> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking
This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma.
Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to.
They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall.
Consumers then are left without the option to pay for an ad-free experience.
But ads are run on hardware the consumer owns, consuming their resources and harvesting personal information on the consumer, which is a security concern.
So even if they want to support content creators by viewing the ads they run, they need to also accept the security trade-off, which many reasonably do not
Just a note that many creators integrate the advertisement of their sponsors into their content presentation and not all of that can be stopped by ad blockers (most, in fact, can't). Those creators also tend to have a Patreon or similar so their content can be supported directly. And I'd wager that's a much better model for the creators than relying on ads they don't even select themselves and that possibly clash with their content. This also makes it much more clear to users that the creators directly benefit from those integrated ads, so those kinds of ads are probably much better tolerated.
Which btw doesn't work. Users have to first watch the video, identify "sponsor blocks" and then update the blocker's database. So between the Sponsorblock users who have to watch the video and the multitudes who don't even know it exists... Sponsorblock won't block many sponsors.
Yes it's crowd-sourced, so of course it's not perfect. Saying it doesn't work isn't true though, and as more people get onboard, improves. I don't think it's the final solution, but it helps right now.
40-50% of people are ad-blocking some rather beloved content creators. That means, not paying for premium, and not viewing ads.
Ok, so maybe they are suscribing to patreon? Maybe Nebula?
Well those two have conversion rates around (on a good day) 1%.
You can swim in the waters of cognitive dissonance because ads really do suck and ad block is a great way to stop the pain while still getting what you want.
Understand though, the statistics are so damning against the ad-block crowd, that you come off like the people screeching about human generated CO2 being totally fine for the environment (It helps plants grow!) because they cannot imagine having to give up commuting in their diesel monster pick-up truck everyday. (Ad block does no damage because I cannot imagine having to see ads...)
As an aside, ironically, security nightmare ads are really only served to people with tracking blockers, because those people are the lowest value visitors and only scammers/bottom feeders really bid on their views. Regular tech illiterate people get ads for Tide and Toyota. The more you know.
I do want styles tightly coupled to my React components. The product I work on has tens of thousands of React components.
I don't want to have to update some random CSS file to change one component's appearance. I've had to do this before and every time its a huge pain to not affect dozens of random other components. Other engineers encounter the same challenge and write poor CSS to deal with it. This compounds over time and becomes a huge mess.
Having a robust design system that enables the composition of complicated UIs without the need for much customization is the way.
Front end development got taken over by the Enterprise Java camp at some point, so now there is no html and css. There’s 10,000 components, and thus nothing that can be styled in a cascading way.
All these arguments are just disconnects between that camp and the oldskool that still writes at least some html by hand.
When I get sucked into react land for a gig, it starts making sense to just tell this particular div tag to have 2px of padding because the piece of code I’m typing is the only thing that’s ever going to emit it.
Then I go back to my own stuff and lean on css to style my handful of reusable pieces.
Those technologies don't just solve tech issues, they solve organizational issues. If one or two people manage a website, going without fancy tooling is completely fine. When 1000 people are managing a product with complex business logic across multiple platforms, you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.
> you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.
If you have a thousand people working on a single product, yes, but you also have the resources to have dedicated tool support teams at that level. In my experience, if you’re under multiple dozens of developers or not everyone works on all of your projects, the tools fragment because people aren’t combining or configuring them the same way and there’s enough churn in the front-end tool space that you’ll hit various compatibility issues which lower the effectiveness of sharing across projects. This is especially true if you’ve hired people who self-identify as, say, Next or Tailwind developers rather than web developers and lack the understanding of the underlying technology to fix complex problems.
> build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images
Build pipelines are purely a technical decision. Bundlers are purely a technical decision (TBH, a non-brainer if you decide to have a build pipeline, but it's not an organizational helper). Those help one do some things, not several people to organize.
I'm still waiting for any person to claim they made CSS maintainable by adopting a framework. It's an almost purely organizational decision with no upsides at all.
PWAs are a product decision, not technical or organizational. The same applies to Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts and srcset, those are all product decisions.
You can escape the technical and organizational decisions. You can't escape the product ones.
This is why web development stopped being fun: developers that cannot manage or train people and instead hope garbage like jQuery will simply act as a surrogate parent.
> No one ever forced any company to work with China.
"Forced" is a strong word here, but company's do need to compete or die. If your competitors are manufacturing in China and selling widgets at a price less than what an American factory can produce them for, what choices do they realistically have?
To expect merchants to get together and act according to some greater good is a pipe dream. Government should have stepped in and prevented the offshoring of American industry through policy
Yes, such are capitalism’s incentives, I’m afraid.
But this could have been managed. FDR managed it, other governments somewhat managed it with policy in times of war, like WW2.
The US had the technology edge for DECADES. More industrialization would lead to more inovation and more jobs. They could invest in factories and the like, and even marketing, since “american made” has always been a fine talking point for companies. But it was cheaper in the short term to ship it to China and just not care about the future.
The governments didn’t care, the companies (owners, shareholders) certainly didn’t care, and as a result, decades later, they’re stuck with fascism. Which I don’t think they care about either.
If services offered a paid version that guaranteed privacy, such that I stay anonymous and only data points that are strictly necessary to provide the service are persisted in the company's servers, I would happily pay.
And I mean guaranteed in a way that I would have legal recourse against the company if they go back on their word or screw up
Baiting people with "no cost" services, and then using their data in ways that people might not agree with, hiding behind 10 subpages to click through or a huge "how we protect your data (NOT)" text is no solution though.
