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But how can I make Gemini stop using "It's not this, it's that" every other sentence?

I like this article because it feels so pre-AI. This is what people were arguing about on HackerNews back in the day! How so very nostalgic it makes me feel.

But in response to the article: no, vanilla JS is a nightmare to keep your code organized, and battle tested frameworks do quite a good job at that. It's otherwise mostly a waste of time, or an intellectual exercise at most, to build an app with vanilla JS

I've found my reading picked dramatically since I started using LLMs for programming. Waiting for a prompt to finish is a great time to read.

If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

I have been experimenting with methods of reading books and creating software for these methods.

For example, I was inspired by the activeness of typelit.io when reading - typing out an entire book helped keep my mind from wandering when reading. But typing the whole book is too tedious. I wrote a few scripts to mirror the words on an epub, which does help with focus but isn't quite good enough.

My current epub reader software I use requires you to press a button to reveal the next word. This has dramatically improved my reading comprehension, prevents inadvertent skimming, and keeps my mind from wandering.

I'm still experimenting but for those who have ADHD or are borderline ADHD, it's quite a revelation - I can finally read without my mind wandering.

If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.

If you use the broswer verison of apps you can also inject custom scripts. I have one for Instagram that completely removes the recommendation feed. Works great.

I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.

Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.

There is a difference between a run of the mill CRUD React app and solving specific, complex UI problems.

I have been a programmer for a long time and CSS is still the hardest language to master. There are countless quirks and APIs most people have never heard of that solve extremely specific problems.

For example, using @starting-style with allow-discrete to use display: none on CSS transitions. Knowing that you would need to use this API, what it does, and how to debug your CSS is a skill that will be hard to replace with an LLM because of the fine grained detail needed for CSS. If you do not know how this API works and you need to use it for whatever reason, and then need to adjust your transitions later, it's probably faster to have real CSS skills than to constantly have to prompt an LLM for you.

Funny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.

No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.

Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.

I do this too. I generally skim PRs just to make sure the person isn't doing anything too crazy. I trust my team to write good code. Pulling a branch and testing the code is usually a waste of time unless it's a critical bug or feature.

What the author fails to understand is that merely consuming text is not the be-all-end-all of being an educated citizen. I am wary of trusting an author who is screaming from the rooftops about how the bad thing is coming, how the world sucks so much more now.

It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube, understand it, think about it, and then write out your thoughts and ideas and would be far more educated than someone merely reading a novel.

There is always a strange disconnect with egg head types where they fail to understand that information input is not the only way to become smart. And valuable information exists everywhere: a book, a blog entry, a podcast, a video, a movie, in the real world, etc. Thinking that text, which by the way is one of the most inefficient methods of information consumption, is the only way to be "smart" is incorrect. Critical thinking is what is desperately needed.

Any website that isn't some landing page or basic blog is going to need human intervention in the code (craftsmanship, essentially). And any website that's a landing page or basic blog already has a million tools for GUI design.

I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.

Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications. My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The NY Book Review or whatever.

Both magazines and books are valid forms of information consumption and books are not the only way to improve your writing, reading, and understanding of the world.

Now this is the type of comment to farm upvotes on Hacker News!

Clicking buttons is easier than writing a prompt.

Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.

Even though my Focal Bathys headphones are more expensive and have worse noise cancellation, I'm still sticking with them because the Airpods Max are so damn uncomfortable.

Yup, my Airpods Max don't hold a charge anymore. Right on time for me to buy the shiny new one!

I worked at big newspapers as a software engineer. Please do not blame the engineers for this mess. As the article says news is in a predicament because of the ads business model. Subscriptions alone usually cannot cover all costs and ads will invariably make their way in.

For every 1 engineer it seems like there are 5 PMs who need to improve KPIs somehow and thus decide auto playing video will improve metrics. It does. It also makes people hate using your website.

I would constantly try to push back against the bullshit they'd put on the page but no one really cares what a random engineer thinks.

I don't think there's any real way to solve this unless we either get less intrusive ad tech or news gets a better business model. Many sites don't even try with new business models, like local classifieds or local job boards. And good luck getting PMs to listen to an engineer talking about these things.

For now, the bloat remains.

To make a different point, a regular consumer does not care about tech specs. They want a laptop that can browse the web, stream Netflix, and maybe open a Word doc. They will be more sensitive to hardware problems in my opinion. A janky touchpad is going to be annoying no matter what computer task you're doing. A wobbly keyboard will be the same. To me an average consumer is more interested in the "feel" of the computer rather than what it can do.

Not always. That's assuming you have a full viewport modal. There are plenty of instances where you'll have a modal inside of another container somewhere on the page.

You also generally don't want to use position: fixed as it can allow the user to scroll behind the modal.

The first example of not using absolute positioning isn't a good example because sometimes you do need to absolutely position things, like a modal.

Also you can just use display: flex with justify-content: center and align-items: center for non absolutely positioned elements.

Just because it uses CSS grid does not make it more "correct" than flexbox.

I also only see one usage of custom @property properties here, which has been one of the most useful things to happen to CSS in years. They have many different use cases, particularly for complex animations.

You can also just use Tamper Monkey (though you need to add a script called Trusted Type Helper in order to inject CSS into YouTube).

I used to use Stylebot but I switched everything over to Tamper Monkey so all my CSS and non CSS related scripts would be in one place.

Tamper Monkey/Grease Monkey scripts are very portable too, I use my scripts in Safari on iOS via the UserScripts extension.

I mean are we really arguing over milliseconds here? I have never in my life had the thought "NPM search is too slow, I need a faster solution"

I have had the thought "NPM search sorted by downloads this week is giving me irrelevant packages" - but I'm not sure this tool solves that.

I'm working on a sewing pattern software to make patterns with code. It has a bunch of useful features like chopping up the pattern into a PDF for printing. But the thing that really made this software nice to use is the timeline I implemented, where you can go back and see how the pattern is constructed with each segment. It makes debugging so much easier. I have it so you can put different curves into groups, so you can see how just the sleeve is constructed, for example.

I will definitely consider adding timelines to future software I make, it's an awesome feature.

This app idea has been made a million times and never works. It's also not hard to make a few divs and copy and paste styles from Figma.

I wish you luck with your project.

I read the Design of Everyday Things and most of it was painfully obvious examples and was overly philosophical.

Design is solving problems so they're intuitive for the user. Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it. And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.