AI is a business model stress test • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#131

Post by layer8 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

hk__2 wrote: post #25

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.

Do I have to publish my book for free because I got inspiration from 100's of other books I read during my life?

If you are plagiarizing, “for free” doesn’t even save you.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#132

Post by azangru » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

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.

Why do people prefer it over CSS modules? They also solve the style containment problem, and do not require any effort to set up, or any additional library to learn?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#133

Post by cyanydeez » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

heliumtera wrote: post #21

Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework. The sudden improvement in getting desired UI without relying on pre-built templates killed Tailwind Labs. There are many initiatives in a similar spot, improving your experience at using Next.js would hurt Vercel. Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Imp…

Your synthesis points to software in the public interest. Governments need to start forking projects and guiding them through maturity, the same as other public utilities.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#134

Post by azangru » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #129

ForHackernews wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very different :-) Inline styles do not have access to @-rules.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#135

Post by bongodongobob » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #38

I see "hackers" in these comments are now advocating to make "criminal contempt of business model" a serious thing, instead of a mere meme used to describe draconian copyright and patent laws.

[dead]

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#136

Post by layer8 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

kubb wrote: post #121

blitz_skull wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The subject of copyright isn’t “ideas”. Even patents aren’t about mere ideas, because you have to demonstrate how the idea can be realized.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#137

Post by aurareturn » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #26

bob1029 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we do probably need some kind of industry organization to maintain these things. In the case of CSS, we already have that: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html

Are you saying the www consortium should be paying to keep Tailwind development and maintenance going? The css standard is not the same as a usable library of components.

Tailwind is open source. Anyone can contribute to it, including an LLM.

If the founder of Tailwind quits on it, others who deem Tailwind valuable enough will continue to maintain it.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#138

Post by azangru » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

peacebeard wrote: post #130

ForHackernews wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You don't need CSS to offer an additional unit of reuse

Erm. Isn't this one of tailwind's selling points? That you have a set of classes that you keep reusing?

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#139

Post by watwut » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

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.

Honestly, for me, tailwind was just pleasant to work with and pure css definitely was not.

And I was super skeptical about it at first. I almost said no to it, but I trusted our main ui guy and wanted to allow him autonomy. And I ended up loving tailwind after working with it.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#140

Post by christophilus » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

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…

I’ve been building web sites and applications since 2000. I’ve done just about everything you can imagine SCSS, BEM, whatever. Tailwind is the best thing I’ve seen in that time.

We can agree to disagree about that, and that’s OK.

I should note that other than Clojure, I absolutely hate dynamically typed languages. I suspect (though dunno how to prove it) that folks who like Tailwind probably like statically typed systems and maybe functional programming- it seems to fit into that philosophical niche. And probably people who like vanilla CSS are in a different category.

I’d love to hear from both camps to find out whether or not that tracks.