> is that really true for reactivity and state management?
No. Use a framework if you want those things. Everything around reactivity, state management, and components have been badly fumbled by the web platform and the various front-end frameworks are far more ergonomic.
Publication of the source code should be required for software to be copyrightable and copyright should expire much sooner. It makes no sense for a binary to fall into the public domain 70 years later.
"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."
You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.
People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.
In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.
And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.
From what I've gathered, and I'm still feeling like I'm missing something, most people don't seem to be doing that. They seem to pass the binary in, say to decompile it, and out the other side is something that looks similar but not exact. https://youtu.be/qFEuYUfauNY .
On the recent WAN show LTT said they tried the recent Photoshop clones and they were buggy, feature missing messes. If they were truly reverse engineer decompiles (minus needing a subscription) they would work just as well. But they don't so they're not.
the adobe suite clones are vibe coded clean room implementations, decompiles on the other hand should compile 1:1 to the existing software, and we have ways to verify that's the case. recompiles from my understanding of the term are somewhere inbetween.
That's the view you hear from doomers - the view you hear from boosters is that it's basically Adobe quality. I haven't tried it so I don't know which is actually true.
I also heard a lot of people rave about Affinity and all kinds of Lightroom alternatives, but so far I found it all terribly disappointing and am back to CS5 and Lightroom 4 (because I own those on disc)… There is a lot of useless hype around.
No chance the AI industry gets destroyed. China wouldn't care if Adobe somehow sued and won (so really it would just be America destroying its economy), and this point nvidia could buy Adobe and shut it down mid lawsuit just to make it go away.
Meh I don't think Adobe has anything there. AI is just a tool. Are they going to sue Microsoft and Dell just because those two were involved in the laptop used to instruct the agent to do the thing?
Are they gonna sue the user's power company because they supplied power for a nefarious activity without making the human agree to use it for innocent purposes only?
With the right harness, it's doable today. Obviously quality will be what you end up actually spending time manually testing and what surfaces when testing this, because agents won't be able to even get 80% there without strict hand-holding. But with the right individual driving the right harness, definitely doable.
I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.
Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.
And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.
Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.
Singapore is a melting pot of many different ethnicities, it’s not xenophobic, and more than 40% of people living in Singapore are immigrants. And it has extremely low crime.
This lauding of ethnic homogeneity and xenophobia just seems to be a dog whistle from the American right because they want to say “See? If we kicked out all the non-whites it would fix our problems!” it’s not true; It’s just a very, very, very old racist playbook.
One of the major founding ethnicities of Singapore was overseas Chinese, who filled the same role anthropologists have long documented as Jews in Europe or Lebanese in Africa. It is unusual for subpopulations fulfilling that economic role to engage in petty crime (organized crime can be another story). And as the other poster mentions, the distinction between citizens and outsiders is about as severe as in GCC countries. So, the diversity of Singapore is somewhat less unrestrained than outsiders often depict.
Singapore is just further evidence of my statements being true.
They also brutally enforce social norms and anti-drug policy, and in 2025 they had a total of 35K people granted permanent residency (in a country of 6M people).
In Singapore you're confusing temporary foreign workers with true immigration. In fact Singapore is an extremely low immigration country.
None of these foreign workers qualify for Singapore's public housing or healthcare for example.
I'm pro immigration and left-leaning, but I don't disagree with the right wingers that ethnic homogeneity leads to higher social trust (many studies have demonstrated this). I prefer having immigration though.
By ethnic groups according to Wikipedia it’s 75% Chinese. The UK is 81% white according to Wikipedia. US at 61% white. Spain is 85% “Spaniard”. (I’m just picking the dominant group)
Are you willing to say the United States is much more racially diverse than these countries? How would you then assess the political systems in comparison?
When you go around saying that we should whip degenerates to be a civilised society, you don’t need to explain why you don’t mind being called a Nazi. Everybody knows why.
Germany's ideology was bad, we know this because it abjectly failed and lead Germany to destruction. Singapore's ideology is good,we know this because it has lead Singapore to a safe, clean and productive society. Stop being obtuse and judge it empirically. The results are what matters.
Do you apply this logic to all efficiency gains or just ones that weren’t commonplace when you entered the industry?
