As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.
This is my understanding too - tools like react are like microservices - they’re a technical solution to an organisational problem. HTML/css/JavaScript is an imperfect abstraction, so we got bootstrap. Then we got client side frameworks which introduced a build step, and then we got asset bundles, optimisers, linters, validators, tree shakers, package managers, validators for your package managers. All of these monkey patched around the actual problem with more abstractions, and the end result is what we have now.
I'm not insanely deep into frontend, I mostly just pick up React and call it a day, but it seems like this is also over-engineered?
I've seen vanilla JS before, and I just know I wouldn't want to do the housekeeping that comes with it. People claim it's less work because it' simpler, but I fully expect myself to rewrite the thing at least twice, only to give up because I have no actual mental model anymore of how it works.
I have never in my career encountered a Vanilla JS project of at least medium size that I would have called simple. They all feature brittle selfmade frameworks whose developers have since left the company years ago.
Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?
CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.
We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.
How are CSS and HTML a mess? Combined, they're an incredibly powerful layout engine that works almost the same across all environments and devices while also featuring easy accessibility.
When taking a bird eyes view on CSS it will be hard to oversee that CSS is a mixture of different concepts that evolved over time with a lot of inconsistentsies. It is possible to make it work, but it's not pretty.
Same for HTML. If the web would be reimagined today, there is a very low chance that we would create HTML as is.
Not that backend is any better - microservices everywhere, must scale to Facebook traffic even if we only have 10 customers, etc. Saying this as a backend dev
Hard disagree. This is JavaScript frameworks building a hierarchy for themselves and ignoring any sort of complexity on the generated DOM. There’s 0 reason for these 8-10 nested divs other than that’s what the framework spits out.
The logical conclusion I've come to is that the world will be divided into two types of people in the future: entrepreneurs with an army of AI employees, and the unemployed. Presumably those entrepreneurs are mainly just selling to other entrepreneurs, since the unemployed don't really have any resources to buy their products and services.
it makes private energy storage a viable investment option.
You can just invest in a large battery (or other storage system) and make a profit over buying/selling energy.
I really hope, this happens on a big scale and further reduces the dependency on fossil fuels (at least over 24h. winter is a different question)
For consumers, power prices consist of the actual price of power, plus network fees. Network fees are fixed at (on average) something like 10ct/kWh or 100€/MWh. So negative prices are only really negative if the power price drops below those -100€/MWh, which rarely happens (the usual dips are at low single-digit cents per kWh).
And even then, there is the issue of network fee double-dipping: Depending on the contract you have with your power company, the size and kind of storage you are operating, and the phase of the moon and your donations to the ruling party, you will be charged network fees twice, once when buying the power, once when selling it again. In that case, the threshold would be even worse, at -200€/MWh.
And all that doesn't factor in the cost of the storage infra.
Edit: And there is another factor: The current very low dip is in the intra-day prices. But contracts for consumers use day-ahead prices, which usually don't include those very large dips that result from miscalculations of weather and dispatch capacity.
Edit2: Just check https://tibber.com/de/preisrechner (use e.g. 10119 as Postleitzahl) and scroll down for the graph. Today, they give a negative day-ahead price of -1.5ct/kWh, but including network fees, taxes and their cut, you still end up paying 18.2ct/kWh...
You didn't read what I wrote. The news is about trading prices. End users never pay those, because there are fixed network fees to be paid on top. So the actual bill will practically never have a negative price on it anywhere.
And even if there were negative end prices happening: There are metal smelting works and other operators of big resistors who will happily heat up even more. So prices will probably never get so negative that a normal consumer can ever profit from them.
It does not make private energy storage viable on its own. You need to get enough charge/discharge cycles out of it in a certain time period. This means you need almost daily high price fluctuations. We aren't seeing that in Europe. We see high winds push down prices for multiple days and we see multiple weeks with consistent high prices in the winter, with occasional drops on the weekend.
It’s a daily event now in Australia. Very low prices during the middle of the day, and higher in the morning and evening. Anyone with a battery or an EV they don’t need to drive far can play the market, usually with scripted sell/buy trigger points.
There’s enough profit to make the payback period for a decent battery quite short.
Yes, I see energy-intensive industry moving away from extreme latitudes in the long run. Most of Europe is at an unfortunate latitude and has surprising levels of cloud cover.
The only interesting part is that renewable production in Europe is so random that there can be far too much for short periods.
The wholesale price system is not a reliable signal or incentive for electricity generation supply and demand in Europe. There are various subsidies, taxes, levies, and fixed costs not shown at the wholesale level that completely change calculations.
These numbers will make customers upset and complain about price gouging if they don't understand the disconnect. Or, it makes customers think that renewables are cheap because they are not seeing the subsidies that on net result in higher payments to renewable providers than carbon-based producers.
It's an indicator of how far they've come in supplanting fossil fuels. Today it's one day; soon it will be two, then a week. They can start thinking about next steps.
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
Two things can be true at the same time, such as: Germany decommissioning nuclear power was a huge loss, and also, rising use of renewables is a success story.
Prices being negative for one day does not make energy prices low. The "green shift" in Germany has increased the use of fossil fuels and the price of energy.
From JP Morgan's 16th Annual Energy Paper, March 2026
> In 2024 we estimated that had Germany not decommissioned nuclear power after the Fukushima accident, it would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels, 84% less generation from imported natural gas, 27% less fossil fuel capacity and 42% less natural gas capacity. Another road less traveled: Germany’s electricity prices in 2024 were almost 25% higher than they would have been had the country kept its nuclear power online . And as shown below, Germany might not have experienced such a sharp increase in its electricity imports which are 2x higher than a decade ago as a share of consumption.
> More nuclear shutdown repercussions: Germany’s industrial power prices were 3x higher than the US and China in 2024, and part of the reason why Germany has been experiencing the deindustrialization shown on the right.
> Prices being negative for one day does not make energy prices low.
My apologies, that was poorly worded - I didn't mean to imply that all energy prices were low across the board. Of course they are not.
It's an interesting indicator, not (yet) a systemic change. And as I said in answer to the parent comment, it's a important subject right now because of the petrochemical price shock.
Nevertheless, if I were to interpret your statement as unilaterally as you interpreted mine: you said "negative prices are not low prices", which is wrong as a matter of arithmetic.
I really hope that someone disputes their DMCA claim based on that. I imagine no one will, since they'll probably be sued by Anthropic, but it would be really funny.
When people suggest to use AI for open-source projects, what exactly are they advocating for given that the median open-source project budget is pretty much $0/month? Maybe $1/month if the maintainer likes to have a website for the project.
Ha, I just shipped an open source library using the Anthropic API. The way I solved the cost concern was by having users bring their own API key. Zero infra cost on my end and they pay for what they use.
The $20 / month subscription is less than I pay for electricity already and the local models are also capable enough. A lot of the top open source projects have paid devs working on them already.
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