Does anyone know what font is used here?
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lexend
Thanks!
AI is stifling new tech adoption?
431–440 of 442 posts
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#432Not entirely sure it's a hard fact but this is definitely an example of bias in an AI system.
More reason to decouple and think for ourselves.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A world where e.g. Django and React are considered as obvious choices for backend and frontend as git is for version control sounds like a world where high quality web apps become much cheaper to build. Imagine you saying this twenty years ago. Would you still want to be writing your back-end in JavaBeans, your front end in VisualBASIC, and storing your data in Subversion?
VisualBASIC made much nicer (and more responsive) UIs than Electron, so this isn't the slam dunk you think it is.
I miss VB too.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO create-react-app was a crutch for the last generation of build systems like webpack which were egregiously complex. Nowadays you just use Vite and start with whatever Github template has all the tech you need. Even starting a project from scratch is really simple now since the config files to get started are tiny and simple. There’s always the problem of outdated tutorials on the internet, but as a frontend dev s…
Never been simpler you say? I think that heavily depends on your project. If you are not building an app, but a website, I think it has been simpler for at least a decade, because then you wouldn't worry about lots of the stuff like bundler, build system (for a few scripts!!!) and some plain CSS. But aside from all that topic, I have a question about Vite. Does it in any way bind you to using their service for hostin…
What service? It’s a bundler that outputs HTML, Js, and CSS. You can upload that or run a Node webserver wherever you want.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never been simpler you say? I think that heavily depends on your project. If you are not building an app, but a website, I think it has been simpler for at least a decade, because then you wouldn't worry about lots of the stuff like bundler, build system (for a few scripts!!!) and some plain CSS. But aside from all that topic, I have a question about Vite. Does it in any way bind you to using their service for hostin…
What service? It’s a bundler that outputs HTML, Js, and CSS. You can upload that or run a Node webserver wherever you want.
I think I mixed it up with vercel. Thanks, you answered my question.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#436Related: https://www.mjlivesey.co.uk/2025/02/01/llm-prog-lang.html
It’s doesn’t matter if a minority of passion techies will still be up for new tech, if the average developer just wanting to get the job done and relying on LLMs finds it harder, it will be a significant barrier.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're asking about performance and memory, then yes, it does. Most places just don't care. I've worked 15 years as a contractor and only in once place have the business cared about optimisation. As long as it wasn't unbearable than it was "good enough". > This is especially true in e-commerce where many studies have shown that overall page performance has a correlation to conversion. Add to that the fact that a…
Have you ever worked for a place that cared about meeting CWV? Poor JS performance will definitely hurt rankings.
Yes. It was one contract only and I was the lead frontend dev.
I wrote a very lightweight JS framework (it was just a few classes really) so we could have plugins. A plugin implemented was just an object that implemented an interface, I also wrote a poor man's React for two or three pages that needed to build a lot of DOM Dynamically.
At launch the site was getting basically 100 on the lighthouse tests with the gzipped CSS and JS coming it at ~80KB. Of course that lasted for a week because people will put up a huge image that hasn't been optimised for the web.
The site was fast because I wrote it like a website from mid-2000s. Everything was basic OOP and almost all the code was procedural.
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#438I think this is true because I myself said to myself: "it is useless for me to create a library or abstraction for the developers of my project, much better to use everything verbose using the most popular libraries on the web". Until yesterday having an abstraction (or a better library/framework) could be very convenient to save time in writing a lot of code. Today if the code is mostly generated there is no need to…
> Maybe some product will become a hell with millions of lines of code that no one knows how to evolve and manage. That is exactly what will happen, so why would you do that?
I think I might be forced to do this by the metrics that measure me at work "things have to work right away and have to scale quickly to other low-skilled people"
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#439I think this is true because I myself said to myself: "it is useless for me to create a library or abstraction for the developers of my project, much better to use everything verbose using the most popular libraries on the web". Until yesterday having an abstraction (or a better library/framework) could be very convenient to save time in writing a lot of code. Today if the code is mostly generated there is no need to…
Only in one sense. As code is now cheaper, abstractions meant to decrease code quantity have decreased in value. But abstractions meant to organize logic to make it easier to comprehend retains its value.
I hope so, but it adds an extra difficulty
Easy to understand is not always an absolute metric, a project with many lines of code can be easy to understand for a team with a certain experience and difficult to understand for another team with a different experience (not less but different).
Now I will have to think about "easy to understand" for AI
Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What about closed source tooling? How do you expect an AI to ever help you with something it doesn't have a license to know about? Not everything in the world can be anonymously scraped into the yearly revision. This is not a novel problem. Proprietary toolchains already suffer from decreased resources on public forums like Stack Overflow; AI did not create this knowledge segmentation, it is scraping this public inf…
> This is not a novel problem. AI did not create this knowledge segmentation, it is scraping this public information after all. I think you misunderstand the situation. You as a person can be privy to private knowledge. Relying on AI enough that you can't use that private knowledge is the novel situation. > I do not see why AI code generation further incentivizing the use of the open-source solution is a problem. May…
I am curious, have you used a code generation tool that is linked to your IDE?
If I ask it, "why is the structure I am feeding into the `do_cool_stuff()` function not working", it won't say "sorry, I can't figure that out because I don't know the library that implements `do_cool_stuff()`. It will:
1. read my code where I construct the data to feed into the function,
2. see that the function is imported,
3. then read the file containing the linked `do_cool_stuff()` function to understand exactly what data structure it expects.
Crucially, the linked function can be anything from my own personal super secret UI framework for building widgets, to the `lib` folder containing my proprietary driver code for my unreleased hardware. This is fundamentally the LLM figuring out how to do "development [] against unreleased APIs or hardware".
I don't really know what "private knowledge" you are referring to, given you talk about Apple developing widgets against their new unreleased framework. The code is not really "private"; certainly to you or I it might be, but Apple owns the code on both sides of the interface, no? What precludes their internal generative AI tooling from doing the equivalent of Ctrl-Clicking through to the linked `do_cool_stuff()`?
If anything, this is perhaps a benefit of genAI; for security reasons, I am sure your average programmer at Apple is expected to work solely against the internal documentation regarding how `do_cool_stuff()` works, and has no access to the actual implementation of it. Yet, an in-house inference server could certainly have access to both sides without the risk of code leakage you have directly sharing the other side of an interface with the consuming developers.
To me, in this context, "closed source" implies something the LLM does not have access to the implementation details for, e.g. source unavailable for the user invoking the LLM; in this case, I think my original analysis holds re: genAI further encouraging the development on top of open source technologies.