That's one thing I'll say for in-house "mini-frameworks": Real frameworks often try to present a smooth façade of abstraction which is hard to punch holes through. An in-house "mini-framework," though, is often just a hodgepodge of compostable abstractions which you can individually take or leave without too much hassle.
Of course, your hodgepodge ecosystem will eventually ends up a bit of a mess, but I'll take that over a flashy off-the-shelf framework that insists on handling everything itself.
Okay? The framework being proposed here is designed to enable universal communications surveillance. No combination of "details" would make that acceptable.
Why? "This was written badly" is a perfectly normal thing to say; "this was written badly because you didn't put in the effort of writing it yourself" doubly so.
Say they used AI to write it, it came out bad, and they published it anyway. They had the opportunity to "make it better" before publishing, but didn't. The only conclusion for this is, they just aren't good at writing. So whether AI is used or not, it'll suck either way. So there's no need to complain about the AI.
It's like complaining that somebody typed a crappy letter rather than hand-wrote it. Either way the letter's gonna suck, so why complain that it was typed?
So, it's the style you oppose, the way a grammar nazi complains about "improper" English
> and in exciting new ways (e.g. by introducing factual errors).
Because factually incorrect comments didn't exist before AI?
Your concern is that you read something you don't like, so you pick the lowest-effort criteria to complain about. Speaks more about you than the original commenter.
I'm pretty sure by verbose it's the realization you've wasted precious time reading AI bloat that you'll never get back. On top of that, now you need to reread the text for hallucinations or just take a loss and ignore any conclusions at risk that they came from bad data.
> It has to load HTML templates into memory and insert strings into them.
In practice, I doubt this is much slower than serializing JSON. Keeping a couple kilobytes of HTML templates in memory is nothing. Conversely, running a whole vdom on the frontend (typically more resource-constrained than the server) is a much bigger performance issue.
Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was. My "server" is some anemic ARM core built into real physical hardware with 64M of read-only storage. I don't want it spending its time "hydrating" some DOM, I don't want to bring any of this frontend insanity on there at all. No code hosted on npm shall ever run on that processor or I can't go to sleep in peace.
So how do we still get a fancy SPA website? Build it all down to a simple zip bundle, the ARM can serve those static files just fine. The SPA talks to the ARM via a few JSON APIs. Very nice clean boundary.
Yes, if your server is a weak, limited processor, you want to keep the demands on it as low and lean as possible, and let the client do the heavy lifting. HTMX is not a good fit for this scenario, just like PostgreSQL is not a good database to embed on your devices.
This isn't a controversial idea and nobody would try to sell you on HTMX for your use case.
1. No, templating strings is actually quite cheap. I'm doubtful that you could benchmark any substantial difference between templating html and serializing json.
2. Who has a server with a weak, limited processor? HTML templates power Django, Rails, and PHP. This paradigm worked fine on the servers of 20 years ago, in the slowest languages we use. I could serve a Django app on my phone and see reasonable performance.
I agree that templating is very fast and efficient, probably faster than serializing to JSON.
Read the OP's posts - he is talking about a "server" being an embedded device with 64mb of read-only storage. My assumption is that the data output format is basically hard-coded in the device's OS and doesn't even rely on JSON serialization.
> Three levels down and people have entirely forgotten what my post was.
I missed this reply entirely. Whoops.
That said, I do feel like you can do HTML templates on a tiny chip with 64 megs of memory. I've seen NASes with comparably tiny & terrible chips serve their web UIs this way: paper-thin html templates with <form>s for interactivity and <table>s for layout.
But that's the point of something like HTMX, though.
You draw a simple web page with very basic elements, tag them with an HTMX element, and let the client side javascript turn that into something that "does stuff".
I wrote a phone directory with find-as-you-type using Django (because it's what I had lying around) and HTMX (because I read somewhere that it was cool and fun and I should try it, and I bow easily to peer pressure), and then min.css to make it not look shit.
All totally vendored, just download the appropriate .js and .css file and check them into your source control.
