<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/06/greece-authoritarian-right-eu-kyriakos-mitsotakis-syriza/" author="" source="Jacobin">The Triumph of Greece’s Authoritarian Right Is the Future the European Union Wants</a> <bq>Greece has now been following the Troika’s blueprint for well over a decade, down to the smallest details. <b>GDP per capita is less than two-thirds of its 2009 level. The average annual wage for a Greek worker in 2009 was €21,600; today it is €16,200.</b></bq> <bq>The leading players in the EU — above all, the German government of Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaüble — <b>relied upon an understanding of the Eurozone crisis that was childish, self-serving, and economically illiterate.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the speech delivered by Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas:<bq>Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.</bq></bq> Because Germany and Greece are not business partners. They are in an extractive, extortionate relationship. Greece pays Germany to not destroy it too quickly. To the point: Greece empties its public coffers to protect the fortunes of a handful. Fuck you, pay me, indeed. <bq>[...] <b>in contrast with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, Mitsotakis hasn’t faced so much as a token reprimand from the European Commission or the big EU member-states.</b> They clearly approve of the violent, lawless methods that Mitsotakis has used against refugees attempting to enter Greece, with the EU’s own border control agency, Frontex, acting as an enabler of such criminality.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>given the choice between dealing with Tsípras in June 2015 or Mitsotakis in June 2023, they wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.</b> That should be food for thought when we discuss the potential for democratic reform of the EU.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/29/patrick-lawrence-russian-melodrama/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Russian (Melo)drama</a> <bq>The all-powerful dictator, the ruthless, merciless, brutal Hitler of our time, is suddenly revealed as weak in the face of <b>a few thousand infantrymen and their leader, who turned back at what appears to be the first suggestion they do so.</b></bq> <bq>Did he think some sizable proportion of the Russian military would go over to his side? <b>Of the 25,000 troops under his command, roughly a fifth went with him. None of his officers did. What was his point, his objective, his best outcome?</b> Where in Moscow was he planning to go once he got there—assuming for a sec he thought he would?</bq> <bq>I find it impossible to accept that Prigozhin ever thought—or even intended, indeed—to reach the Russian capital. We are left wondering what the true story is. <b>There is self-mythologizing and there is delusion</b>. If we find evidence of the former in Prigozhin’s conduct, do we now detect he suffered from the latter?</bq> <bq>“Big ambitions and personal interests led to treason,” Putin said in the brief speech he delivered to the nation Saturday. I argue here in favor of this assessment: It was a frustrated megalomaniac, not a grand strategist with a plan for a new, reformed Russia, who set out from Rostov to Moscow last weekend. <b>Putin called Prigozhin’s conduct a betrayal and he called it a mutiny. He did not call it a coup or anything like one, which would imply more organization and design and less in the way of one man’s shoot-the-moon ego trip.</b></bq> <bq>My mind has wandered often over the events of these past days, and then over the plentiful images of Prigozhin in uniform with a visage of soldierly determination under his helmet. And then it drifted into thoughts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and finally Stockton Rush, who just killed himself and four others in that submersible cylinder looking for the Titanic. <b>These are rich men in search of grand adventure and exotic sorts of distinction—in space, at the bottom of the ocean. They all want to appear as heroes before the great, broad masses, having made fortunes by way of other than heroic endeavors.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/28/patrick-lawrence-breaking-bread-with-authoritarians/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Breaking Bread with Authoritarians</a> <bq><b>Antony Blinken was extremely stupid to elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI as we’re saying now, to a principle of American diplomacy</b> when he was named the Biden regime’s secretary of state.</bq> <bq>Diversity! absolutely. But <b>these fools talk only of diversity based on the color of one's skin or one's gender rather than the content of ones character.</b> No diversity of opinion or class is allowed.