[zubat]

Or to put it in other words: browser technology is asked to do so much that they had to go invent a new language to keep up. So that they could serve ads.

For us ordinary folks trying to write good applications that can be maintained by one person and scale reasonably well, there's justifiable reason to jump off this rollercoaster and work in a more humble environment with modest perf/safety tradeoffs and native code executables(e.g. Go, Basic, Pascal).

[justinmk]

The "so they could serve ads" meme is facile, reductionist, sophomoric. Actually, the fact that Google et al. were able to identify a profit function that could be optimized to fund the last 15 years of technology is an incredible achievement. In ~2000 it wasn't at all obvious that the internet could find a robust funding model.

Where the funding comes from is practically irrelevant, specially if it is a feedback function (i.e., an economic phenomenon, not "phone the legislature to fund more research!!1").

New funding models are good, too, of course. But the tone of the anti-ad camp is asinine.

[zubat]

A realpolitik view of tech only holds under the assumption that any new technology is good technology. It allows nothing to balance or sustainability, and I believe the trajectory of the Web is unsustainable and therefore fundamentally doomed despite its near-term wonders.

The SV camp has said nothing to convince me otherwise.

[coldtea]

>Where the funding comes from is practically irrelevant, specially if it is a feedback function (i.e., an economic phenomenon, not "phone the legislature to fund more research!!1").

I preper phoning the legislature -- more democratic and less private interests-driven.