Why does Ted Nelson need to deliver a "product"? He's not a computer scientist. He's not a product manager. He's just a goofy guy with wacky, interesting ideas. More of a philosopher than anything else.
The US has a long dark history of enacting laws that seem "fair" to those (whites) who sponsored it, but in reality are meant to target a specific minority population. Jim Crow is a major example. Many of the laws never particularly singled out blacks in the actual text, but things like poll taxes and literacy tests were used because of the disproprtionate impact they would have on that community.
>I know that Comma isn’t as successful as Waymo and probably may not be.
Are you sure about that? Comma is in use by thousands of real people all around the world, who have driven millions of miles with it and derived an incredible amount of value. Waymo is a walled garden tech demo available to a few engineers and a select number of alpha testers within a few square miles of Phoenix, with no timeline at all to mass adoption.
I'd second this. The most important skill for a programmer is being able to look at a problem and say "I have absolutely no idea what's going on here, but I know that I eventually will". Going from a complete lack of context on something to fully comprehending and solving it is infinitely satisfying.
>I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises.
Web development is complicated because it is no longer web development. It's application development. And nontrivial applications are, by definition, complicated.
>The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds).
I really wish this point was better understood. The rhetoric around the "1%" has completely missed the point, as the vast majority of the 1% is comprised of our doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people. Pitting the poor and working classes against them makes no sense. The real problem is the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth [0].
>As a person who writes a lot of JavaScript and (mostly) enjoys it, this makes me sad because while I enjoy the interactivity it provides, I must concede that big data companies and advertisers have weaponized it against us.
I could not agree more. I have started browsing the web with JS turned off by default in all of my browsers (desktop, laptop and mobile) over the last few months. I've never been happier. Especially on mobile. The web has become a bloated, unusable mess.