</bq> <bq>“From our perspective, it has never been as simple as drawing up jerseys. It has always been about seeing those long-term trends and trying to point those trends in the right direction and then being prepared to have a more sophisticated approach to how we build relationships with a range of different countries.” I wish the French would make up a word just for this guy: <b>Sullivan is a master bullshitier in our household. It has always been about issuing jerseys, hats and such like, always in black and white.</b></bq> Sure, sure. Saudi Arabia, India/Modi OK. Russia/China bad. <bq>I once had lunch in Bangalore with Ramachandra Guha, the distinguished historian. We were talking about India’s exceptional diversity, which I have long counted its single most admirable feature. <b>Guha pulled out a 100–rupee note and told me to count the languages on it. There were 17. “We’re going to lose this,” he said ruefully. This is what I find most unforgivable about Modi and his kind.</b> They are erasing the best India has to give the world in the name of the ideology known as Hindutva, an abominable stew of xenophobic fanaticism born of an insecurity</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=99835" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Wollt Ihr die Welt in Flammen sehen?</a> <bq>[...] <b>offenbar hat die naive Hoffnung auf einen „Regime Change“ in Moskau unsere Meinungsmacher so fest im Griff, dass man sich dafür sogar Chaos und Bürgerkrieg in einem Land herbeiwünscht, das die größte Atommacht der Welt ist.</b> Es kann einem wirklich mittlerweile angst und bange werden, wenn man sich den geistigen Zustand unserer Eliten vor Augen hält.</bq> <bq>Der Politikwissenschaftler wurde von den Medien zu einer Art „Christian Drosten des Ukraine-Kriegs“ aufgebaut und darf in zahllosen Talkshow- und Interviewauftritten der Öffentlichkeit seine Sicht der Dinge erläutern; und die ist gnadenlos transatlantisch, pro-ukrainisch und bellizistisch. Keine Frage, <b>Masala ist ein Falke, wie er im Buche steht. Dass er in den Medien oft nicht so wahrgenommen wird, liegt wohl vor allem daran, dass ebenjene Medien nicht mehr den gesamten Debattenraum abbilden, sondern fast nur noch Falken zu Wort kommen lassen.</b> Und im Konzert der Falken ist sogar ein Carlo Masala nur eine Stimme von vielen.</bq> <bq><b>Normalerweise wird in solche Talkshows ja zumindest ein einzelner Gast eingeladen, dessen meist hoffnungslose Aufgabe es ist, dem Meinungsmonopol der anderen Gäste zu widersprechen und das „Krokodil“ im medialen Kasperletheater zu geben.</b> Das hat dann auch die erzieherische Wirkung, dass dem Teil der Öffentlichkeit, der ebenfalls kritische Positionen vertritt, vor Augen geführt wird, wie einsam sie mit ihrer Meinung liegen und wie falsch diese doch ist.</bq> <bq><b>Es wurde also ein sehr kleiner, aber sehr mächtiger Meinungshorizont abgebildet</b>, der im Paralleluniversum Anne Will die gesamte Debatte repräsentieren sollte. Toll.</bq> <bq><b>Auf einmal war der ultranationalistische Oligarch und Söldnerführer Jewgeni Prigoschin</b>, der bei objektiver Betrachtung eigentlich all das verkörpern müsste, was der politisch-mediale Komplex Deutschlands abgrundtief verachtet, <b>„unsere Hoffnung“</b>.</bq> <bq><b>Prowestliche Kräfte sind in Russland nahezu inexistent, und Personen wie unser Darling Alexei Nawalny haben in Russland ungefähr so viel Rückhalt</b> bei Militär, Staatsapparat und Zivilbevölkerung, <b>wie</b> der in Deutschland hochgepuschte „Putschist“ <b>Prinz Reuß</b> mit seinen Reichsbürgern hierzulande hat.</bq> <bq><b>In wessen Interesse soll es sein, dass direkt an der östlichen EU-Grenze ein militärischer Konflikt zwischen atomar bewaffneten „Warlords“ entsteht?</b> Das wäre für die gesamte Welt ein schockierender Albtraum und kein wünschenswertes Szenario.</bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/24/the-elite-war-on-free-thought/" source="Scheer Post" author="Matt Taibbi">The Elite War on Free Thought </a> <bq><b>Not long ago we were told in no uncertain terms the Russians blew up their own Nord Stream pipeline, that they were the only suspect. Today the U.S. government is telling us it has known since last June that Ukrainian forces planned it, with the approval of the highest military officials.</b> But we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget.</bq> <bq><b>We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory.</b> It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people like Russell who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek,</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/15/drought-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-the-next-pandemic" source="The Guardian" author="Tim Smedley">‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’</a> <bq>Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in <b>England</b> this amount of water will soon be unavailable. <b>Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply.</b> As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.</bq> <bq>In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. <b>Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.