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AI is a business model stress test

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Re: AI is a business model stress test

#171

Post by sefrost »

paradox460 wrote: post #169
azangru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

Fe devs who refuse to learn css and instead use tailwind have always struck me as incredibly odd. It's like a carpenter who refuses to use a hammer because they hit their thumb once as an apprentice I wrote this piece on tailwind a few years back, and little seems to have changed https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

It’s interesting to me because CSS is very stable. It doesn’t really change that often. It’s great foundational knowledge to have for people who build for the web.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#172

Post by Quekid5 »

appplication wrote: post #43
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…

> 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…

It's getting better (in a C++ kinda way), certainly, but...

It's ultimately still driven my matching "random" identifiers (classes, ids, etc.) across semantic boundaries. Usually, the problem is that the result is mostly visual which makes it disproportionately hard to actually do tests for CSS and make sure you don't break random stuff if you change a tiny thing in your CSS.

For old farts like me: It's like the Aspect-Oriented Programming days of Java, but you can't really do meaningful tests. (Not that you could do 'negative' testing well in AOP, but even positive testing is annoyingly difficult with CSS.)

EDIT: Just to add. It's an actually difficult problem, but I consider the "separate presentation from content" idea a bit of a Windmill of sorts. There will always be interplay and an artificial separation will lead to ... awkward compromises and friction.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#173

Post by paradox460 »

nojs wrote: post #159
azangru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If suddenly CSS became pleasant to use, Tailwind would be in a rough spot. CSS is pleasant to use. I know I find it pleasant to use; and I know there are quite a few frontend developers who do too. I didn't pay much attention to tailwind, until suddenly I realized that it has spread like wildfire and now is everywhere. What drove that growth? Which groups were the first adopters of tailwind; how did they grow; when…

> What drove that growth? It is a natural fit with component-based frontend frameworks like React. You keep the styles with the component instead of having to work in two places. And it’s slightly nicer than writing inline styles. The core CSS abstraction (separating “content” from “presentation”) was always flimsy but tailwind was the final nail in that coffin. Then of course LLMs all started using it by default.

You've been able to keep the styles in the component well before tailwind turned the class attribute into ersatz inline styling. CSS-in-JS has been around for a decade, and there are myriad options for react. Vue and Svelte have them built in.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#174

Post by renjimen »

> You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running.

Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#175

Post by paradox460 »

sefrost wrote: post #171
paradox460 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fe devs who refuse to learn css and instead use tailwind have always struck me as incredibly odd. It's like a carpenter who refuses to use a hammer because they hit their thumb once as an apprentice I wrote this piece on tailwind a few years back, and little seems to have changed https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

It’s interesting to me because CSS is very stable. It doesn’t really change that often. It’s great foundational knowledge to have for people who build for the web.

And nearly every step it's made has been for the better. I used sass on that blog, because a few corner case features weren't widely available when I last did work on the style, but for the last 3 projects I've worked on, I don't use it anymore. Pure css can do basically everything I needed before. Sure, I bundle using bun's bundler, but that's for performance optimization, nothing more

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#176

Post by techpression »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #128
iterateoften wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nee…

I find it very easy to understand, people don’t generally want to work for free to support billionaires, and they have few venues to act on that, this is one of them.

There are no ”commons” in this scenario, there are a few frontier labs owning everything (taking it without attribution) and they have the capability to take it away, or increase prices to a point where it becomes a tool for the rich.

Nobody is doing this for the good of anything, it’s a money grab.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#177

Post by cluckindan »

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.

Which means most people don’t understand the basics of what they’re working on.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#178

Post by paradox460 »

benjiro wrote: post #152
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.

Ignoring that Tailwind requires that same discipline... Pay close attention how often you end up in a situation where a different color was used, or how dark theme tags have been missing, and so much more. What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So…

The situation you describe is one of the most maddening things about tailwind, and what leads to most of it being write only code, in my opinion

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#179

Post by antihipocrat »

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?

Humans are punished for plagiarism all the time. Myriad examples exist of students being disenrolled from college, professionals being fired, and personal reputations tarnished forever.

When a LLM is trained on copyright works and regurgitates these works verbatim without consent or compensation, and then sells the result for profit, there is currently no negative impact for the company selling the LLM service.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#180

Post by cluckindan »

hahahahhaah wrote: post #163
azangru wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have understood if tailwind got popular primarily among full-stack or backend developers: people who have neither time nor interest to learn CSS deeply. But, what contradicts this expectation is that one still needs to acquire CSS knowledge to use tailwind, and that some front-end developers seem to prefer it as well. Although I still cannot tell whether there are more front-end developers who prefer tailwind…

I was too subtle but the issue is less understanding CSS and more collaborating in a team where someone decides to add a specific rule that fixes something applies on every page but makes no sense semantically. Then do that 100 times to create spaghetti. CSS rule anywhere can affect anything whereas tailwind is more local. You can also bricklay it along lines of components in React, so you know how X component render…

The irony is that Tailwind is not semantic at all.
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