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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#121

Post by kubb »

blitz_skull wrote: post #118
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

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.

The idea of being able to “steal” ideas is absolutely silly. Yeah we’ve got a legal system for it, but it always has been and always will be silly.

Disney lawyers would like to know your location.

Also, that Botox patent should be expiring by now, shouldn’t it?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#122

Post by tisdadd »

christophilus wrote: post #112
azangru wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember what made it click for you? What was the hard part of writing plain CSS that tailwind made significantly easier?

CSS requires discipline, or you end up accidentally styling something completely unrelated because you were overly general, or overly specific, or accidentally reused a class name. CSS disallows local reasoning. If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files. There are plenty of other problems Tailwind solves, but these two alone make me never want to go back.

This is why I loved polymer 1 and it's adoption of the shadow dom.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#123

Post by azangru »

christophilus wrote: post #112
azangru wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember what made it click for you? What was the hard part of writing plain CSS that tailwind made significantly easier?

CSS requires discipline, or you end up accidentally styling something completely unrelated because you were overly general, or overly specific, or accidentally reused a class name. CSS disallows local reasoning. If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files. There are plenty of other problems Tailwind solves, but these two alone make me never want to go back.

I agree with you about discipline; but... was it not interesting to discover how to build such a discipline? Was it not intriguing to learn how people who had been writing CSS for years had made it tolerable?

Besides, there recently have been several crucial improvements to CSS to address these pain points. One is CSS layers, which lets define custom layers of specificity that help with the discipline (e.g. resets or some baseline styles go in a low layer, component styles go in a higher layer, and finally overrides end up in the highest layer). The other is CSS scope, which prevents the leakage of the styles. These should greatly help with the specificity issues; and @layer is now sufficiently broadly supported that it is safe to use.

> If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files.

Yeah; one of the reasons for my question about the groups in which tailwind saw the biggest growth was that in some ecosystems jumping between files was not a problem to begin with. Vue, for instance, had single-file components, where css could be written in the same file as javascript. So did svelte. So does astro.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#124

Post by yread »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #53
appplication wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use Not being sarcastic, but this will never be. CSS is a perfectly functional interface, but the only way it becomes less annoying is when you abstract it behind something more user friendly like tailwind or AI (or you spend years building up knowledge and intuition for its quirks and foibles). We have decades of data at this point that fairly conclusively shows that many people…

I agree. I actually think CSS (and SQL or other “perfectly functional” interfaces) hold some kind of special power when it comes to AI. I still feel that the main revolution of AI/LLMs will be in authoring text for such “perfectly functional”-text bases interfaces. For example, building a “powerful and rich” query experience for any product I worked on was always an exercise in frustration. You know all the data is t…

Hey! Don't you dare to compare SQL and CSS. SQL is not a cobbled together mess of incremental updates with 5 imperfect ways of achieving common tasks that interact in weird ways. Writing everything in SQL-92 in 2026 is not gonna get you weird looks or lock you out of features relevant for end users. If writing SQL for your problem feels difficult it's a good sign you ought to look at alternatives (eg. use multiple statements instead). Writing the right CSS being difficult is normal.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#125

Post by ForHackernews »

aleksandrm wrote: post #117
znnajdla wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used plain CSS for more than a decade and felt the benefits of Tailwind within 10 minutes of getting started. What fueled the growth of Tailwind is that it makes web development palpably easier.

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.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#126

Post by SoKamil »

venndeezl wrote: post #109
jen729w wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion information wants to be free. But I still need to pay rent.

Well like a plumber then you should string together one paid job after another. Not do a job once and collect forever. Rent is a political problem. Perhaps invest in the courage to confront some droopy faced Boomers in Congress.

The thing is, someone will collect rent from IP anyways. LLMs shift rent collecting from decentralized individuals to a handful of big tech companies.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#127

Post by jen20 »

azangru wrote: post #123
christophilus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS requires discipline, or you end up accidentally styling something completely unrelated because you were overly general, or overly specific, or accidentally reused a class name. CSS disallows local reasoning. If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files. There are plenty of other problems Tailwind solves, but these two alone make me never want to go back.

I agree with you about discipline; but... was it not interesting to discover how to build such a discipline? Was it not intriguing to learn how people who had been writing CSS for years had made it tolerable? Besides, there recently have been several crucial improvements to CSS to address these pain points. One is CSS layers, which lets define custom layers of specificity that help with the discipline (e.g. resets or…

> was it not interesting to discover how to build such a discipline? Was it not intriguing to learn how people who had been writing CSS for years had made it tolerable?

As someone who writes tiny amounts of CSS these days (having known it reasonably in the late 90s and early 2000s with all the hacks and IE related bullshit), I have _zero_ interest in it.

If I'm doing it, it's only because there's no serious cross-platform equivalent to Windows Forms to power small experiments, and curiosity is certainly not there to improve the experience.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#128

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

iterateoften wrote: post #47
drivebyhooting wrote: post #4

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.

I stopped writing open source projects on github because why put a bunch of work into something for others to train off of without any regard for the original projects

I don't understand this mindset. I solve problems on stackoverflow and github because I want those problems to stay solved. If the fixes are more convenient for people to access as weights in an LLM... who cares?

I'd be all for forcing these companies to open source their models. I'm game to hear other proposals. But "just stop contributing to the commons" strikes me as a very negative result here.

We desperately need better legal abstractions for data-about-me and data-I-created so that we can stop using my-data as a one-size-fits-all square peg. Property is just out of place here.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#129

Post by Tade0 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #125
aleksandrm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is that different than inline styles?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#130

Post by peacebeard »

ForHackernews wrote: post #125
aleksandrm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that the primary feature of CSS is what people don't want from it anymore. If you're building your app with components (web components, react, etc), those become the unit of reuse. You don't need CSS to offer an additional unit of reuse, it only complicates things at that point.
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