</b></bq> <bq><b>Australian infrastructure firm Macquarie owned Thames Water between 2007 and 2017, leaving it with £2bn of debt , while paying its investors, according to one analysis, on average between 15.5% and 19% in dividends a year.</b> Instead of making changes to a system that was supporting such poor levels of investment, in August 2021, Ofwat approved a new £1bn equity takeover of Southern Water . The new owner was Macquarie.</bq> That's just legal robbery. Spinning tales of cheap debt while walking away with all of the assets. A scam. Nothing more; nothing less. <bq>Tucker is Australian and says mates back home find it funny that England can have a water problem, given its wet reputation. “We do get a lot of grey days. But grey doesn’t mean rain. Even drizzle doesn’t mean rain.” He gives me a quiz question: <b>“Which Australian state capital city gets more rain on average every year than London?” I guess Sydney. “They all do.”</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we have a population poorly educated in the need for water saving or living with drought. And water is too cheap – or at least not valued.</b> When we speak, Thames Water’s combined water supply and wastewater charge is about £2.20 per 1,000l. “You pay the same for one litre of water at WH Smith at the train station,” he says.</bq> <bq>[...] In the first year of the scheme, farmers near Brighton were offered £35 per hectare of overwinter cover crops. In some regions, this has since increased to £109/ha . <b>The simple calculation is that it’s more expensive for water companies to treat the water than it is to pay the farmers not to pollute it in the first place.</b></bq> Thank god it's cheaper as well as less energy-intensive and environmentally friendlier, else there wouldn't have been a real reason to do it. 🤦‍♂️ We think money is the only way to measure value. And then scammers manipulate that belief by making their costs cheap. But someone pays; someone always pays---but not them. They walk away with millions and billions, having made millions of people's lives more miserable while making one person rich. Cool system, bro. <bq>We canalised our rivers, drained our land, overpumped our groundwater, dried our wetlands, burned our peat, killed off our keystone species, all in the belief that modern engineering had decoupled us from our dependence on the natural system. It was always hubris. <b>The climate crisis hasn’t caused the water crisis we now face, it has simply shone a punishing, unyielding light on it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/book-reviews-plastic-waste" source="New Yorker" author="Elizabeth Kolbert">How Plastics Are Poisoning Us</a> <bq><b>Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens.</b> In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.</bq> <bq><b>The researchers found that a single bag from CVS leached more than thirteen thousand compounds; a bag from Walmart leached more than fifteen thousand.</b> “It is becoming increasingly clear that plastics are not inert in the environment,” the team wrote. Steve Allen, a researcher at Canada’s Ocean Frontier Institute who specializes in microplastics, tells Simon, “If you’ve got an IQ above room temperature, you have to understand that this is not a good material to have in the environment.”</bq> <bq>Then, there’s the threat posed by the particles themselves. Microplastics—and in particular, it seems, microfibres—can get pulled deep into the lungs. <b>People who work in the synthetic-textile industry, it has long been known, suffer from high rates of lung disease.</b></bq> <bq><b>Nurdles, which are key to manufacturing plastic products, are small enough to qualify as microplastics. (It’s been estimated that ten trillion nurdles a year leak into the oceans, most from shipping containers that tip overboard.)</b> Usually, nurdles are composed of “virgin” polymers, but, as the New Delhi plant demonstrates, it is also possible to produce them from used plastic.</bq> <bq>He learned that <b>nearly half the bales of PET that arrive at the plant can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated, either by other kinds of plastic or by random crap.</b> “Yield is a problem for us,” the plant’s commercial director concedes.</bq> <bq>Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wells quotes <b>Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.”</b></bq> <bq>Only containers labelled No. 1 ( PET ) and No. 2 (high-density polyethylene) get melted down with any regularity, Schaub learns, and to refashion the resulting nurdles into anything useful usually requires the addition of lots of new material.“ <b>No matter what your garbage service provider is telling you, numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7 are not getting recycled,”</b> Schaub writes. (The italics are hers.) “Number 5 is a veeeery dubious maybe.”</bq> <bq>Americans, the report noted, produce more plastic waste each year than the residents of any other country—<b>almost five hundred pounds per person, nearly twice as much as the average European and sixteen times as much as the average Indian.