> Effective altruisme is a smoke screen term to make legislators and the public believe that tech companies have humanities best imterest at heart.

I think it's a smoke screen term to convince wealthy people they have humanity's best interest at heart—pretty trivially. I find it impossible to believe that anyone else believes this.

You forget people who are convinced that they are wealthy, and then are convinced that they have humanity's best interest in part.

This describes many who fell for crypto Ponzi schemes. Who were convinced that buying into the Ponzi scheme made them rich, and the world a better place.

No. Proper "reform" entails reorganizing our economy. We will all die before this happens.

Some would rather die trying to make it happen.

Doesn't really matter after compression unless the bulk of your code can be culled from the end product. Tbh the largest business value this has is slowing down people trying to use your internal APIs.

It would be nice to have experimentally-derived numbers to point to in order to help people visualize whether or not minification actually improves compression to any significant degree.

Quick test I've done with some popular frameworks. I wonder if minification affects to parsing speed.

    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+
    |         Library          |  Size   | gzip -1 | gzip -9 | brotli |
    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+
    | bootstrap.css            |  280813 |   47312 |   33109 |  24533 |
    | bootstrap.min.css        |  232948 |   42003 |   30776 |  22695 |
    | react.development.js     |   87574 |   28733 |   23513 |  19818 |
    | react.development.min.js |   25612 |   10217 |    9224 |   8052 |
    | tailwind-2.2.19.css      | 3642321 |  376787 |  304100 |  82049 |
    | tailwind-2.2.19.min.css  | 2934019 |  354063 |  294632 |  72803 |
    | vue.global.js            |  476920 |  134655 |  105130 |  87121 |
    | vue.global.min.js        |  167898 |   74769 |   65582 |  57922 |
    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+

Edit: something important to note: some frameworks (e.g. React) have lots of comments on their un-minified versions, that are removed when minified. That affects their size greatly.

> Edit: something important to note: some frameworks (e.g. React) have lots of comments on their un-minified versions, that are removed when minified. That affects their size greatly.

Are you telling us your code doesn't? :-)

Hah! It's self-documenting!

Nah, in a more serious note, to properly compare the impact of minification, I should remove the comments from the unminified (maxified?) version first. :)

Nah that wouldn't be fair, the code I serve my users initially has comments too and the arguments that people bring to criticize minification is that it adds complexity if you want to read the code in the browser. The comments should stay

Often I avoid comments by using long names for functions and variables (e.g. the test whose name is a statement of the postulate behind it) and minimization squashes many of those.

Here's an old article: https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-a...

In the example given:

Original - 147 KB

Minified - 123 KB (83%)

Gzipped - 22 KB (15%)

Both - 20KB (14%)

Compression is waaay more effective, so if you have to pick one, go with compressing. Is having readable source code worth the other 2KB? That's up to you. Source maps can do the same thing with less, though. Also, modern devtools have ways of de-minification (if you don't mind all the mangled variable names).

I've seen the same thing with different jQuery versions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3239125/is-there-any-poi...

At least with jQuery, it seems that minification matters considerably.

Can client/browser choose if to use compression? If so, this is a problem for the website

Yes, HTTP Accept-Encoding

Speak for yourself: I'm not returning to the world of "discipline" (aka lost productivity) without a damn good reason to carry on existing codebases. It's just a waste of a good coder and certainly of good time.

In C++ discipline is optional. In Rust it's mandatory.

I think this is amusing because both directions completely work:

In C++, you can do whatever. Rust forces you do to some things. No discipline required by C++, absolutely required by Rust.

In C++, you can do whatever. Rust forces you to do some things. This means you must have discipline in C++, or you will do bad things. But in Rust, you can do whatever you want, the compiler has your back.

Good point, I was imprecise.

I should have said that no discipline is required in C++ to obtain a binary.

In C++ crashing with a helpful error is rare. In Rust it's rare not to get a helpful error.

I completely disagree; discipline is only optional in C++ if you want to ship broken code. Even the top poster in this thread that actually cops to the productivity overhead of C++ admits (albeit obliquely) they still make memory errors

I'm pretty surprised to see Scott mixed in with these folks. I love me some Alien, but his other works have a noticeably looser quality and shallow worldviews. As a director or to a lesser extent as a producer I suppose I tepidly agree with his mastery, but he's more of a Michael Bay than he is a Kubrick as a filmmaker overall: he makes puerile but engaging blockbusters.

Penrose is obviously wrong and has been repeatedly criticized for his shoddy thinking when it comes to cognition.

It would help if anyone believed Silicon Valley was capable of producing a non-profit of any value to begin with.

Hat tools does any of us plebs have in this country have to compel reasonable behavior from board members? As far as I can tell in this country you're not even legally allowed to be on a board if you're not a narcissistic, antisocial cretin.

I mean that's at best a wildcard when it comes to saving us from our own laws; it's not like our judicial system has literally ever consistently demonstrated good judgement. It's by far the most conservative and reactionary of our branches of government. That's not even touching the absolute disgrace that is our current generation of judicial staff.