What would be a solution, but one that the companies don't want, is to offer a service either as a paid service or truly at no cost which includes no privacy cost. But they are afraid of doing that, because they fear that then they can't hitch the ride on data taken from users, who are not informed and who only clicked some accept button, because the business kept nagging them about it, instead of accepting a "no".
I have to admit though, that Google did better than most other big techs, as they do provide a consent dialog, where rejecting is as easy as accepting. See for example YouTube. And not sure about Google search, since I don't use it these days. However, I did not research (and that's how one would have to call it), whether rejecting is truly adhered to, or they sneak in not actually needed things as "functional cookies" or something.
However, lets not have any illusions here. If the EU didn't demand things to improve and didn't impose fines, big tech would have done exactly nothing of the sort.
What specific legal recourse beyond what exists? You can already sue for breach of contract if a company violates their privacy policy. The real problems are: (1) detecting violations in the first place, and (2) proving/quantifying damages. A 'guarantee' doesn't solve either.
Of course you could also argue that human intention comes from largely deterministic processes emerging from the brain. That may eventually perhaps lead to all figures of speech involving things like intentionality meaningless.
This type of response is just stochastic parrotry, rather than displaying evidence of actual <whatever cognitive trait we're overconfidently insisting LLMs don't have>.
Yet more evidence that LLMs are more similar to humans than we give them credit for.
Never stops fascinating me how folks are arguing this kind of thing. Why make up an explanation for why this obvious mistake is actually some kind of elaborate 4D chess sarcastic "intention"? It's a simple machine, its network just didn't support making up a new Toy Story character. That's it! Simple as that! Occam's Razor anybody?
Or yes, maybe the regex I wrote the other day which also had a bug that missed replacing certain parts also had an "intention". It just wanted to demonstrate how fallible I am as a human, so it played this elaborate prank on me. /s
...Because Occam's razor is not assuming it's a "mistake"?
There's a thread full of people saying how clever humorous they find almost every headline.
The real 4D chess is dogmatically assuming it is not assuming it managed to by pure accident succeed in that dozens of separate times, because your dogma refuses to incorporate evidence to the contrary.
Occam's razor is that this system which no one actually understands the emergent capabilities of, and is convincing so many people it has intention... has intention.
There are still a lot of Toy Story characters to come by, and it doesn't seem the franchise is about to end, as long as they keep a reasonable release cycle, Debian is safe ;)
I'm kind of curious how many there are left and how long they'd last. Also, how far are they already picked and what would be the absolute last resort choices.
Someone must have done the math. (Actual plans would actually probably be up somewhere as well, given Debian orgs nature.)
I exclusively use the autocomplete in cursor. I hate reviewing huge chunks of llm code at one time. With the autocomplete, I’m in full control of the larger design and am able to quickly review each piece of llm code. Very often it generates what I was going to type myself.
Anything that involves math or complicated conditions I take extra time on.
I feel I’m getting code written 2 to 3 times faster this way while maintaining high quality and confidence
This is my preferred way as well. And when you think about it, it makes sense. With advanced autocomplete you are:
1. Keeping the context very small
2. Keeping the scope of the output very small
With the added benefit of keeping you in the flow state (and in my experience making it more enjoyable).
To anyone that even hates LLMs give autocomplete a shot (with a keying to toggle it if it annoys you, sometimes it’s awful). It’s really no different than typing it manually wrt quality etc, so the speed up isn’t huge, but it feels a lot nicer.
Maybe it subjectively feels like 2-3x faster but in studies that measure it we tend to see smaller improvements like in the range of 20-30% faster. It could be that you are an outlier, of course.
2-3x faster on getting the code written. Fully completing a coding task maybe only 20-30% faster, if we count chasing down requirements, reviews, waiting for CI to pass so I can merge etc.
Before LLMs I used whatever autocomplete tech came with VSCode and the plugins I used. Now with Cursor a lot of what the autocomplete did is replaced with LLM output, at much greater cost. Counting this in the "LLM generated" statistic is misleading at best, and I'm sure it's being counted
I don't think that is what the original commenter was getting at. In your case, the company is actively choosing to make changes. Whether its for a good reason, or leads to a good outcome, is beside the point.
LLMs being inherently non-deterministic means using this technology as the foundation of your UI will mean your UI is also non-deterministic. The changes that stem from that are NOT from any active participation of the authors/providers.
This opens a can of worms where there will always be a potential for the LLM to spit out extremely undesirable changes without anyone knowing. Maybe your bank app one day doesn't let you access your money. This is a danger inherent and fundamental to LLMs.
Right I get tha. The point I’m making is that from a users perspective it’s functionally very similar. A non deterministic llm or a non deterministic company full of designers and engineers.
Bank tellers are deterministic though. They have a set protocol for each cases and escalate unknown cases to a more deterministic point of contact.
It will be difficult to incorporate relative access or restrictions to features with respect to users current/known state or actions. Might as well write the entire web app at that point.
I think the bank teller's systems and processes are deterministic, but the teller itself is not. They could even rob the bank, if they wanted to. They could shoot the customers. They don't, generally, but they can.
I think, if we can efficiently capture a way to "make" LLMs conform to a set of processes, you can cut out the app and just let the LLM do it. I don't think this makes any sense for maybe the next decade, but perhaps at some point it will. And, in such time, software engineering will no longer exist.
This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma.
Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to.
They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall.
Consumers then are left without the option to pay for an ad-free experience.
But ads are run on hardware the consumer owns, consuming their resources and harvesting personal information on the consumer, which is a security concern.
So even if they want to support content creators by viewing the ads they run, they need to also accept the security trade-off, which many reasonably do not