> I want to believe stuff like this, but the whole field is so mired in quackery and jingo it's hard to believe any of it.
Haha yes I just saw a youtube video last night of a personal account that said something that seemed to directly contradict what the author of this post learned ("static stretches don't work" whereas this author is saying they worked for him).
I feel like for these kinds of cases where there is contradictory information that it is better to rely on direct experience in my own body rather than just scientific information about what's supposed to work. Use mindful awareness to feel directly what's happening in the muscles and tissues and how it changes over time using the different types of techniques. Then I don't really need to believe anything anyone says. The downside of this approach is that we may miss out on important information if we're ONLY relying on direct experience. But direct experience should be the foundation in my opinion.
I would say your foundation should be the science and you can fine tune to your personal experience. If you're starting from personal experience you're just going to miss out on the wealth of pre-existing knowledge and are likely very far from optimal if not completely wasting your time. AKA reinventing the wheel.
This would be similar to going to the gym and trying to figure out what works for you for gaining strength or muscle mass while ignoring the research/existing knowledge. Very likely you'll get nowhere. The proper approach is to do the research, start from a well supported base, and then fine tune to your own body/requirements.
I mean yeah, but we never start from nothing of course! Totally agree. But our experience should always be the ground truth we test against and if the science disagrees then we should hold the science lightly or ignore it. But if the science offers us something that works in our direct experience then great! And there is a progressive feedback loop as we continue to notice more about our experience and also learn more from research. That's been my experience anyway :)
Reading your question, I think Svelte or SvelteKit is probably a good option like you said. It's basically just JS/HTML/CSS as normal but if you want interactive UI stuff it's very simple to add. At this point SvelteKit is totally stable, it's just not as popular as React so it doesn't have as much community / LLM support.
I don't know if the intention of the article was to stoke worry but actually embrace as opportunity! Users being able to make their own software for their own needs is a worthy and beautiful goal. It's like if people could only eat what was at restaurants and not cook for themselves.
And of course with iteration and feedback loops people can definitely learn how to specify what they want in a fairly precise way.
However, the easier programming gets the less people who doesn't know it need to do it because it's more likely somebody has already solved their problem.
Really heartening to see commenters in this thread concerned about plastic pollution! I have also tried to stopped buying clothes with plastic (polyester). Probably not our biggest environmental concern at the moment, but still might as well develop good habits of consuming in a way that minimizes my impact on the environment.
Glad to see other comments bringing this to light. As Saul Griffith likes to point out, physics indicates that stuffing CO2 back into the ground is not an easy or cost-effective job. Stopping it from entering the atmosphere is much simpler. Also Saul mentioned that the IPCC models have a disproportionate amount of faith in CO2 removal technologies which at this point is an unproven and uneconomical option and for physics-related reasons will probably remain so.
Also, there doesn't seem to be an appreciation of the speed at which we need to stop emissions to meet 1.5C or even 2C of warming. It's at the point where if we don't replace almost every car, furnace, stove, etc with its electric counterpart and power them with clean electricity (due to the continuous emissions of those machines for their lifetime, assuming no early retirement), we can guarantee breaching the 1.5C limit. We need a World War 2 level buy-in from government, industry, and consumers. I wish this was more widely known.
I've been using SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com for about 3 years now! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!
Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.
There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet (or doing some obvious SQLite config optimizations). DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.
One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.
How do you deploy updates of your app without downtime? (I know not all web apps need that but in case you do I would love to know about your approach)
I don't! I take the moment of downtime. It's usually instant — only as long as it takes to stop and restart the server. Occasionally a DB migration will take longer — the longest I've so far was 10-15 seconds — and the site is down for that time. I think this is acceptable, but it would be nice to have a more seamless automated solution.
That article, along with the ability to have streaming backups with Litestream and not wanting to pay for a separate DB server, inspired me to use SQLite in my SaaS four years ago. I've been enjoying the operational simplicity a lot although there is not a lot of community documentation currently about tuning SQLite for web app loads. My app does about 120m hits a month (mostly cached and not hitting the DB) on a $14/month single-processor DigitalOcean droplet.
