5 ms·

I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids" To me, it feels similar to "If every

I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids" To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc." Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very different incentives. Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google, but unless every browser got on board to break web pages that didn't conform to that standard, then people aren't going to fully follow it. Instead, browsers (correctly in my view) decided to be as flexible as possible to render pages in a best-effort way, because everyone had a slightly different way to build web pages. I feel like people get too stuck on the "correct" way to do things, but the reality of computers, as is the reality of everything, is that there are lots of different ways to do things, and we need to have systems that are comfortable with handling that.

ajkjk 1y ago
eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody externally has any standards, and the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better? What happens in practice is that the culture exterminates the drive for improvement: not only are things bad, but people look at you if you're crazy if you think things should be better. Like in 2025 people defend C, people defend Javascript, people write software without types, people write scripts in shell languages; debugging sometimes involves looking at actual bytes with your eyes; UIs are written in non-cross-platform ways; the same stupid software gets written over and over at a million companies, sending a large file to another person is still actually pretty hard; leaving comments on it is functionally impossible ... these are software problems, everything is shit, everything can be improved on, nothing should be hard anymore but everything still is; we are still missing a million abstractions that are necessary to make the world simple. Good lord, yesterday I spent two hours trying to resize a PDF. We truly live in the stone age; the only progress we've made is that there are now ads on every rock. I really wish it was a a much more ruthlessly competitive landscape. One in which if your software is bad, slow, hard to debug, hard to extend, not open source, not modernized, not built on the right abstractions, hard to migrate on or off of, not receptive to feedback, covered in ads... you'd be brutally murdered by the competition in short order. Not like today where you can just lie on your marketing materials and nobody can really do anything because the competition is just as weak. People would do a much better job if they had to to survive.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....
  - dmurray 1y ago
    Presumably the spectrum that would have Rust and Typescript at the other end.
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      Is that just age?
      - klardotsh 1y ago
        Well, sure, age is part of it. I would hope languages coming out 40-50 years after their predecessors (in the case of Rust following C/C++) would have improved upon those predecessors and learned from the ideas of computer science in the intermediate years. (Coincidentally this is one of my chief complaints about Go: despite being about the same age as Rust, it took the avenue of discarding quite a lot of advancements in programming language theory and ergonomics since C)
        cestith 1y ago
        Go has a much different set of design goals than Zig, Nim, or especially Rust. Go is really for people who want a few major improvements on C like easier builds, faster builds, higher-level standard string handling, direct support for some form of concurrency, an optional GC which defaults to on, and a few syntax tweaks - things that a modern C might have that were not going to make it into a standards revision. Rust, to support ownership and the borrow checker at compile time, had to build a useful language around that hugely helpful but quite restrictive requirement. They subsequently went different directions than the Go team on a lot of the other language features. Zig, Nim, and D are something in between those extremes in their own ways. As someone with a background of a lot of time with Perl and the Pascal/Ada family who was rooting for Julia, Go strikes a good balance for me where I would have used Perl, Python, Julia, Ruby, or shell for system tasks. I haven’t done a lot of work in Rust yet, because in the infrastructure space speed to implement is usually more important than performance and Go is a lot faster already than Python or Ruby and because my team as a whole has much more experience with it. I certainly appreciate why the folks at work who do the performance-critical network and video software use mostly Rust to do what they used to do in C, Java, or C++.
justincormack 1y ago
The semantic web came out of work on Prolog and formal systems for AI which just didnt work well... LLMs and vector databases give us new tools that are pretty usable.
- cestith 1y ago
  Imagine how easy it would be to build and train an AI if it had semantically tagged input all over the Web.
fouc 1y ago
"Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google", sorry that's false. They only contributed a bit towards it. Tim Berners-Lee coined it in 1999 and further expanded on the concept in a 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila.
roadside_picnic 1y ago
> Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google Was this written by AI? I find it hard to believe anyone who was interested in Semantic Web would have not known it's origin (or at least that it's origin was not Google). The concept of a Semantic web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (who hopefully everyone recognizes as the father of HTTP, WWW, HTML) in 1999 [0]. Google, to my knowledge, had no direct development or even involvement in the early Semweb standards such as RDF [1] and OWL [2]. I worked with some of the people involved in the latter (not closely though), and at the time Google was still quite small. 0. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up 1. https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html 2. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/ https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/
- tjr 1y ago
  Some ideas going back even further than that, like 1994: https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old
- headcanon 1y ago
  That was a human-generated hallucination, my apologies. I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future. W3C of course deserves credit for their hard work on this standard. My main point was that regardless of the semantic "standard", nothing prevented us from putting everything in a generic div, so complaining that everyone's just "not on board" isn't a useful lament.
  - lemonberry 1y ago
    "That was a human-generated hallucination" Kudos. I respect this kind of honesty. I wish there was more of it.
  - ynx 1y ago
    The association isn't without merit. Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation. (one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)
discostrings 1y ago
I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.
- cestith 1y ago
  Neither broke web pages, honestly. XHTML requires a DTD named at the top of the document, and browsers will happily fall back to HTML 3, 4, or 5 as they can if there’s no DTD specified.
  - discostrings 1y ago
    My interpretation of "break web pages" was serving XHTML with MIME type application/xhtml+xml, in which case browsers don't render anything when the XHTML isn't well-formed, which is really just a strict / validate-my-syntax mode you can opt into. In either case, I agree!
rco8786 1y ago
The phrase “if everyone just” is an automatic trigger for me. Everyone is never going to just. A different solution to whatever the problem is will be necessary.
- gopher_space 1y ago
  I can't find a copy of the old "reasons your solution to email spam won't work" response checklist, but one of the line items was "fails to account for human nature".
m463 1y ago
I also think... mom: "you need to clean up your room" kid: "mom, just give up. The room will always be a mess, just use search"

