The brigades are out, but most people in the UK have a high level of trust in the BBC (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...). This whole incident is a storm in a teacup; yes the program was edited badly, but it is a single incident. It is ridiculous that the DG and News CEO have resigned.
Specific to this politician, right and wrong don’t matter. The one skill he’s sharpened his entire life is bad faith litigation. Once he threatened to sue, BBC needed some gesture that, in court, would demonstrate contrition.
The problem is that people are frequently using SPA JS frameworks for things that are clearly not gmail of figma -- i.e. news websites and other sites with minimal interactivity or dynamic behaviour. If you are genuinely building an 'app'-like thing, then of course you need some kind of JS SPA framework, but too often people are reaching for these tools for non-app use cases.
I say if you have any reactivity whatsoever you need a framework. If you don't your code will be crap, and there's really no getting around that. Once you start doing DOM calls to update GUI you've got a mess on your hands instantly, and it will only get worse over time.
While I agree with this article's conclusion, I think it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power) with technical concerns.
For a time, I tech-led the creation of the AMP site for a major news publisher. The technical choices of AMP, excluding the CDN-aspect, are I think a great fit for publishing websites with tens-hundreds of developers who are all tempted to write bespoke JS and in so doing create performance and maintenance hell. In many respects, philosophically, I think AMP was not far of HTMX. In AMP, developers are able to construct relatively sophisticated dynamic/interactive features using simple markup (and pre-built JS components). The page is managed through a single JS runtime which helps manage performance issues. As components have a standard HTML interface, it is possible to migrate the backend to different rendering technologies partially over time unlike (for example), isomorphic JS which forces a large-scale rewrite down the line.
I tried to advocate for an in-house AMP-like solution for our main website, but it was ultimately re-written in React -- a process which took several years and resulted in a codebase of much greater complexity. (Performance was better than the old website but I'm not sure React really contributed to the gains here.)
While AMP is rightly dead, I think the technical choices it made live on (or at least, they should).
Yeah, while I basically loathed AMP for all the control and monopolization issues, I do see what Google was trying to accomplish, at least at first.
Any front end dev has had to deal with the onslaught of asks from various marketing and sales teams: "Can you add this tag library?", "We need to integrate this affiliate broker!", etc. etc. And lots of devs would push back with stuff like "At this point we load 247 3rd party tags and JS libraries and it takes 53 seconds for our page to load, we have to stop this madness!" but the problem was that for any individual marketing team ask, the impact was small and of course that team had some KPIs to hit this quarter. It was basically a sort of Tragedy of the Commons situation.
So AMP came along and essentially gave front-end devs a technical reason why they couldn't add some shitty, slow, buggy affiliate broker JS library to the code base, so when marketing came with an ask, they could simply say "Sorry, not supported in AMP, and without AMP we get downranked in Google". AMP essentially became a technical hack to align short term incentives ("We need to add some marketing feature X!") with longer term goals of faster, lighter-weight pages.
You're either uninformed or splitting hairs about what "downranked" means. Google required AMP in order to be featured in the "Top Stories" carousel that was (unsurprisingly) at the top of the results page. Google ended this requirement in mid 2021, https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_v...
Doesn't really matter. Google directed clicks to the AMP sites in various ways, including the OneBox. Most sites which need ad revenue had no choice but to adopt AMP.
They learned from this and now just have periodic arbitrary layoffs to depress salaries and keep the workers scared and in line in a deniable way instead of in an explicit way.
Perhaps I'm just being dense, but I really don't see the point of AMP. If you want to build a non-bloated website, you don't need special branding from Google to do so, you just need to care about the quality of your work. Websites like HackerNews, SourceHut, and Pinboard, are living proof.
The Wikipedia article does a very poor job, in my opinion, of explaining what AMP even is. [0] It emphasises use of CDN caching to improve performance, but this can be done for any static website. What does AMP contribute? Where's the innovation?
It wasn't innovative or intended to be, it was a solution to a collective action problem. It's easy to make the case for "we have to do it this way to avoid being penalized in search rankings".
Doesn't Google already penalise websites for poor performance though? Why not just intensify that penalty, rather than develop and promote a new framework intended to forcibly prohibit bloat?
Sure but people won't always respond to incentives. It's like asking why AA exists when the cops will already throw you in jail for being drunk in public.
Google will rank results partially based on page performance and behavior. It is possible to improve your ranking by improving page experience. AMP is the complement: a tech stack that makes it impossible to not do those things.
When nearly every site has horrible performance IDK if it would make a difference to intensify those penalties, as they'd apply about equally for instance to every news site, every blog, every e-commerce site, etc.
Thanks, that sounds like a neat feature. Regrettable than neither the Wikipedia summary, nor the Google Search AI overview, nor Google's own official summary page for AMP, [0] make this clear.
