It seems disingenuous to imply that the effects of COVID are not worsened by a high body fat percentage and / or poor physical health.
COVID is not a fat persons disease, but as with most detrimental health episodes, the negative effects are greater in people with high body fat percentages.
I would say OP was pretty disingenuous in implying that this was merely "fat people feel better from diabetes drug", when clearly it's not that they "felt better", it was that the medication reduced incidence of long covid when given during infection.
They may be referring to React 18 + Strict Mode meaning all useEffects can be called as many times as React wants. People before were writing code where useEffect on [] worked like onMount and was only called once.
The entire hooks "thing" felt like a case of the library authors being too clever.
Having components with lifecycle methods called at known times by the framework is a perfectly straightforward mental model. It's worked just fine since the beginning of time. iOS still uses it.
I remember investing hours (and days and weeks) migrating old code to the "new way" or trying to get some simple thing "working with hooks." Other than being able to share in the authors' feeling of smugness over the unnecessarily-convoluted mental model when we finally got it all working, I genuinely can't recall any value we got out of the whole investment.
I agree. Hooks felt to me like an attempt to go all-in on functional programming when components are perhaps easier for many people to think about as classes due to the unavoidable need to have state in the component. It seemed like an attempt at purism that, instead of making things simpler, made them, at least cognitively, a bit more complicated due to the irreducible complexity of state.
My experience has been the opposite. With hooks, it's now possible to decompose a concern and modularize it in full. Having logic for dealing with a concern spread over willMount/didMount/shouldUpdate/willUnmount was a total mess. It's bad enough with one concern, but if a component has 3 or 4 concerns that span across the lifecycle, it quickly became unwieldy. And for all the complains about people using `useEffect` wrong, I saw just as many people using setState calls in lifecycle methods and crazy things happening in mapStateToProps of class components.
In the end, hooks have greatly simplified things for me.
> Having components with lifecycle methods called at known times by the framework is a perfectly straightforward mental model. It's worked just fine since the beginning of time. iOS still uses it.
What's so infuriating about that is the documentation basically told people, hey instead of doing this, use useEffect the way you were using these methods.
When you have to rewrite the documentation to basically tell the world "you're holding it wrong" then it says a lot about the thought that has (not) gone into designing the feature.
And that's why I think I'm done with React for now. It just does not spark joy.
My news site dumped AMP late last year also. We were doing a replatform and just didn't carry it over. Didn't see any appreciable changes in traffic or user behavior.
Ads themselves aren't the core problem. It's the 10's of megabytes of superfluous javascript you're expected to download to read content with primarily text presentation. Put the marketing departments on the ark ship along with the telephone sanitizers and we'll all be better off.
I block most javascript by default for a nicer 90's style web experience but there are times when I'm using a browser without addons or reader mode available. This is far faster than the supposed streamlining that AMP was claimed to provide. The most hostile web sites I encounter are the AMP pages on the Google assistant news feed.
AMP never limited you from doing all that; it's just the method that is tweaked.
In my experience if a publisher chooses to make their main website a trash fire, their AMP version is too.
Nothing stopping a publisher doing their website right. Even with advertising: manage inventory first-party, don't track users off-site, base your ads on content.
To the user? Absolutely none. You can make better sites without it.
To the publisher? Originally, some twisted incentive that you'd rank higher on mobile and then globally but IIRC this no longer exists and OG data is also used. AMP is a component library too now so I guess that could simplify development if they couldn't use anything else, because HTML is so hard.
To Google? A funnel away from in-house and management at larger publishers, and ideally into one of their AMP-supported models. AML is "open" now but it's still Google, innit.
Google can load an amp page instantly from a search result page since they can cache the data and pre-render before you click. No publisher can do that with their non-amp pages.
Problem is that adtech companies are extracting all the value from the news market
There seems to be a huge gap between what ad buyers pay, and what publishers receive (one study showed The Guardian got as little at 10c for each $ spent) so publishers end up adding nore ads to try to compensate
It says that's the worst case for programmatic buys.
I don't know their business, but I suspect most of their big money ads are direct sales and they pocket the lot. It'd be interesting to break down their income by source.
Speaking of AMP and ads, fun fact! If you block ads, AMP purposely ads a few second delay to load all AMP pages. So in your scenario, the winning option is to install an ad blocker and avoid all AMP pages. :)
My own experience with load times as a user who blocks tons of scripts, and countless people citing it over the years. I've responded to them a bunch on HN, but here is one from 2018.
Journalist here: Yes I do think that journalists often work for free. Many, many journalists work for free until they "make it". It's sadly such a competitive field that it's the only way to get paid work down the line.
Regardless though, the most-critical local reporting I know of is funded without advertisement or paywalls. Both newsroom and freelance journalism funding happens through grants. Funny enough, the orgs that I'm never able to get freelance work through are orgs that have paywalls and significant ads. Lots of gatekeeping when you have advertisers to appease.
Exchanging money for goods and services is the entire basis of the economy. Ads force people to pay with their attention span, which seems to have serious consequences - the user is suffering from attention deficit far more than an imagined lack of content.
Advertising is a service, it is fundamentally no different than any other service. We may find it annoying or distasteful, but it is a natural good from natural actors in a capitalist system.
Subsidizing products with your attention span is not a natural thing in a capitalist system. What a ridiculous idea. Advertising is a service, it should be paid for with capital, not used as a subsidy or alternate form of payment.
I don't think I am. Internet users are not being fairly compensated for their data and unless you block the entire Facebook and Instagram namespaces, they track you whether or not you have consented.
The platforms are acting like feudal landlords, not capitalists.
So is attention a resource or a capital equivalent? Doesn't seem like you've made up your mind on that.
> Some of us feel we're being exploited by having our data harvested for the transaction of advertising, but most do not.
Since FB and Google have monopolies in ppc marketing, I'm not sure how you'd reach this conclusion. The only way to opt out is to completely block them on your networks, there is no competing option.
You are correct overall that they are a legitimate way to trade for something with your attention but their application is so abused now. The push-back is worthwhile.
Ads don't have to be bad, but most are for a variety of reasons... jarring graphics, animation, unrelated to the content. If a news organization is showing a lot of junky ads then I'm going to assume it is a failing news organization.
I get your argument, but more ads mean more intrusive JS and longer load times, which make the user experience worse. But yes, of course one needs to weigh these two sides. Free content needs to be monetized.
And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that. Seems like content creators didnt even get any of the promised benefits out of it.
> And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that.
Wait, what? At the time it was introduced, it was literally the only counterbalance to the incentives of adding as many ads to your site as possible. Google has better ways of penalizing bad practices now, but that wasn't the case 7 years ago.
There's a German news site (I think Zeit?) that has an interesting approach. When you try to access the site, it gives you an explicit choice (between two buttons) between the site with ads or subscribing to the site.
NPR's plaintext site is one of the best news sites ever.
Obviously, if you visit a news article and select to be redirected to plaintext, they don't redirect you to that article on the plaintext page for that article, but to the homepage, which makes it inconvenient in the hopes you won't select that option again. But once you see where to insert the article ID, it's good.