</b></bq> <bq>“<b>So long as we’re churning out single-use plastic . . . we’re trying to drain the tub without turning off the tap</b>,” Simon writes. “We’ve got to cut it out.”</bq> <bq><b>If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought.</b> The question is what matters to us, and whether we’re willing to ask ourselves that question.</bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/27/patrick-lawrence-ellsberg-and-the-process-of-my-awakening/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Ellsberg and 'The Process of My Awakening'</a> <bq>Let us ask at this point who was crying on the men’s room floor at Haverford, that we can understand the moment for what it was. Was it the eager Marine Ellsberg had been, the RAND war planner, the technocrat who toured the carnage in Vietnam, the Defense Department analyst? Or <b>was it the person Ellsberg had just then become, mourning all that he had been and all that he had done until that moment—the Marine and the analyst having that very evening died?</b></bq> <bq><b>Courage is contagious</b>, and coming into contact or exposing yourself to people who are taking those risks is very helpful as a first step toward doing it yourself.</bq> <bq>Ellsberg’s first wakeful act was to rip the veil from the pointless savagery of our Vietnam adventure. Few of us will ever have occasion to do anything of remotely comparable magnitude. But <b>each of us, providing we each summon the courage, can act as truly, as faithfully, as loyally to the human cause as Ellsberg did.</b> No illusions here: Most of us prefer the irresponsibility of slumber. But <b>for those who so choose, we can allow ourselves to awaken. We can accept the burdens knowledge always brings with it</b>, just as Dan Ellsberg showed us in his own life.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/27/prestige-production/" source="Scheer Post" author="Nick Pemberton">Prestige Production</a> <bq><b>Seinfeld represents Zizek’s communist utopia where class contradiction is overcome and only jealousy remains</b>, for society is fair and we succeed based on our own merits.</bq> <bq>He resents hippies because they see themselves as too good for capitalism. He knows that his mother had no choice but to comply with capitalism so <b>he rightly sees this anti-capitalist attitude as a product of upper class privilege.</b> However he fails to see that <b>while anti-capitalist sentiment may come from the middle class, it nonetheless is the correct sentiment.</b></bq> <bq><b>As monopolies form, companies choose to reinvest in themselves rather than labor because labor doesn’t produce as much profit.</b> But there is no real value (which comes from labor) in this process and this only works out for the big corporations because they can get away with it. As a result <b>there is not even real gains in technological development.</b></bq> <bq>We have reached the point where companies find it more profitable to invest in money rather than goods. From Arthur Allen, KFF Health News: “Cisplatin and carboplatin are among scores of drugs in shortage, including 12 other cancer drugs, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder pills, blood thinners, and antibiotics. Covid-hangover supply chain issues and limited FDA oversight are part of the problem, but the main cause, experts agree, is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry. <b>Made mostly overseas, these old but crucial drugs are often sold at a loss or for little profit. Domestic manufacturers have little interest in making them, setting their sights instead on high-priced drugs with plump profit margins.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.stilldrinking.org/tech-erosion" source="Still Drinking" author="Peter Welch">Tech Erosion</a> <bq>Part of the nonsense is due to the way America has decided to flood international travel points with <b>security mummery to ward off imaginary threats.</b> The resulting tedious gauntlet then becomes overwhelming to the underpaid personnel, so <b>America rolls up its Goodwill bin flight jacket sleeves and starts automating bits of bad system, because rethinking the assumptions that inform a broken system would cause the whole country to collapse.</b></bq> <bq>Going through US customs as a US citizen always irks me. In European countries, going through customs as a US citizen is, for me, going under the sign that says “Nothing to Declare” and leaving the airport. Then on my way back, <b>I stand in three lines: One to scan my passport in a machine that gives me a questionnaire and a receipt, one to hand my ticket, receipt, and passport to a human for human scanning or whatever they’re supposed to do, and finally one to give my receipt to a security guard, i[n] case I dropped out of the ceiling between the two human components of customs for the privilege of being caught leaving without a receipt.