AMP is a set of rules for people who are unable to stop themselves from making bad decisions. It has nothing to do with technical superiority. AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. There is nothing that stops you from creating an AMP-like experience if you are naturally not a jackass.
Doesn't seem to prevent AMP sites promoted on Android/Google/Gemini assistant from using dick moves like hijacking the back button to prevent you from leaving. I can't fathom why Google doesn't drop the hammer on that behavior.
Exactly this. AMP was not a technological concern so much as a "contract": I won't act like a jackass and do anti-user things on my site and you will convey that to your readers/searchers.
AMP has no relationship to Google Ads, does not require Google Ads, and does not require using Google's CDN. There are dozens of ad networks that support(ed) AMP.
Google Ads has integrations for AMP. AMP does not require Google Ads.
> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages. Visitors might be served your page from a Google domain instead of your own, or the ad tech and other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site (handily, it seemed, for Google, who might prefer you to use their ad tech instead).
Part of that statement is correct, part of it is misleading.
> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages.
Sort of correct: this is true if and only if you wanted the rank boost for Google search. If you just wanted to serve AMP and have snappy page, not entirely correct.
> other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site
Correct, because that's the entire point of AMP. It is a straightjacket intended to make it technically impossible for your "other scripts" to run, because actual users hate your "other scripts" and they make users' phones overheat etc.
The innovation is that the page can be prerendered from cache without any privacy or analytics concerns. AMP is an open standard replacement for Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News Format.
Edge caching might not have been as prevalent but was hardly new technology.
> without any privacy or analytics concerns
Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.
> Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.
Um, yeah, yes. The whole point of AMP (and competing proprietary formats like FBIA and ANF) is that the preloading happens from a cache owned by the link aggregator, so the publisher doesn't get your details just because its page was prerendered in the background. The link aggregator obviously already knows that you're browsing over the article link, so there is zero privacy loss.
With AMP, you basically get guard-rails to prevent your team of junior engineers from making your mobile pages too slow in exchange for increasing The Google's monopoly power. :D If I remember correctly, with AMP, you have to use their web components, and you have to pass their validator or pages won't be listed or cached at all. AMP is not really innovative in the slightest. One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to. The businesses that see engineering as a necessary evil are not properly incentivized to care about page performance, and are sometimes only prodded into doing so if a giant like The Google tells them to. Management tells their programmers that they read an article about AMP and that it makes pages load faster and reaches a wider search audience by caching and cutting out unnecessary crap; the more seasoned programmers think "Yeah, no shit – I've been trying to tell you... but I'll spend time rebuilding pages for AMP because I get paid the same either way."
> One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to
This is incorrect. You cannot beat prerendered. It does not make sense to implement AMP for people visiting your website directly. AMP is for link aggregators like search engines, news aggregators, and social media websites.
AMP is a misplaced principle, because it says “due to the constraints of mobile, web pages should be lightweight, not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast."
Instead they should have said, "Web pages should be lightweight not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast."
How would forking work? The whole point of AMP is that a cache can validate that it is safe to prerender. If you added your own stuff, the caches would just reject it.
The point of AMP is that the link aggregator owns the cache, not the publisher. You would have to convince Google, Bing, and all the other link aggregators to use your implementation for their AMP caches. That's why it has a standards body. If you don't understand why, you don't understand the problem that AMP solves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733809
Of course it was user-hostile. I can't tell you how many times I would get linked to an AMP version of a page on desktop, with text spanning the entire width of the screen, and no way to get back to the 'normal' version.
The article is polemical, which I don't mean as a criticism but simply as genre description. There is no attempt to engage with the scholarly consensus (or indeed any of biblical scholarship beyond the named author). The piece wants to explain why religion persists but even on this lens it is heavy on words but lacking in depth. A lot is asserted.
You are overstating the case on authorship (we don't know who wrote Matthew and John) but otherwise you are wholly correct -- the article misrepresents the scholarly consensus. I.e. as you say, Greek was pervasive and Jesus almost certainly spoke it (along with Aramaic) and it is quite possible that gospel accounts are either written by eyewitnesses or contain the direct testimony of those who were. The historical timeline allows for this and we simply lack historical evidence to make a wholly conclusive case either way (though many attempt to do so on each side).
It is not correct to assert this. More precise is to say: it is unlikely that all of the gospels were written by the names we now associate with them -- at least not insofar as these names relate to the 12 disciples.
The truth is we don't know who wrote the gospels. The evidence is that they are quite early (i.e. for Mark, consensus is late 60s so perhaps 30-40 years after Jesus' death). In fact, many scholars think 'Mark' was written by 'Mark Antony' who is mentioned in Acts. And John may have been written by a 'John the Elder' who is mentioned elsewhere. These are educated guesses though -- the evidence is circumstantial.
