I'm disappointed that Vercel is a part of this foundation. NextJS is on its way to its funeral, they have absolutely ruined it with things nobody asked for or cares about. I have been working on a large scale NextJS app which when I run locally consumes just over 8GB OF RAM on M4 Mac Mini. Brilliant. Slowly migrating the application to a Vite Based React SPA with a dedicated Hono backend and life is already looking already better.
NextJS as a framework is pretty good, it has gone downhill since the whole RSC shift sure but its still pretty good for most use cases. The problem however is Vercel and how closely its tied to Vercel.
I recently developed a small internal application in NextJS and we are using Azure PostgreSQL, we are on the Pro Plan from Vercel (honestly even that's an overkill, our use case would be satisfied easily on the free plan; which is very very generous) but one problem I faced is a NextJS App hosted on Vercel, it will never have a static fixed IP, so we couldn't directly access our database unless ofc we opened it to the entire world, which is never an option. This is so dumb honestly, the audacity to call it a full stack framework is stunning.
Yeah, I recently had an offer letter in hand, the company flew me out to do a final security review since it was a sensitive cyber sec role, did a 2-hour long polygraph test which went quite well honestly, but then 3 weeks later they told me they have decided to move ahead with another candidate? Made no sense and broke me down for weeks. Totally defeated. I still don't understand how they could move ahead with another candidate if they had already given me an official offer letter, but eh life goes on I suppose.
That would be a rare case where I would reach back for more information. Rescinding an offer is, in my book, a huge black mark against the company and I would consider shaming them in a blog post as well.
Was this your first polygraph? I never had one, but I heard that passing the first one for a high level ticket virtually always takes several tries.
Yeah it was my first polygraph so I was sweating buckets! The polygraph was relatively simple though, they tell you all the questions they will be asking beforehand, so nothing unexpected is thrown at you.
I think I passed the poly cause if I didn't then they would tell me that instead of saying they selected another candidate and honestly I was so depressed and defeated that I just didn't bother communicating with them after that, 3 weeks of constant waiting and reaching out for updates and then finally getting an 'Unfortunately' email kind of did it for me.
Are you willing to name the company? Shame them here. This sounds wrong.
I do not know what the details of the situation were, for example was the offer contingent on additional background checks that you failed or on something else, but if it was related to a US security clearance I would seriously consider filing a request for information -- they are required to tell you their findings.
It would probably be an interesting reading (unless one has a very thin skin) and I would do it just for fun, regardless of the pulled offer. My 2c.
Bunch of racist Israeli hooligans that were thrown into the Amsterdam Canals got more outrage from the international media and diplomats than a livestreamed cold blooded murder by a terrorist.
This is everything you need to know about the world we live in. Palestinian lives simply do not matter.
And many of Israel's apologists point to the many, often horific, instances of Jewish victimization to justify Israel's crimes. It is a poor excuse. And pragmatically, it fails to persuade, only alienating anyone who isn't already with you.
While we should absolutely be covering on-going civil wars and genocides across the world -- I personally listen to French news sources in order to understand what's going on across Africa -- the fact is that the US has provided Israel with over $300 billion since it's founding. For Sudan, that number is somewhere around $5 billion. So many of us here in the US are rightfully watching and questioning why our taxes are funding a genocide.
> USA continues to ignore the plight of Palestinians and continues to fund and arm the regime that kills them
False monolith. To the extent there is a single foreign policy issue dominating the American public consciousness, it’s Gaza.
Palestinian lives are not being ignored. There isn’t universal compassion for them. But the average American has more developed views on this topic than for any comparable conflict around the world.
How do you square this view with the current situation? The US has poured resources and weapons into Israel. Gaza is levelled, tens of thousands of Gaza’s people are dead.
The US might care about Gaza, but it cares a lot more about Israel.
You can argue that American citizens aren't unaware, but the politicians are born and bred to ignore this catastrophe. We have laws to stop them from caring.
And yet far less attention than those in Ukraine got even at a time when the destruction and killing there was less than 1% of what Palestine has gone through. Within one week of the first attack, Ukraine got more mainstream support, on-air time, and geopolitical response, than Palestine got over a year of suffering through civilian murders and other clear war crimes.
Speaking out about this issue in any way that smells "pro-Palestinian" has cost people their jobs, and sometimes even their residency and "freedom" in western countries, and is accompanied by smears and accusations of anti-Semitism against people who clearly are not.
I've lost friends of 15 years for remarking on my horror about bombings and civilian deaths. Nothing more.
I can't even begin to understand a mentality which cannot see the absolute asymmetry of power at work here.
The daily protests happen because they're necessary. And they're clearly not enough.
The problem comes when they only focus on Hamas, and ignore Israel's kidnapping and detention of 10k Palestinians without being charged. AKA, "hostages".
