> These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form.
@concinds, you yourself are being too empathetic. I am trying to view these websites on my $2,000 PC on high speed internet, and it still is maddeningly slow.
I like JavaScript-light websites just as much as anyone (my own website works on the same principle). However, I do wonder how much of the increased traffic has to do with AI agents that now have an easier time working with the more standard web forms. My own contact form had a bunch of bots quoting Scorpion lyrics before I added a rate limiter.
Ecclesiastes is an interesting one. It goes chapter by chapter, trying to find meaning in life through process of elimination, trying education, hedonism, labor, and wealth. While some things (usually wisdom) bring about more joy in the interim, he declares that they all will lose their charm rather quickly. In the end, all joy from these will leave us before death. Solomon's last hope for fulfillment lies in the eternal and supernatural.
Solomon seems to give a glimpse into a life of "what happens if the only challenges you have are the ones you freely pick?" He had everything one could dream of and more, including an unprecedented era of peace.
Yet he struggled to pass the time. Having the equivalent of billions of [insert favorite currency here], most folks fantasize about the ideal life. We often believe all of our immediate problems go away, free to do whatever we want. Yet, at least in Solomon's case, he seemed to become incredibly fed up with these grand projects and plans of his own devise.
While I certainly wouldn't mind a fraction of that wealth myself, I do recall my college weekends. Free to spend time however I pleased, with my basic needs met and no homework looming, I spent hours playing my favorite video games. And yet, no matter how good they were, I remember how dull and boring they eventually became in only a few hours.
Sometimes I wonder if we should consider using some sort of a hardware key going forward, like a Yubikey or similar product. Physical devices are fairly easy to understand, and a simple on-device PIN or fingerprint-reader adds a 2FA that prevents a lot of fraud. While an ID number is fairly easy to steal, a GPG private key is nearly impossible if handled right.
Of course, the flip-side, this would open up more opportunities for tracking (requiring the hardware keys to log into Facebook). However, in most societies, we do need some way of authenticating who is who, and at least this approach makes fraud much more difficult.
Yes I think government issued credentials like Estonia does is very neat, and preferable to what we have in USA when you need to verify your identify to interact with online gov services, the id.me, which is taking a video and uploading it to some third party to say 'yep that's the person definitely using their laptop right now', as if gen-AI hasn't already made that obsolete.
Besides that we have the technology for services to ask 'yes/no' questions of a secure enclave without revealing the personal data, like 'is this person's birthdate after May 29 2005', instead of letting every liquor store and gas station scan the barcode of your government ID including your home address
Sometimes it makes me feel crazy what we collectively have settled on.
Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.
@concinds, you yourself are being too empathetic. I am trying to view these websites on my $2,000 PC on high speed internet, and it still is maddeningly slow.
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