For instance, package managers didn’t always exist. Would you prefer it if we got rid of them? Instead of 30 seconds running `uv add whatever` collaborating with your package manager, you could spend 30 days collaborating with other human beings to build the functionality yourself.
There are some people who see the web as a platform, and some people who see a web browser as a window for zero-install applications to draw into. There have always been people in the latter group who try to abstract everything away, but it does tend to discard pretty much everything that makes the web great.
A lot of what Next does/did _is_ leaning into web’s strengths. It was Next that made me declare image size beforehand, for example, drastically reducing layout jumps. It also made image optimization almost effortless, greatly improving load times for my websites. The web as a platform is a nice concept I would love to adopt more, but then I need to write some server-side code and I am completely on my own. Pushing the DX around the client/server boundary is one of the things that made Next great for me.
WebP is 15 years old, and Google cares about it less than anybody else. Pretty much everybody else supports WebP but Google can’t even be bothered adding support for it to Google Docs.
I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.
> Your premise that the browser implementation is faster and better is rarely true.
I know that they’ve optimised this as much as they can, but it still seems to catch pretty much everybody by surprise that every single instance of a web component with a shadow DOM needs the site’s CSS reset added to it individually (or just skip it and keep forgetting that things like box-sizing will be inconsistent with your non-shadow-DOM styles). There’s no way to say “here’s my default styles” that will work consistently across the whole page once you start using web components. And then you have the !important fights between the web component and its contents as well.
Even though it’s been standard practice amongst web developers for 15+ years, the people working on the web platform seem to mostly act like CSS resets aren’t a thing.
The tension is between two kinds of CSS users. The ones who want cascading style sheets, and the ones who want scoped style sheets. And sometimes even people who think they want scope find out they also want the cascade, and just wanted to scope a bit "at the end" (something the cascade can do anyway)
I find that developers add a CSS reset without thinking about it as if there is always a need. We never used resets. There was never a need. Typically we would set something according to the design anyway and starting with a reset was like slamming something against one wall only to throw it back to a different wall later.
They were a lot more necessary when each browser threw in fairly random sets of default styling. These days they've converged heavily on the same defaults.
The box-sizing property is another way of calculating element sizes but not the default way or the only way. Those of us who were adept at calculating the area sizes after years of doing so had no need for it. Those who are new to the game or can't figure it out use box-sizing.
The history here, as I understand it, was that they imagined you would use custom elements from multiple third parties, so any shared CSS definitions would cause breakages.
> there are only three platforms: Blink/V8; WebKit/JavaScriptCore; and Geko/SpiderMonkey.
You’re misunderstanding the terminology here. The platform being talked about is the World-Wide Web and you are listing three implementations of the client part of the platform.
I think you have the causality incorrect. There aren't fewer implementations because the standard is complicated; the standard is the product of the browser wars, when well-resourced browser implementors differentiated themselves by adding behavior to anemic/underspecified standards. Browser vendors did, to their credit, co-operatively add a lot of common/similar behavior and then work to standardize it--that's healthy standards growth. But a lot of the size of the standard is because they all wanted to add different capabilities to entice users.
A standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge. See also: AMQP, C++.
The browser wars are long gone, and there is no technical reason why the standards each browser added had to be complex per-use-case builtins instead of composable primitives.
In any case, that is what happened.
And now new projects like Ladybird take a decade to arrive, even with AI, because of the immense amount of stuff in the platform.
> standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge.
> The browser wars are long gone, and there is no technical reason why the standards each browser added had to be complex per-use-case builtins instead of composable primitives.
Browser vendors couldn't see the future. Each was doing their best to stand out from the crowd with limited budgets and schedules. Hence JS being as odd as it is.
With hindsight it's clear it could've been better. And now with today's mono-culture there is an opportunity to drop some of the legacy cruft and rethink a modern web. Or even just slimmer Electron-like solutions using an ideal subset as better primitives.
I really wish something like FirefoxOS had gained traction. Because unlike Android, it could make native apps so much more open an approachable. In theory at least.
No. Use a framework if you want those things. Everything around reactivity, state management, and components have been badly fumbled by the web platform and the various front-end frameworks are far more ergonomic.
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