> [Our] truth is we don't know who wrote the gospels
Okay, because y’all forgot? People purposely want to remake Sacred Scripture?
I mean, the Church knows who wrote them; Jesus, Mary and the Saints know; bishops and priests and the faithful knew for centuries.
Naming of Bible books isn’t about some guy holding a pen and making stuff up: the names speak to provenance, lineage, and perspective. Somewhat the same function as the “begat” passages everyone hates (because who can remember who all THOSE people were???)
If scholarship wants to move past that attribution and unmoor the books from tradition, then they can. Modern interpretations, perspectives, and hermeneutics are always in demand. But I confidently assure you that anyone who mattered was well aware of where those books came from and “who” had written them, notwithstanding meddlesome medieval monkey business.
This is not correct. Secular academics disagree quite a lot about the specifics as we lack sufficient historical data but it is very widely accepted that:
* the gospels were written in the 1st century
It is therefore entirely possible that they were written by eyewitnesses, even though many do not think they were written by some of the 12 disciples. The topic of 'eyewitnesses' is however hotly debated. See e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitne... which is pro this view but also plenty against.
Even John's gospel, which is often thought of as the latest, may well have been written very early; arguments for a late dating are almost wholly made in relation to the text itself (i.e. it has a 'higher' Christology) and not wider historical data.
Source: I am studying theology at Cambridge University in the UK and have heard several professors here debate these topics, plus I am familiar with the literature.
They "eyewitness" testimony would include things like Pilate talking to Jesus and the devil tempting Jesus in the desert. Or the women in Mark's gospel finding the empty tomb and then not telling anyone about it. There is a lot of legendary type of story telling that you get with ancient heroes.
Some of the teachings of Jesus might be historical.
I think your thinking is short-termist and naive. Naive because:
* Putin will use any pause in fighting that doesn't come with credible security guarantees to rearm and continue (he basically always breaks ceasefires he agrees)
Short-termist because:
* a resurgent Russia and weakened (and alienated) EU will only strengthen China and strategically weaken the US
The USA is powerful but that doesn't mean it can be indifferent to global affairs.
The only plausible rationale for Trump's behaviour is that he doesn't care about liberal democracy, either around the world or at home. If you are a US citizen who doesn't care about their own democracy perhaps that's fine, but if you do believe in the constitution, his behaviour should worry you.
China and Russia are rival powers both seeking some domination over asia (their continent) -- a strong russia will preoccupy china.
As for liberal democracy, only two us presidents in history cared about that for a a brief moment (george bush the latest, woodrow willson the earliest), and that ended in catastrophe.
The US certainly didnt care about democracy in Ukraine when the state department was deciding who should replace the democratically elected leader of ukranine in 2013 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26079957 -- you can go find the recording and listen, the media reports are propaganda). Nor did biden care about democracy in UA when he withheld aid in order to have a prosecutor fired (go watch the video of biden, the reporting is propaganda). Nor has the US ever cared about democracy: it does exactly the same across the world -- deposing, blackmailing, threatening democracies all over the world. It even armed al q. in syria just to depose Assad -- the very people who dragged it back into middle eastern wars. Every state which cannot oppose the US is not soverign in the eyes of the US: it must do what it says. Well, now China and Russia are strong enough to do the same.
The US has its sphere of influence: the western hemisphere, europe. And threatens, blackmails, bribes and deposes all of the world to advance its interests. This is the behaviour of a great power -- and Russia has returned to this status.
Unless another great power is willing to contain Russia, there is nothing to be done. Since Russia is not a threat to China or the US at the moment, neither are willing to contain it. And so it goes.
This has very little to do with Trump's personality -- exactly his actions are stated in words by Obama, and every president since Bush: detent with russia, withdrawl from europe, retiring nato, containing china. Trump is just the first to do it. Trump wants peace with rival powers at all costs, hence his "WW3" comments -- the world is now far too risky for the US to impose its will has it had done from 1992 til 2022.
Unfortunately many have grown up in this era and still think an american "deciding" that the world-should-be-some-way is sufficient for it to be that way -- that the US military will be their to impose the will of the western mind. That era is over. It no longer matters what we think -- there's more than one bully in the system.
No, that is too cynical a take. The UK gives a lot of resources to Ukraine, has offered 'boots on the ground' as part of a peace deal, and is increasing its defence going forward.
The problem is, Putin will not stop at Ukraine if he is allowed to take it. His worldview is that the fall of the USSR is the greatest wrong of the last century, and he is determined to recreate it.
And Europe will suffer greatly if a resurgent USSR is allowed to grow unchecked next to it. (Not even speaking of the millions of people who will suffer under its authoritarian rule.)
