rablackburn

How many companies have 1000 frontend developers?

Do they need 1000 frontend developers?

Aside from the Giants maybe some consultancies or hire-firms have that many? But they use whatever the client uses. If you're not in the business of selling frontend development services then a big part of your competitive advantage is _being able_ to make technology choices that are more-optimal than the labor market's lowest-common-denominator slurry.

Between JS/ECMAscript being abandonware for a decade and CSS' historical immaturity (cross-browser layout, custom properties, more pseudoclasses, etc) the Web was more of a wild west "whatever you we can cobble together" place. So of course we built an entire toolchain ecosystem for all the cool new tools we would reinvent from scratch.

but Things Are Pretty Good these days. We even have the world's only fully system portable assembly language: WASM! And the browser's Web APIs are becoming something like the missing Standard Library (shoutout to Deno).

The author's point seems to be that we are past a tipping point where we need all that additional complexity. You don't _need_ a separate system of reactivity these days, you can write a (closer to pre-hooks React, even!) React-style component library with Web Components now.

Personally I would need for Type Annotations to be a fully supported part of the spec before I made the point to "use the platform" professionally. Until some market force causes the core web technologies to truly fork my skills are useful for life. It's like a pale shadow of how UNIX users must feel :')

Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.

Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)

There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off

and in today's world of constant supply-chain attacks, you do probably _do_ need it!

We've adapted: - our CI and git hooks so that our dependency or .lock files are visible when they change, and error if they change inconsistently - and our team procedures to confine dependency updates to dedicated commits

The idea being that when you see one of those "messy" .lock file changes...you were expecting it. If you see one and are annoyed by it (like OP) that's actually a waving red flag that a dependency changed.

Tabs vs spaces don't matter they are equivalent.

Just to nitpick (because what else is this thread about? :))

They aren't equivalent! Tabs carry more semantic information than spaces. 1 Tab character == 1 Level of nesting

Space-based systems _can_ provide the equivalent semantic information if they are 100% consistent.

...but part of the argument in favor of spaces is that they allow an escape hatch of the strict indentation in order to allow pleasing visual alignments.

Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.

if you type "I use Arch btw" you'll be unshadowbanned

Literally implemented PR guards today to prevent the team merging any dependencies that didn’t have explicit versions pinned (and that matched the resolution in the lock file).

People lamented semver not being trustable but that ship sailed a long time ago, and supply chain attacks are going to get worse before they get better.

Our team is pretty minimal when it comes to enforced hooks (everyone has their own workflow) but no one could come up with an objection to this one.

In theory this should be nirvana. No more vibe coding! Everyone is a power user. Zero dependencies. But there will be much weeping.

If I had to sum up the zeitgeist of the '90s techno-optimism it would be this persistent, confident prediction that once people just learned _how_ to use computers, and everyone is a power user everything will be fine! Despite the mounting evidence that actually, no, like everything else in reality the distribution of skill is a bell-curve with the median sitting uncomfortably low for those who, to quote OP, "lived on IRC or in the bash terminal".

Free universal education didn't fix this problem, LLMs won't fix this problem. Man's natural paucity is no longer in the availability or accessibility of knowledge. The liberal ideal that all we must do is empower the individual turns out to not have been the solution to everything forever.

But hey, being self-aware enough to make productive use of this new technology is probably _some_ kind of edge.

May as many as possible survive.

Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times.

Ah, I was wondering how this was different to xterm.js embedded in a page. It's just the performance angle? I've been teaching the kids programming from the terminal and I've been planning to make the jump from the terminal to a terminal in the browser as we hit graphical limitations (and as they want to be able to share their games). I'll take it for a spin.

(and if nothing else, I'm going to steal that ripple effect for them ;) )*

* obligatory https://xkcd.com/541/

Reading this thread I'm reassured that despite everything AI may disrupt, humans arguing past each other about philosophy of knowledge and epistemology on internet forums is safe :')

Seems like a pretty clear case of caveat emptor

I feel like I should say "spoiler alert" but:

I often wonder is "what will be the minimally viable LLM" that can work from just enough information that if it googles the rest it can provide reasonable answers?

