261–270 of 361 posts
In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.
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Content should come from your database, Markdown, JSON, models etc. Presentation is determined by the HTML and CSS together. So your content and presentation is already separate enough to get the benefits. Breaking up the presentation layer further with premature abstractions spread over multiple files comes at a cost for little payback. I'm sure everyone has worked on sites where you're scared to make CSS file edits…
> I'm sure everyone has worked on sites where you're scared to make CSS file edits because the unpredictable ripple of changes might break unrelated pages. CSS gives you multiple tools to solve this problem, if you don't use any of them then it's not really CSS's fault. > Styling code near your semantic HTML tags doesn't get in the way It does. When I'm working on functionality I don't want to see styles and vice ver…
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The point of CSS is specifically to separate styling and semantics, so that they are not tightly coupled. If you were writing a blog post you would want to be able to change the theme without going through every blog post you ever wrote, no? If I'm writing a React component I don't want it tightly coupled to its cosmetic appearance for the same reason. Styling is imposed on elements, intrinsic styles are bad and work…
I do want styles tightly coupled to my React components. The product I work on has tens of thousands of React components. I don't want to have to update some random CSS file to change one component's appearance. I've had to do this before and every time its a huge pain to not affect dozens of random other components. Other engineers encounter the same challenge and write poor CSS to deal with it. This compounds over…
Front end development got taken over by the Enterprise Java camp at some point, so now there is no html and css. There’s 10,000 components, and thus nothing that can be styled in a cascading way.
All these arguments are just disconnects between that camp and the oldskool that still writes at least some html by hand.
When I get sucked into react land for a gig, it starts making sense to just tell this particular div tag to have 2px of padding because the piece of code I’m typing is the only thing that’s ever going to emit it.
Then I go back to my own stuff and lean on css to style my handful of reusable pieces.
I've been doing exactly that since AI came out :-D
You absolutely can prompt your way to 3.5 nines of uptime (even more), but you need to know what you're doing and correct it.
Even very well aligned models like Opus will make traps for your infrastructure. For example you tell it to write a fluxCD implementation of some application, in your k8 cluster, following your conventions and best practices described in some md files. And it does this, very nicely. But unless you tell it in advance every detail it will do something extremely stupid mid way through.
For example, let's say you have a database and it needs to create a new instance (with gitops) for the app. It adds the new DB and it gets created, but instead of using a tool that already exists (or proposing one if it doesn't) to sync the DB access credentials from the DB na espace to the app namespace it will read the credential, encrypt it and store in the app namespace.
What's the problem with that? Well, none unless you rotate these credentials. In which case your app will stop working, possibly after you tested it and decided it's good enough to use seriously, despite having a HA DB.
There are a dozen things like this in each "ai project", but even with this. With the time needed to review everything it saves a lot of time.
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What were the benefits that you felt instantly? I still don't feel anything and would prefer plain CSS over Tailwind any day.
It lets you apply styles to a single element without it messing up the whole rest of the page/site/app. i.e. it disabled the primary feature of CSS, the thing most people don't want from it.
There’s already a style attribute on every html element that does exactly that, and works fine in components.
“There must be something more…?” But it turns out there’s not. Just shorthand class names to save you having to type padding-left:4px
This is not exclusive to FOSS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for good reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consulting-ware'.
AI eats into these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of what used to take a specialist for that product can now be handled by a good generalist + AI.
Leaving aside the business model impact for a second, getting rid of obfuscation incentives is intrinsically good thing for a user community.
Dries' solution, offering operations as a SaaS or managed service, is meeting a need AI can't as easily match, but not exactly for the the stated reason. What the client is actually buying is making something someone else's problem. And CIOs will always love this more than anything if they can credibly justify it.
Where AI does impact this is in that latter part. If AI does significantly commoditize operational expertise, then the cost of in-house operating is (sometimes dramatically) lowered, and thus the justification gap on the CIO side for spending outside widens. How much this will drive a decision will be highly variable between businesses and projects.
Many FOSS business models did, explicitly or implicitly, rely, not on direct obfuscation or overcomplication, but on not making things easy. So you sell not the product, services around the product. This is not exclusive to FOSS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for good reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consulting-ware'. AI eats into these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of wha…
if u imagine the "business" stack as: customers on top, over business, over analysis, over software, over machines/infrastructure.. 25+ years ago i thought that DSLs and such very-high-level-mostly-formalised-descriptions will move the line between what-product-is-aka-business-analysis and software/coding towards software, reducing its part in the whole stack.
Well, it did not happen, just the opposite - instead the developers become expected to know everything from infrastructure to software to analysis to business domain and higher. So, stack became something like customers over business over... software-dev. Requirements, analysis... mostly gone / done by devs.
Now if that whole "software-dev" part collapses into zero-margin, i see two ways: either businesses very quickly resurrect the business-analysis (what the product is) and make that their margin/moat, or the customers start making their own software (as throwaway 100 wrongs is now possible) - and removing the business from the whole transaction...
In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.
This is one way to look at it. The other way is to argue that LLMs democratize access to knowledge. Anyone has access to all ever written by humanity. Crazy impressive if you ask me.
In my opinion LLMs are intellectual property theft. Just as if I started distributing copies of books. This substantially reduces the incentive for the creation of new IP. All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license: if you train your model on this, your weights and training code must be published.
Copyright, as practiced in late 20 and this century, is a tool for big corps to extract profits from actual artists, creators, and consumers of this art[0] equally. Starving artists do not actually benefit.
Look at Spotify (owned and squeezed by record labels) giving 70% of the revenue to the record labels, while artists get peanuts. Look at Disney deciding it doesn't need to pay royalties to book writers. Hell, look at Disney's hits from Snow White onwards, and then apply your "LLMs are IP theft" logic to that.
Here's what Cory Doctorow, a book author and critic of AI, has to say about it in [1]:
> So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model.
> And I'm here to tell you they are wrong: wrong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!.
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> All written text, art work, etc needs to come imbued with a GPL style license
GPL-style license has been long known not to work well for artifacts other than code. That's the whole reason for existence of Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, and others.
[0] "consumers of art" sounds abhorrent, yet that's exactly what we are [1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/