When you type it hits an endpoint that returns a bit of HTML that contains a table, and swaps it into a div. The querying part and the drawing part is client-side and there's nothing stopping you passing a query string to the endpoint and getting just a bare table out.
Indeed there's nothing stopping you detecting if it's an HTMX request and only returning the fragment, or if it's "bare" returning a full valid page. You know what? I should do that, I'll log a feature request on my project for it.
I've gotten a little away from the original point.
You use HTMX on the client side, to turn a plain HTML page with no interactivity into something that will pull data from a backend and swap it into the DOM. If you want to return JSON and render that with yet another library you can, but you're probably already filling in the blanks in an HTML template as it is.
Well yeah, HTMX wouldn't be a good fit for micro-frontends, but I didn't think many people were actually using those. You have to write all your html in accordance with a single stylesheet, but that strikes me as the least of HTMX's impositions.
"What happened to Rust" is that it got a lot of coverage for being good, then a few people were annoying about how good it is, and now a large number of other people have become annoying in their complaints about how annoying the first group was. Meanwhile, Rust & its community remain unaffected; adoption continues to grow, and Rust now used in the kernel, Windows, Android, AWS infra, etc.
The problem you've encountered is that people are annoying. I'm afraid that's not specific to any one technology or community. Fortunately, annoying blog posts are easily ignored and would never stop a useful tool from being adopted anyway.
I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?
And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work.
High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing. Apartment blocks are cheap. It's bad zoning, NIMBYs, and a slow pace of construction due to disproportionate focus on luxury units that cause housing supply issues.
> The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household.
Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places? They're in exurbs of Arizona, a thousand miles from anything. During the housing bubble, we built a bunch of homes in unlivable areas and now we're dealing with the fact that they're functionally useless.
> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?
None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is.
> Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero.
So you're in Manhattan? Figures
> High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing.
Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US. And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.
> Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places?
Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes. There are no jobs because it's cheaper for companies to build offices in Downtowns of large cities, offloading the externalities.
This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job. This further increases the talent pool nearby, incentivizing more companies to open offices there.
Rinse, wash, repeat, and you get a misery-density housing spiral.
> None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit.
Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.
> So you're in Manhattan?
Nope.
> Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US.
Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.
> And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.
Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.
> Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes.
I'm honestly baffled. What makes you think bike lanes are undemocratic? Bikes are super cheap and take up very little space. Bike lanes really cut down on traffic.
> This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job.
Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.
The big advantage of downtown offices is that a city's downtown is the nexus of its public transit: If you work downtown, you can easily live a ways outside the city on cheaper land and then come in by train. So no, the point of a downtown is that you don't need to live there to work there.
Do you actually live in a city? I feel like you don't have a very strong understanding of how they're structured.
> Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.
The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost). The pure "just-keep-the-lights-on" cost is around $750. It's that you're paying it from your taxes and rent.
> Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.
Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods.
> Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.
Think about it again. If density works so well, why is there a significant number of people too poor to buy groceries?
> Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.
> The TRUE cost of one month's pass is about $3000 (with capital cost).
Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average).
> Yes, and it is metastasizing into other neighborhoods.
Good. More apartments means cheaper rent.
> If density works so well, why is there a significant number of people too poor to buy groceries?
The cost of living is high because rent is expensive, obviously. I never said it was cheap to live in NYC. Focus on the actual subject of our discussion, please. Do you think rent in Manhattan would be cheaper if there were fewer apartments?
> Not anymore.
You're just saying stuff now. Only 40% of jobs are located downtown in my city, and compared to the other cities I saw when I was poking around for this data, that's high.
> Lol as if you can't just look up the transit commission's budget. (Annual budget) ÷ (average daily ridership × 12 months per year) = $180 per month per rider at most (since the pool of riders is larger than the daily average).
The farebox recovery rate for NYC is 20%, which is higher than usual, actually. So you can just multiply the price by 5 for a rough estimate.
Or you can do it your way, the 2023 operating budget for MTA was $19.379B and the annual ridership was 1.15B (2023). It works out to about the same: ~$17 per trip or ~$500 per month. Figures are from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au...
