It needs real-time extremely badly. If I wanted to write English instead of code I'd have been a writer instead. It will nudge pixels but it will not take in the myriad of reasons that button is the way that it is and solve it in any meaningful way. Decent for MVPing with stuff like shadcn/tailwind but falls apart with anything else.
Can you give some examples? I feel like React is still pretty much just React, having developed with it for a decade now. Hooks was the only meaningful API (surface) change, no?
I think this is the reason why React feels normal to you. But as someone coming into it fresh, React felt like there were always 4 different ways to do the same thing and 3 of them are wrong because they built a new API/there are more idiomatic ways to accomplish the same thing now. If you have a decade of experience, then you probably do most things the right/obvious way so don't even notice all the incorrect ways/footguns that React gives you.
If you're coming into it in 2025, it's even simpler. Just ignore the SSR stuff which Vercel are pushing and you're good. A lot of the path has been smoothed out over the years to make it an ideal place to start today.
You claim that React offers me multiple incorrect ways/footguns to do things, but you can't list a single meaningful API surface change besides Hooks when that was the point of my comment?
Saying React is a "bloated monster" and then not being able to provide a single example of ways it has bloated is a joke. The article we're looking at shows that the bundle size can be a bit bigger but the speed to render is equivalent to all these other frameworks.
If you really love minimal bundle sizes, go off, but bundle size is not how I would define bloat in a framework
I feel like the introduction of React Compiler was a pretty big change, too?
The article seems to make the bloat self-evident by comparing the load times of identical apps and finding React magnitudes slower.
To be fair, I haven't written in React for a few years now. I reached for Svelte with the last two apps I built after using React professionally for 4 years. I was expecting there to be a learning curve and there just... wasn't? It was staggering how little I had to think about. Even something as small as not having to write in JSX (however normalized I was to writing in it) really felt meaningful once I took a step back and saw the forest for the trees.
I dunno. I just remember being on the interview circuit and asking engineers to tell me about useCallback, useEffect, useMemo, and memo and how they're used, how something like console.log would fair in relation to them, when to include/exclude arguments from memoization arrays, etc.. and it was pretty easy to trip a lot of people up. I think the introduction of the compiler is an attempt to mitigate a lot of those pains, but newer frameworks designed with those headaches in mind from the start rather than mitigating much later and you can feel it.
> I feel like the introduction of React Compiler was a pretty big change, too?
React 19 required almost no code changes in my multiple production apps so unless I missed something, I would say the API surface was virtually unchanged by it
> The article seems to make the bloat self-evident by comparing the load times of identical apps and finding React magnitudes slower.
What are you talking about? Next.js != React, that's your own fault if you bought into their marketing. TanStack / React looks to be a slightly larger bundle size but I'm seeing FCP differences from 35ms to 43ms (React being 43ms), how is that orders of magnitude slower?
Bad faith or bad reading, I can't help you either way here
> asking engineers to tell me about useCallback, useEffect, useMemo, and memo and how they're used
What are you even trying to say? Are you implying that other web frameworks don't come with any state management, or that they are reactive, or that you don't need the concepts from React in them?
"People got confused sometimes" isn't really a defense when the alternative is a framework you only ever use on solo greenfield projects that you've never talked to another engineer about their core concepts.
Seriously, you are just peddling groupthink, there isn't a single legit criticism of React.
Next.js, on the flip side, we should all go off on those clowns, but I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole so I don't see how it's even relevant.
react now needs you to declare what you are not using, using a language "feature" that does not exist. It is crazy how people keep denying reality wrt React.
They gave an escape hatch to people who wrote malformed hooks so their build process wouldn't crash, I don't really think that's a meaningful use case.
Are directives horrible? Absolutely. Did I encounter any need for this across porting 4 different apps and a component library to React 19? No, it was frictionless.
Because React is the same as it has been for a long time.
I rolled my eyes when hooks came out and never used it again besides for work, so not really. All the frameworks on the planet and facebook is still a heaping pile of dog shit. I was spoiled by Vue's lifecycle methods and then Svelte and it was impossible to go back.
Maybe hooks are cool but the same code written in react vs vue vs svelte or something else is always easier on the eyes and more readable. Dependency arrays and stale closures are super annoying.
Sorry but I really hate React. I've dealt with way too many shit codebases. Meanwhile working in vue/svelte is a garden of roses even if written by raw juniors.
Congrats, it's the most popular framework, no doubt there are abuses out there.
I highly doubt raw juniors are actually writing beautiful vue/svelte code, if obviously emotionally charged anecdotes are your only arguments here, I think you can just admit you see "Facebook" and crash out...
This is going to sound selfish, but I liked being a solo React Typescript developer. My colleagues worked on UI/UX, back-end, DB, specs, etc, but I was responsible for the React code and I could just iterate and iterate without having to submit every change as a pull request.
Now with Laravel, Blade and JQuery the IDE support is low but everything is easy enough and we work as a team and do merge requests and it's a chill job even if it's full stack.
Hilarious its come full circle again. React was a breath of fresh air for fe's back in the day, and now we're back at jQuery! Why the switch from React to Laravel/Blade/JQuery?
>I liked being a solo React Typescript developer.
Being a solo FE rocks. Everyone thinks you're a magician. The worst is FE-by-committee where you get 'full-stack' devs but really they're 99% postgres and 1% html.
I've also had a lot of success with the Art Of Problem Solving text-books, the regular ones not the competition ones. As someone who's starting from the ground up with arithmetic.
I think of Math Academy as ideal for efficiently mastering subjects at a level slightly deeper than a typical education in a shorter amount of time, and AoPS is for taking your time to go much deeper into the topics.
Doing them both is probably best, but doing one or the other would still work.
>I think of Math Academy as ideal for efficiently mastering subjects at a level slightly deeper than a typical education in a shorter amount of time, and AoPS is for taking your time to go much deeper into the topics.
I've been searching hi and lo for the ultimate beginner resource and nothing comes close to AoPS for the exact reason you mentioned. I started with principia mathematica by bertrand russel because I thought math worked like a big tree all stemming from one trunk. Boy was that a bad move lol. I'd be reading some textbook and I have an infinite amount of why's that would block me on the most basic of things, tons of assumed knowledge. AoPS treats you like a caveman who first discovered fire, and then discovered their books, in that order.
I'll give MathAcademy a go too, I heard lots of great things.