</b></bq> <bq>People are already losing their jobs. It’s not only the artists, whom nobody cares about until they’re gone, it’s copyeditors and clerks and designers. And just like self-checkouts and airport entry surveys, <b>the humans are replaced by something a little bit worse. But it’s cheaper, and novelty often obscures indignity long enough for it to entrench, and we all accept that everything is a little bit slower, a little bit less trustworthy, and everything has a little more friction to grind us down over each day.</b> The replacement bots could be honed into better tools, but who will bother once they’re accepted? <b>Market trends always converge on giving us as little as possible.</b></bq> <bq>The luddites had a point: their profession was destroyed and replaced by something worse, for the benefit of fewer people. <b>Mechanization was absolutely crushing to the working class and we spent a century clawing some rights and dignity back. We now live in an era where those rights are being actively stripped in the midst of another technological breakthrough.</b></bq> <bq>As the art bots rush to crystalize our artistic culture, shipping more and more industries into imitation engines <b>risks crystalizing the mechanisms that accelerate the exploitation inherent to capitalism. There is a very hard wall at the end of that road, and I shudder to think how many off-ramps we’re shutting down.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/06/26/doing-fieldwork-in-china-during-and-beyond-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-study/" source="Made in China Journal" author="Xiao Tan, Nahui Zhen, Leiheng Wang And Yue Zhao">Doing Fieldwork in China During and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study</a> <bq>During interviews, they have omitted certain questions when faced with sensitivity issues raised by their sources.</bq> No more "are you going to stop beating your wife?"-type questions? 🙃 <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/" source="Ars Technica" author="Mark Bayliss">Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out</a> <bq>However, this ignores three salient facts:<ul><b>Most people don't give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared</b> Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former</ul></bq> I agree with all of this, but I also don't think that people are aware of what they are trading away. Ordinarily, they trade away their privacy and their data and their ability to operate safely, securely, and without surveillance. In this case, the security of the free-software version is actually worse, so people are rightfully staying away. But, that doesn't mean that people are woefully unaware that their messaging services are terrible---and that there are better alternatives. I have family members who still use Facebook Messenger for everything, which is ridiculous. Then, they ask me why their phone battery won't last. These people could easily communicate with Apple Messages instead, which is end-to-end encrypted and uses almost no battery relative to Facebook Messenger. <bq>They have a very different perspective from someone who may not even understand what a server is—<b>there's an increasing number of people who simply never grew up having to comprehend the idea of a server or even the notion of using a desktop OS.</b> Those people are quite simply talking on a completely different wavelength from people who are already all-in on the fediverse.</bq> <bq>This is not really compatible with the demands that running an instance places on its owners. Here we have a <b>catch-22</b>: Everyone should join small instances, but the costs of running those instances will get more prohibitive the more [people] join them. But trying to recoup those costs in any sustainable or consistent way will lead to that instance getting blocked, which means nobody will join them. <b>If you do somehow keep growing through charity or goodwill alone, your instance will become big enough that it isn't "small," so naturally nobody should join it.</b></bq> <bq>I'm also not convinced that repeatedly pushing away any entity with any kind of resources and ability to match the server scaling that a proper decentralized network demands is going to help anything. <b>You're not going to be able to run a social network the size and breadth of Twitter purely based on generosity when the scaling of the network is so abysmal</b>, or otherwise accepting a significant level of centralization. The only other alternative, really, is that you don't have one.</bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://riffle.systems/essays/prelude/" source="Riffle Systems" author="Nicholas Schiefer, Geoffrey Litt, Johannes Schickling, Daniel Jackson">Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database</a> <bq>In data-centric apps, much of the complexity of building and modifying the app comes from managing and propagating state. Here's an interesting thought experiment. Many software developers think that it is much easier to build command line tools than GUI apps, or even text-user interface (TUI) apps. Why is that?