But wait, there's more! This is not an honest comparison. Not at all. It completely misses the capital spending on transit. Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway! Unfortunately, there is no easy way to estimate the total capital expense wasted on public transit.
So the _real_ numbers for transit and cars are not even close. And not in the favor of transit.
> Good. More apartments means cheaper rent.
Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.
The ONLY way to reduce the housing costs is to decrease the city population.
> The cost of living is high because rent is expensive, obviously.
Yup. And the rent is high because...?
> You're just saying stuff now. Only 40% of jobs are located downtown in my city, and compared to the other cities I saw when I was poking around for this data, that's high.
The problem is the continuing enshittification. Look at the dynamics, check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns. The gap is exploding.
> Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.
I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing.
> Yup. And the rent is high because...?
High demand, low supply. Obviously.
> check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns
Yeah, because downtown office space costs more & goes disproportionately to higher-paying finance jobs. That has nothing to do with density—that's just finance bros wanting to work in the fanciest skyscrapers.
> The average total expense for _new_ cars in the US is about $1000 per month
Your source refers to cars generally: "As of 2025, the average annual cost of owning a car in the U.S. has reached approximately $12,297, translating to about $1,025 per month." Even with your $500/month figure, transit is still much cheaper. And that $500 isn't just distributed among riders—drivers pay some of it too, as they should, since every person on the subway is person not driving on the road, reducing the need for road infrastructure maintenance & expansion.
> Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway!
Again, Manhattan is unique. I don't know why you keep referring back to it as if its problems are easily generalizable. They put their trash on the street in bags because they don't have room for dumpsters. Also, yes, that's why LRTs are popular—no tunnel required.
> I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing.
You assume that the _demand_ is constant. It's not. And the supply increases can't feasibly outpace the demand increases.
> Yeah, because downtown office space costs more & goes disproportionately to higher-paying finance jobs. That has nothing to do with density—that's just finance bros wanting to work in the fanciest skyscrapers.
And why does this happen in Seattle, SF, Chicago?
> Your source refers to cars generally
New cars. An average car is now 13 years old.
> Even with your $500/month figure, transit is still much cheaper.
I literally provided you the source that proves that just the OPERATIONS budget is the same order of magnitude as the _total_ cost of car ownership, including capital expenses, insurance, and financing. This ensures that the total cost of transit will dwarf the cost of car ownership.
> Again, Manhattan is unique.
No, it's not. Seattle's failrail will cost about the same amount per track mile. It's so far projected to cost $120B, or over $120k for each and every houseshold.
The market for labour is a monopsony (the limited number of buyers relative to sellers make it a buyer's market). Just as suppressing price in a monopolistic market is unlikely to drive down supply and can actually increase overall sales, recent minimum wage increases have been found to have a net positive effect on employment.
> We present the first causal analysis of recent large minimum wage increases, focusing on 47 large U.S. counties that reached $15 or more by 2022q1. [...] We then find significant and larger positive employment effects, as the monopsony model predicts. We go on to document the presence of monopsony in the restau- rant industry. [...] The fast food industry’s monopsony power allowed it to accommodate large minimum wage increases and raise employment.
True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
The article's definition: "A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it."
This definition is compatible with watching some films and not others.
I think Alan Watts said something like that his job was that you no longer needed him. This implies that consuming his work would be thick until it wouldn't.
I think, perhaps because the creation is the goal in itself, not the consumption by others. Because it is the change/improvement that the author mentions that we seek.
I think that leans toward a mistaken veneration of productivity. You don't have to make something to enrich your life. It's also valuable to connect with the things other people make, or with the world around you.
Oh I really worry about that. AI code at least needs to pass unit tests, but there's no way to prove that the ideas in an AI document make sense until you try them and run into issues. Writing is thinking. If you let a robot do it, you aren't.
Of course, your hodgepodge ecosystem will eventually ends up a bit of a mess, but I'll take that over a flashy off-the-shelf framework that insists on handling everything itself.
reply