It depends what that word "reasonable" means for your specific use-case ;)

Fantastic comedic writing (and project, of course). It had me guffawing.

To add my own "most relatable" quote to this thread:

As always, please save any important work before running anything I ever write.

:')

But really I just want to add to the cacophony of appreciation in this thread :)

0x0mer, I hope you feel the love from this reaction and can bask in that warm inner glow for years to come.

Excellent self-owning example:

You mean that dumb app that forced you to move files into a single folder instead of adapting to your workflow was prefect?

Users in 2012 were overwhelmingly of the cohort who's metaphor for doing work on a computer was the filesystem. You opened Files with Programs, worked on them, saved them. You wanted your latest Files on all your computers (1), and you wanted to Share them (2).

Unless users were on a system managed by a sysadmin there were only really two solutions for problems (1)&(2): you would Email the File (A), or you would copy it to a Floppy/CD/USB (B) and physically move it.

Note the caveat of "in absence of a sysadmin". So either on a school or corporate work environment, or if you happened to have a geek in your family/social group who did it as a passion project. Or y'know, if _you_ were the geek you could roll your own.

So of course when Dropbox was first introduced to a technical audience they didn't get it. See the infamous thread ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

While you're there, note the tag line in the title of the post "Throw away your USB key"

Now rereading your comment it is clearly an example of exactly what OP was referring to:

It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.

If Dropbox did not "adapt to your workflow", then just _don't use Dropbox_.

Instead you attack it as "dumb" and demand it change...and those users for whom Dropbox _was_ perfectly adapted don't have their solution anymore.

Software doesn't have to be forever changing and chasing user growth; it's not a zero-sum game. The bits don't care if no one uses them. But _people_ care if you take away their bits.

...we shouldn't normalize that, we should push for improvements

Agreed, you should create a new solution and put it out there! Just as suggested by the post you've replied to :)

Hi Garrett,

I love the project -- even if I agree with a lot of the critique in this thread. Critique that is very high quality, professional feedback that you should take as a very big compliment.

I think every Front End developer or designer dreams of this idea(+) at some point, but you're the madlad who actually did it. It feels like you've posted an implementation of everyone's baby and tugged at our heart-strings ;)

It's fantastic, keep going.

(+) a truly consistent design system that Just Works. See GEB for why not :(

... just to be a (hopefully helpful) pedant:

If you were going to do this for the slider approach you can arrange the labels to the `block-start` and `block-end` of the image and support non-RTL scripts/languages natively.

The flipping-between is a great hack -- as you said your eyes (really, brain) just do the work for you.

I learnt about it in Japan where proof-readers and editors would (or do) quickly lift a top page up and down to spot mistakes with kanji (pictographs). And sure enough, even from a page of dense script the dissonance of the error really does pop out at you.

I likewise tucked that little trick into my belt -- it comes in useful anytime you're trying to manually spot a pattern across complex data. This technique has the same "vibe" as FFTs to me: it's just neat feeling like you're getting computation from the universe for free.

Solar PV in a similar category: free electrons if you can arrange the magic rocks just right :)

Excellent summary of the implications of LLM agents.

Personally I'd like it if we could all skip to the _end_ of Asimov's universe and bubble along together, but it seems like we're in for the whole ride these days.

"It's just fancy autocomplete! You just set it up to look like a chat session and it's hallucinating a user to talk to"

"Can we make the hallucination use excel?"

"Yes, but --"

"Then what's the difference between it and any of our other workers?"

You mean by the site founded by RCE-native AI agents?

And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last decade, it’s the bitter lesson: when you have enough data and compute, learned representations usually beat carefully hand-tuned systems.

There are still holdouts!

