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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#881

Post by TeMPOraL »

kshri24 wrote: post #728
TeMPOraL wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with that perspective shouldn't have been doing open source in the first place. AI isn't hurting people sharing things , only people who are pretending to share but actually indirectly selling things.

There is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example). I can't find a single example of a software developer who has put out software purely for some altruistic purpose without any returns on that investment (direct or indirect). Building a sustainable business model was a great way to j…

> There is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example).

And pretty much none of that is threatened by AI. LLMs learning from code, or articles, found online, are at worst neutral to this, and in many ways beneficial. They're only negative if you're using your contribution as bait to hold your audience, in lieu of a more honest approach of openly selling it to them.

> Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.

Or poison it. Open Source as a business model was always an anti-competitive hack, similar to "free with ads": drive price down to 0, destroying any other way of making money in this space, including "honest exchange of money for value".

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#882

Post by TeMPOraL »

jcattle wrote: post #778
TeMPOraL wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.

> abusing open source as a vector for it It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that. Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full…

> Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem?

On the software ecosystem? Maybe. For society? Now that's a difficult question, and I haven't really made up my mind on that yet.

On the one hand, OSS in general is a great win in terms of innovation. On the other hand, it pretty much destroyed the ability to make money on software directly in a honest way - exchanging money for providing value. This, in turn, became a major driver of turning everything into subscription, and for the surveillance economy.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#883

Post by simlevesque »

tomhow wrote: post #753
simlevesque wrote: post #111

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.

Sorry I honestly didn't anticipate my opinions to be so divisive and this outcome wasn't my intention. I'll do better.

Could you delete my comments too ? Thank you

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#885

Post by retrocog »

trinix912 wrote: post #506
retrocog wrote: post #405

Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs? Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply t…

That's no better than robots.txt, it's simple to bypass and with the current LLM tech there's lots of plausible deniability regarding the output.

That's absolutely true, so it would have to be a standard like others that comes with consequences for non-compliance (like filtering non-compliant clients). I don't claim to have the implementation, but I do see a need for one.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#887

Post by gnarlouse »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #880
gnarlouse wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can s…

> The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. And the millions with ChatGPT (and other LLM) subscriptions, using it for anything from for-profit and non-profit work to hobby projects and all kinds of matters of personal li…

I hope you’re right!

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#888

Post by throw10920 »

echelon wrote: post #264
ericmcer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI". Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.

Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs. We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers. If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'…

> Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.

I fail to see how open source is being "turned against" anyone here.

> we'll be owned by industrial giants

...or how anyone is being "owned by" industrial giants in any way relevant to open source.

> Tech is about to cease being ours.

This doesn't mean anything.

You're just ranting.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#889

Post by chris_wot »

yurishimo wrote: post #745
tshaddox wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam presented his case for the lifetime pricing model in this podcast episode in 2023: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is... I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing . I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.…

If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license. Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium…

Shouldn’t you give lifetime access to specific major releases? Aka the traditional way of doing things in software development.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#890

Post by GlacierFox »

refulgentis wrote: post #829
GlacierFox wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be sure to avoid you during a time of crisis...

May I humbly suggest taking a breath or two? It is extremely taxing mentally to select strangers to tell you don’t trust them in an imaginary crisis. (Especially ones on a tech discussion board! Especially just because they noted there were no negative comments and only fawning ones! Especially when you think fawning feels fine in a crisis!)

May I pull you aside and suggest you take a few breaths yourself? If you're finding typing half a sentence on a keyboard taxing, perhaps consider getting some support.

This is put forward with all the humbleness.

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