> Today, Jews residing in Muslim countries have been reduced to a small fraction of their former sizes, with Iran and Turkey being home to the largest remaining Jewish populations, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq. This was due to Zionist recruitment, religious beliefs, economic reasons, widespread persecution, antisemitism, political instability and curbing of human rights in Muslim-majority countries.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim," they say. Where then, should the Jews be allowed to live? Only in Brooklyn?
> Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes
> The introduction of nationalist ideologies (including Zionism and Arab nationalism), the impact of colonial policies, and the establishment of modern nation-states altered the status and dynamics of Jewish communities in Muslim-majority countries.
From your source.
It's important to note that in a place like Algeria the French colonists granted Jewish populations citizenship to France, yet denied it to the Arab and Berber populations. [1] This fractured relations between the Sephardic population and the rest of the local population, which is exactly what the French wanted.
I'm not going to say relations were perfect before, or deny that Jewish populations weren't second class citizens, but there was a long history of being neighbors and having cities like Constantine be a place of refuge after the Spanish expulsion of Jews from Andalusia. I mean, in places like Mogador in Morocco, Jewish populations were explicitly invited by the king to settle and set up trading businesses [2].
The founding of Israel completely changed this and fractured relations that went back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. [3]
Judging by the British Raj, choosing to inhabit a former British colony probably wasn't a super informed decision. If you attended history class, you know what happened the moment Britian left.
Violence begets violence, if Israeli settlers want to fight to displace other people then they will die in that process. Thankfully for Jews, there are other states they can choose to inhabit that are both secular and respect international law. These are, statistically, safer places for Jewish individuals to live than a state that instructs their army on how to commit fratricide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
I recently started consulting for a company that's building an AI first tool.
The entire application is powered through several AI agents, I had a look at their code and had to throw up, each agent is a single Python file of over 4000 lines, you can just look at the first 100 lines and tell its all LLM generated code, the hilarious part is if I paste the code into ChatGPT to help me break it down, it hits the context window in like 1 response!
I think this is one of the main problems with AI code, 5 years ago every time I took on a project, I knew the code I was reading and diving into was written by a human, well thought and structured. These days almost all the code I see is glue code, AI has done severe damage by enabling engineers who do not understand basic structures and fundamentals write 'code that just works'.
At the same time, I don't blame just the AI, cause several times I have written code myself which is gluecode, but then asked AI to refactor it in a way I want and it is usually really good at it.
I agree, NextJS used to be my go to for building any kind of web applications, it was essentially a full stack framework capable of handling complex requirements, however since they decided to go all in on this new React Server Component bs, I'm so done. Sure there are some benefits here and there but overall, its a huge loss of DX and UX. React was always supposed to be a front end library, not a full stack framework and now the direction of React is being lead by the NextJS team so there is no hope.
The hate towards modern front end tooling such as React/TS/JSX is nothing but a phase. 10 years ago engineers were hating and raging against PHP, but today they want to bring PHP back and make it a fundamental part of their tooling? They hated writing plain old CSS but now they want it back instead of Tailwind? None of this hate is actually based on any engineering value, sure you can build a little dumb todo app in plain old HTML, CSS and JS and it will work flawlessly, and if that's your goal you better stick to that, React, Next, Webpack, Vite and all these other tools aren't built for that purpose. Its nothing but nostalgia and elitism.
> sure you can build a little dumb todo app in plain old HTML, CSS and JS and it will work flawlessly
This is a weak argument. These technologies can be used along with a database for state persistence to make literally any website in existence. That’s before even mentioning that those three things are how React et al. even work in the first place. What is a React component if not a logical collection of HTML, JS, and CSS?
Sure you can build anything, hell you can even build websites using C and C++ if you really want to. React exists to make life easier, if working with HTML, JS and CSS was just as easy there would be no reason for React to exist. React and other JS frameworks are aimed at large tech companies that have thousands of engineers working on the same codebase, a framework provides structure, rules that everyone has to follow. Have you tried maintaining a single JS file with 50 functions written by a bunch of engineers? Yeah its not pleasant at all.
So funny story, I tried using o3 for a relatively complex task yesterday, installing XCode iOS Simulator on an external SSD, it was my first time owning and using a macOS so I was truly lost, I followed everything it told me and by the end of the hour.. things got so bad that my machine couldn't even run normal basic node projects. I had to a proper fresh boot to get things working again. So yeah lesson learned.
The hype around AI replacing software engineers is truly delusional. Yes they are very good at solving known problems, writing for loops and boilerplate code but introduce a little bit of complexity and creativity and it all fails. There have been countless tasks that I have given to AI, to which it simply concluded its not possible and suggested me to use several external libraries to get it done, after a little bit of manual digging, I was able to achieve that same task without any libraries and I'm not even a seasoned engineer.
