> On the web, you may get Twitter's feed rendering acceptably, and then two days later they ship an insignificant redesign that happens to use sixteen CSS features you don't have and everything is totally broken again.
this is not directed at you, but at this attitude which is very common and which I see all the time: everyone is lightning fast to come up with reasons that something won't work.
why?
why do people say things without understanding that almost any given problem has subproblems, and that those can be solved.
in humans, negativity is always just under the surface, and positivity is often buried deeply, and I do not understand this. I don't think I ever will. people just love to be contrarians.
It's really tiring. It's everywhere on HN, I deal with it everyday at work, and everywhere else I look.
Instead of it being criticism, the commenter could've seen it as a positive. Every time a site changes, you discover functionality you haven't implemented yet. Over time, you've implemented more and more. It's progress. Progress is good. Choosing the negative interpretation is so endemic and arbitrary and simply unnecessary.
If you have infinite time and resources with perfect communication/understanding you can solve a lot of engineering problems. No one has that. This is where the original quoted claim from the article comes from, "building a web browser is impossible". That's encoding a lot of experience and reality of the Brobdingnagian challenge of building a web browser from scratch on 2023's web.
It's not negativity to point out a downside to an approach to a particular problem. It's potentially useful to get feedback on a development approach. Constructive criticism is very important in engineering projects because it encodes assumptions of limitations we all have.
A positive statement like "oh those sub problems are solvable!" doesn't really provide any help. No shit the problems are solvable in a perfect world. Such statements aren't even necessarily constructive because they don't offer any analysis or advice. It smacks of toxic positivity[0].
not all positivity is toxic positivity, you know. I wasn't even positive, I was just anti-negative. being against negativity is not the same as being positive at all.
spouting out a problem you foresee being revealed after another problem is solved is not constructive criticism, it is reactionary and attention-seeking.
my comment is about comments like yours; unlimited time and energy to mention anything that makes what I say sound bad, improbable or difficult, and zero time or energy to even entertain the idea that my point of view is valid, and worth considering.
It's just an effort to enforce social conformity. A specific case of this type of browbeating may not be helpful, but on the whole it's often positive for the group to be mostly uniform. It's also often negative! More a value-neutral standard human tribal grouping behavior than anything.
With regards to the negative interpretation having positive value, yes - working in a company that values ‘not failing in particular cases’ higher than ‘working in general, room for improvement’.
For example in a conservative corporation where a given project requires a ‘go’ from several departments were the success of the project does not give an immediate advantage to those departments, but a failure will require them to explain why they didn’t ‘catch it in review’.
this is not directed at you, but at this attitude which is very common and which I see all the time: everyone is lightning fast to come up with reasons that something won't work.
why?
why do people say things without understanding that almost any given problem has subproblems, and that those can be solved.
in humans, negativity is always just under the surface, and positivity is often buried deeply, and I do not understand this. I don't think I ever will. people just love to be contrarians.