ajkjk 1y ago

eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody externally has any standards, and the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better? What happens in practice is that the culture exterminates the drive for improvement: not only are things bad, but people look at you if you're crazy if you think things should be better. Like in 2025 people defend C, people defend Javascript, people write software without types, people write scripts in shell languages; debugging sometimes involves looking at actual bytes with your eyes; UIs are written in non-cross-platform ways; the same stupid software gets written over and over at a million companies, sending a large file to another person is still actually pretty hard; leaving comments on it is functionally impossible ... these are software problems, everything is shit, everything can be improved on, nothing should be hard anymore but everything still is; we are still missing a million abstractions that are necessary to make the world simple. Good lord, yesterday I spent two hours trying to resize a PDF. We truly live in the stone age; the only progress we've made is that there are now ads on every rock. I really wish it was a a much more ruthlessly competitive landscape. One in which if your software is bad, slow, hard to debug, hard to extend, not open source, not modernized, not built on the right abstractions, hard to migrate on or off of, not receptive to feedback, covered in ads... you'd be brutally murdered by the competition in short order. Not like today where you can just lie on your marketing materials and nobody can really do anything because the competition is just as weak. People would do a much better job if they had to to survive.

BobaFloutist 1y ago
Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....
- dmurray 1y ago
  Presumably the spectrum that would have Rust and Typescript at the other end.
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    Is that just age?
    - klardotsh 1y ago
      Well, sure, age is part of it. I would hope languages coming out 40-50 years after their predecessors (in the case of Rust following C/C++) would have improved upon those predecessors and learned from the ideas of computer science in the intermediate years. (Coincidentally this is one of my chief complaints about Go: despite being about the same age as Rust, it took the avenue of discarding quite a lot of advancements in programming language theory and ergonomics since C)
      - cestith 1y ago
        Go has a much different set of design goals than Zig, Nim, or especially Rust. Go is really for people who want a few major improvements on C like easier builds, faster builds, higher-level standard string handling, direct support for some form of concurrency, an optional GC which defaults to on, and a few syntax tweaks - things that a modern C might have that were not going to make it into a standards revision. Rust, to support ownership and the borrow checker at compile time, had to build a useful language around that hugely helpful but quite restrictive requirement. They subsequently went different directions than the Go team on a lot of the other language features. Zig, Nim, and D are something in between those extremes in their own ways. As someone with a background of a lot of time with Perl and the Pascal/Ada family who was rooting for Julia, Go strikes a good balance for me where I would have used Perl, Python, Julia, Ruby, or shell for system tasks. I haven’t done a lot of work in Rust yet, because in the infrastructure space speed to implement is usually more important than performance and Go is a lot faster already than Python or Ruby and because my team as a whole has much more experience with it. I certainly appreciate why the folks at work who do the performance-critical network and video software use mostly Rust to do what they used to do in C, Java, or C++.

justincormack 1y ago

The semantic web came out of work on Prolog and formal systems for AI which just didnt work well... LLMs and vector databases give us new tools that are pretty usable.

cestith 1y ago
Imagine how easy it would be to build and train an AI if it had semantically tagged input all over the Web.

fouc 1y ago

"Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google", sorry that's false. They only contributed a bit towards it. Tim Berners-Lee coined it in 1999 and further expanded on the concept in a 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila.

roadside_picnic 1y ago

> Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google Was this written by AI? I find it hard to believe anyone who was interested in Semantic Web would have not known it's origin (or at least that it's origin was not Google). The concept of a Semantic web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (who hopefully everyone recognizes as the father of HTTP, WWW, HTML) in 1999 [0]. Google, to my knowledge, had no direct development or even involvement in the early Semweb standards such as RDF [1] and OWL [2]. I worked with some of the people involved in the latter (not closely though), and at the time Google was still quite small. 0. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up 1. https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html 2. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/ https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/

tjr 1y ago
Some ideas going back even further than that, like 1994: https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old
headcanon 1y ago
That was a human-generated hallucination, my apologies. I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future. W3C of course deserves credit for their hard work on this standard. My main point was that regardless of the semantic "standard", nothing prevented us from putting everything in a generic div, so complaining that everyone's just "not on board" isn't a useful lament.
- lemonberry 1y ago
  "That was a human-generated hallucination" Kudos. I respect this kind of honesty. I wish there was more of it.
- ynx 1y ago
  The association isn't without merit. Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation. (one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)

discostrings 1y ago

I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.

cestith 1y ago
Neither broke web pages, honestly. XHTML requires a DTD named at the top of the document, and browsers will happily fall back to HTML 3, 4, or 5 as they can if there’s no DTD specified.
- discostrings 1y ago
  My interpretation of "break web pages" was serving XHTML with MIME type application/xhtml+xml, in which case browsers don't render anything when the XHTML isn't well-formed, which is really just a strict / validate-my-syntax mode you can opt into. In either case, I agree!

rco8786 1y ago

The phrase “if everyone just” is an automatic trigger for me. Everyone is never going to just. A different solution to whatever the problem is will be necessary.

gopher_space 1y ago
I can't find a copy of the old "reasons your solution to email spam won't work" response checklist, but one of the line items was "fails to account for human nature".

m463 1y ago

I also think... mom: "you need to clean up your room" kid: "mom, just give up. The room will always be a mess, just use search"