> I personally have never understood the point of trying to limit what actions are being dispatched. As long as your reducers and action creators are well typed, it shouldn't matter what other actions might be sent through.
The value comes when you consider what happens if a reducer (or saga or whatever) is updated in a breaking way (or removed wholesale).
Example: consider a scenario where you use `connected-react-router`, your codebase fills up with history actions being dispatched, then one day you remove `connected-react-router`, or its major version is updated and introduces some breaking change.
If you have a union type that includes all your own actions plus the `LocationChangeAction` from connected-react-router (and you use is consistently - e.g. your components take `Dispatch<YourAction>`) then you'll learn about the breaking change when your app fails to compile.
The alternative is you catch it later than compile-time, at worst _much_ later.
You might decide that the overhead in this scenario isn't worth it, and that's your call to make (I believe it is worth it) but hopefully this gives an idea of the point.
In suggesting that driving is no more than a boring, productivity-sapping waste of time, the Valley guys are mistaking a personal bias for a universal truth. And they’re blinding themselves to the social and cultural challenges they’re going to face as they try to convince people to be passengers rather than drivers. Even if all the technical hurdles to achieving perfect vehicular automation are overcome — and despite rosy predictions, that remains a sizable if — the developers and promoters of autonomous cars are going to discover that the psychology of driving is far more complicated than they assume and far different from the psychology of being a passenger. Back in the 1970s, the public rebelled, en masse, when the federal government, for seemingly solid safety and fuel-economy reasons, imposed a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. The limit was repealed. If you think that everyone’s going to happily hand the steering wheel over to a robot, you’re probably delusional.
There’s something bigger going on here, and I confess that I’m still a little fuzzy about it. Silicon Valley seems to have a good deal of trouble appreciating, or even understanding, what I’ll term informal experience. It’s only when driving is formalized — removed from everyday life, transferred to a specialized facility, performed under a strict set of rules, and understood as a self-contained recreational event — that it can be conceived of as being pleasurable. When it’s not a recreational routine, when it’s performed out in the world, as part of everyday life, then driving, in the Valley view, can only be understood within the context of another formalized realm of experience: that of productive busyness. Every experience has to be cleanly defined, has to be categorized. There’s a place and a time for recreation, and there’s a place and a time for productivity.
This discomfort with the informal, with experience that is psychologically unbounded, that flits between and beyond categories, can be felt in a lot of the Valley’s consumer goods and services. Many personal apps and gadgets have the effect, or at least the intended effect, of formalizing informal activities. Once you strap on a Fitbit, you transform what might have been a pleasant walk in the park into a program of physical therapy. A passing observation that once might have earned a few fleeting smiles or shrugs before disappearing into the ether is now, thanks to the distribution systems of Facebook and Twitter, encapsulated as a product and subjected to formal measurement; every remark gets its own Nielsen rating.
What’s the source of this crabbed view of experience? I’m not sure. It may be an expression of a certain personality type. It may be a sign of the market’s continuing colonization of the quotidian. I’d guess it also has something to do with the rigorously formal qualities of programming itself. The universality of the digital computer ends — comes to a crashing halt, in fact — where informality begins.
I heard an interesting critique of this from Liz Jackson at Webstock this year [0] [1] [2].
> Unfortunately there are two problems with this ad. First, by relying on text without including visual descriptions, LEGO made their announcement inaccessible to the very people these bricks are intended for. Second, this product already exists.
> LEGO could have partnered with Tack-Tiles, which currently retail for around $700, to make an affordable and commercially viable product. But instead, LEGO decided that Braille Bricks will be provided for free to selected institutions around the world. That LEGO Braille Bricks will be given charitably through their foundation, demonstrates how disabled people, as consumers, are consistently devalued so brands can achieve higher status. If you think about it, LEGO isn’t informing consumers about a new product that can be purchased. The ad can’t even be experienced by the very people these bricks are intended for. LEGO was virtue signaling.