</bq> Yeah, duh. That's why you abstract the UI. <bq>In existing app architectures, a large amount of effort and code is expended on collecting and reshaping data. A traditional web app might first convert from SQL-style tuples to a Ruby object, then to a JSON HTTP-response, and then finally to a frontend Javascript object in the browser. <b>Each of these transformations is performed separately, and there is often considerable developer effort in threading a new column all the way through these layers.</b></bq> <bq>There’s also a similarity to end-user focused tools like Airtable : <b>Airtable users express data dependencies in a spreadsheet-like formula language that operates primarily on tables rather than scalar data.</b></bq> Echoes of Rich Harris and Svelte. <bq>Frameworks like React, Svelte, and Solid have popularized this style in web UI development, and <b>end-users have built complex reactive programs in spreadsheets for decades.</b></bq> Whoops. Missed the point here. Svelte is not very much like React actually. <bq>[...] <b>database reads and writes are modeled as side effects which must interact with the reactive system.</b> Many applications only pull new data when the user makes an explicit request like reloading a page; keeping data updated in realtime usually requires a manual approach to sending diffs between a server and client.</bq> Or use something like MobX. <bq><b>In a local-first architecture where queries are much cheaper to run, we can take a different approach.</b> The developer can register reactive queries, where the system guarantees that they will be updated in response to changing data.</bq> Those are called "views". <bq><b>This approach is closely related to the document functional reactive programming (DFRP) model introduced in Pushpin</b>, except that we use a relational database rather than a JSON CRDT as our data store, and access them using a query language instead of a frontend language like Javascript.</bq> CRDT sound better, honestly. <bq>[...] <b>primitive databases like SQLite</b> are fast on modern hardware: many of the queries in our demo app run in a few hundred microseconds on a few-years-old laptop.</bq> How is SQLite primitive? <bq><b>We’ve effectively created a data-centric scripting API for interacting with the application</b>, without the original application needing to explicitly work to expose an API. We think this points towards fascinating possibilities for interoperability.</bq> No. Too broad. Stop it. <bq>We were frequently (and unexpectedly) delighted by the persistent-by-default UI state. <b>In most apps, closing a window is a destructive operation, but we found ourselves delighted to restart the app and find ourselves looking at the same playlist that we were looking at before.</b> It made closing or otherwise “losing” the window feel much safer to us as end-users.</bq> Have you never used a Mac? This is how nearly every Mac or iOS application works. <bq>As an experiment, we tried replacing SQLite with DuckDB , a newer embedded database focused on analytical query workloads with a state-of-the-art optimizer . We saw the runtimes of several slow queries drop by a factor of 20, but some other queries got slower because of known limitations in their current optimizer. <b>Ultimately we plan to explore incremental view maintenance techniques so that a typical app very rarely needs to consider slow queries or caching techniques.</b></bq> You totally forgot that refreshing the whole UI at once was a temporary workaround. <bq>[...] which we've worked around for now by creating materialized views which are recomputed outside of the main synchronous reactive loop.</bq> Duh. <bq>Some React alternatives like Svelte and SolidJS take a different approach: <b>tracking fine-grained dependencies (either at compile-time or runtime) rather than diffing a virtual DOM.</b> We think this style of reactivity could be a good fit for Riffle, but for now we've chosen to prototype with React because it's the UI framework we're most familiar with.</bq> Naja. It sounds like you're going to just reinvent all of the things that you tried to avoid in the first place. <bq><b>We believe that making migrations simpler and more ergonomic is a key requirement</b> for making database-managed state as ergonomic as frontend-managed state.</bq> Diff the database against your expected model. It ain't easy, but it's doable. I've done it once and it was surprisingly robust. If I had to do it again, I would do it with a more simple system, but the mechanism in Quino---define application model, import database to model, compare the models to come up with differences, come up with a list of changes to apply, convert them to SQL wherever possible, apply them---was pretty bulletproof. It just takes a while to write for each database backend. <bq>[...] we’ve ended up with a strange model of an interactive app, as a sort of full-stack query.</bq> That's kind of what Atlas did. It built a single, gigantic query for the whole UI. It was often exactly what you wanted---until it wasn't, then you were stuck. <bq>Airtable is by far the most polished expression of the relational model in a tool aimed at end users.</bq>