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AI is a business model stress test

dri.es

201–210 of 361 posts

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#201
post #25

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?

Issue to me is that I or someone else bought those books. Or in case of local libraries the authors got money for my borrowing copy.

And I can not copy paste myself to discuss with thousands or millions of users at time.

To me clear solution is to make some large payment to each author of material used in traing per training of model say 10k to 100k range.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#202
post #98

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, 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…

I'll give my guess - it's because of rhe "fullstack" bullshit.

I am a backend developer. I like being a backend developer. I can of course do more than that, and I do. Monitoring, testing, analysis, metrics, etc.

I can do frontend development, of course I can. But I don't like it, I don't approach it with any measure of care. It's something I "unfortunately have to do because someone who is not a developer thought that declaring everyone should be doing everything was a good idea".

I don't know how to do things properly on the front end, but I definitely can hammer them down to a shape that more or less looks like it should. For me, shit like Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever is nice. I have to spend less time fiddling with something I think is a waste of my time.

I love working with people that are proper front end developers for that reason, and I always imagined they would prefer things more native such as plain CSS.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#203
post #98

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, 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…

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load.

With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles.

With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#204

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 have mixed opinions on the "AI=theft" argument people make, and I generally lean towards "it's not theft", but I do see the argument.

If I put something on Github with a GPL 3 license, it's supposed to require anyone with access to the binary to also have access to the source code. The concern is, if you think that it is theft, then someone can train an LLM on your GPL code, and then a for-profit corporation can use the code (or any clever algorithms you've come up with) and effectively "launder" your use of GPL code and make money in the process. It basically would be converting your code from Copyleft to Public Domain, which I think a lot of people would have an issue with.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#205
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different than inline styles?

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

@scope[0] is perhaps a better comparison.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#206
post #60

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…

> Making GitHub actions runners more reliable, stable and economical would hurt Microsoft. Can you explain this one a bit? I know some folks who would absolutely increase their spend if Actions runners were better. As it stands I've seen folks trying to move off of them.

If they were twice as efficient, you would only need to run half as many and spend less.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#207

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…

You can’t even have dynamic Classes: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil...

>

—- I find it really crazy that they think would be good idea. I wonder how many false positive css stuff is being added given their “trying to match classes”. So if you use random strings like bg-… will add some css. I think it’s ridiculous, but tells that people that use this can’t be very serious about it and won’t work in large projects.

—— > Using multi-cursor editing When duplication is localized to a group of elements in a single file, the easiest way to deal with it is to use multi-cursor editing to quickly select and edit the class list for each element at once

Instead of using a var and reusing, you just use multi cursors. Bad suggestions again.

—-

> If you need to reuse some styles across multiple files, the best strategy is to create a component

But on benefits says

> Your code is more portable — since both the structure and styling live in the same place, you can easily copy and paste entire chunks of UI around, even between different projects.

—-

> Making changes feels safer — adding or removing a utility class to an element only ever affects that element, so you never have to worry about accidentally breaking something another page that's using the same CSS.

CSS in js fixed this long time ago.

—-

ChitChat You have a new message!

So many classes you need to learn to use it.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#208
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…

People like tailwind because it feels like the correct abstraction. It helps you colocate layout and styling, thereby reducing cognitive load. With CSS you have to add meaningless class names to your html (+remember them), learn complicated (+fragile) selectors, and memorise low level CSS styles. With tailwind you just specify the styling you want. And if using React, the “cascading” piece is already taken care of.

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 against reusability, that's why we all use resets is it not?

I do agree that the class name system doesn't scale but the solution is not to double down on coupling, but rather to double down on abstraction and find better ways to identify and select elements.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#209
The root of the issue is that Tailwind was selling something that people can now recreate a bespoke version of in mere minutes using a coding agent. The other day I vibe coded a bespoke dependabot/renovate replacement in an hour. That was way easier than learning any of these tools and fighting their idiosyncrasies that don’t work for me. We no longer need Framer because you can prompt a corporate website faster than you can learn Framer. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, what it is and we all have to adapt.

I want to be clear, it sucks for Tailwind for sure and the LLM providers essentially found a new loophole (training) where you can smash and grab public goods and capture the value without giving anything back. A lot of capitalists would say it’s a genius move.

Re: AI is a business model stress test

#210

> AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. The earthquake didn’t destroy the building — it stress tested it.

In software (and business in general!), innovation is expected. If you built a building in San Francisco that couldn't handle a relatively minor earthquake you could argue it would be a 'stress test'.
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