Come back to me in a couple of decades when the trove of humanity's data has been pored over and drifted further out of sync with (verifiable) reality.

Hand-tuning is the only way to make progress when you've hit a domain's limits. Go deep and have fun.

the rich's strategy of owning nothing

I think you may be coming into this conversation with a different definition of "rich" than most people.

I'm curious why you seemingly discount school as a "tight community structure". In many communities it's one of the only options left.

I daresay the label of the community is irrelevant, what matters is some other aspect effective ones share - and of course, the child in question (:

That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.

We are at the point in the technology curve with AI where every day someone figures out something new to do with them, meaning users will take any chip they can get, and use it productively.

Sure, that's an assertion.

But (with just as many citations), mine would be:

This boom is absolutely, 100%, fueled by the combined factors of: 1) employees outsourcing the cognitive load of their jobs to models that are, impressively "close", but not quite _as_ good as a well-trained human.

ie, we're replacing google with a fun, but terribly energy-wasteful (and _very often_ factually wrong) "make up an answer" tech.

and 2), AI "app developers" who are having fun with the previously "impossible" (*cf. https://xkcd.com/1425/) APIs of multi-modal natural language, and "didn't sci-fi warn us about this?" simulations.

Neither of which are good for productivity, if we measure productivity as "improving circumstances for the mutual commonwealth of all life". Which is the goal.

* oh, I _did_ use a citation after all.

It is an interesting article, but _far_ too sure of itself in all the wrong areas.

It would be willfully ignorant to pretend that there's not an explosion of a novel and specific kind of stupidity

I 100% know what you mean, and largely agree, but you should check out the guidelines, specifically:

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

And like, the problem _is_ *bad*. A fun, on-going issue at work is trying to coordinate with a QA team who believe chatgpt can write css selectors for HTML elements that are not yet written.

That same QA team deeply care about the spirit of their work, and are motivated by, the _very_ relatable sentiment of, you DONT FUCKING BREAK USER SPACE.

Yeah, in the unbridled, chaotic, raging plasma that is our zeitgeist at the moment, I'm lucky enough to have people dedicating a significant portion of their life to trying to do quality assurance in the idiomatic, industry best-standard way. Blame the FUD, not my team.

I would put to you that the observation that they do not (yet) grok what, for lack of a more specific universally understood term we are calling, "AI" (or LLMs if you are Fancy. But of course none of these labels are quite right). People need time to observe, and learn. And people are busy with /* gestures around vaguely at everything /*.

So yes, we should acknowledge that long-winded trash PRs from AI are a new emergent problem, and yes, if we study the specific problem more closely we will almost certainly find ever more optimal approaches.

Writing off the issue as "stupidity" is mean. In both senses.

At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.

On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)

I did read the post, but allow me to also recommend rambling when you’re remote.

As in, take time in your day to wander and roam. (I would go for a ~1hr hike in the mornings as my “commute”)

It gives you a sense of distinction from being home or “at work”. The routine cardio, and musings you have while walking make it well worth it.

I have found that the old-fashioned “measure twice, cut once” approach is highly destructive. It was how I was trained, so walking away from it was scary.

To be fair it’s great advice when you’re dealing with atoms.

Mutable patterns of electrons, not so much (:

> ...if it's the sole feature its users would care about?

The tag-line covers it pretty well I thought?

"git-bug is a standalone, distributed, offline-first issue management tool that embeds issues, comments, and more as objects in a git repository (not files!), enabling you to push and pull them to one or more remotes."

That tells you what the feature is - if you need/want a more technical overview you can still get from the `README` to `entity data model` in two clicks (Documentation > Data model).

I took it as capital-L Life is moving from high to low. As evolution continues Life seems to evolve ever higher -> lower/more-ordered organisms (as more complex organisms depend on the systems created by simpler organisms prior to themselves).

I am slightly blending the concept of entropy and complexity. But "ordered complexity" is how I imagine it.