Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -
Yeah, it quickly becomes a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" thing between junior devs and LLMs.
I will say, if you use a Mistral model, and if you insist your CSS framework is Bulma (tell it, 'no tailwind', 'no preprocessor'), it does okay at staying away from Tailwind. (Not perfect, not great, but okay).
No LLM I've used can handle raw CSS well (yet). If you are carefully curating your own classes and styles, you might just be on your own for a bit.
> these bots really want to just barf out tailwind-style crap.
I get it. The LLMs struggle most with state. They don’t have a real fix for that yet. People generally compensate by shoving everything into context, and making the context window as large as possible, which half-works.
Tailwind happens to be “stateless” CSS framework. Nothing uses anything else, nothing is shared, nothing is reused, nothing stacks. It’s super easy to write, since you don’t have to worry about anything else, and the styles are all duplicated dynamically and ‘compiled’ — to the point you can copy-and-paste a HTML block with tailwindcss classes from anywhere into your site, and it mostly ‘works’).
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Tailwind is uniquely suited for LLM use, because the problem Tailwind solves is the problem juniors (and now, LLMs) struggle with most. An LLM can happily write up a bunch of styles, without knowing any of the rest of the project state, and if it’s tailwind, it will mostly sort-of work.
It just also happens to be bad practice, this style of development is the exact thing we told everyone not to do for two decades. (“Inline styles are bad! Duplicate styles everywhere is bad! It’s bloated, it’s inefficient. It’s the mark of inexperienced front end. Don’t inline styles. Unless it’s a tailwindcss class, you can inline those styles, they get a pass I guess”).
We used to measure our JS and CSS in kilobytes, by 2011 standards this would be “far too bloated for production use”. For the old-timers, it can be hard to grapple with the idea that we’re just purposefully doing ‘worse’ front-end intentionally now. The calculation changes when half your content/styles/front-end is LLM-generated, and therefore completely disposable. Very “they don’t make them like they used to” vibes.
> Importantly, I think AI companies are motivated towards the overengineered solutions as they increase the buyer's token spend.
Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’
Even ignoring token costs, there’s a high incentive for LLMs to generate complex solutions, because those solutions generate demand for further LLM use. (You don’t really want to review that 30,000 line pull request by hand, do you?)
When the economy got so bad for so many people, that every waking moment has to be either chasing fresh cash (or spent in recovery from cash-chasing, worrying about new cash), to the point they have to largely ignore their own long term goals or basic morals or principles.
You can blame all the new gadgets (phones/social media/tiktok/‘dopamine-things’) — but it’s a very much blaming the symptom, not the problem.
(It’s the meme. “Guys, this isn’t funny. Humans only do this when they’re very distressed”)
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
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The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
> Housing is too expensive because it's illegal to build enough of it.
A lot of us are in the US, where (except for SF and handful of specific cities) housing is legal to build practically everywhere, municipalities are handing out free money for any form of development, so people do build tons of new housing all over...
...and the prices still rise anyway.
80% of the buildings within a 1 mile radius of me did not exist at all 20 years ago. There's almost 5,000 new units around. Half of the new apartment buildings are only at like 70% utilization. We barely hit 1% population growth year-over-year.
Prices are at 40 year record high prices anyway (yes, even after factoring for inflation).
> I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
I get it. I agree with most of this article. But also like, nothing went away.
If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!)
If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix)
If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
Yeah, honestly, GDPR isn't perfect legislation, but it's pretty close. You could just copy-and-paste GDPR into the US and, with actual enforcement behind it, most of the egregious violations would be fixed pretty quickly.
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
(re: drive-thru) You're going to be waiting aorund in a really long queue for Starbucks regardless.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
> That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant
Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.
I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
> Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!
AMD kind of has, the "Max 395+" is (within 5% margin or so) pretty close to M4 Pro, on both performance and energy use. (it's in the 'Framework Desktop', for example, but not in their laptop lineup yet)
AMD/Intel hasn't surpassed Apple yet (there's no answer for the M4 Max / M3 Ultra, without exploding the energy use on the AMD/Intel side), but AMD does at least have a comparable and competitive offering.
> This is one of the examples of absence of empathy
Isn't this an example of an abundance of empathy? If the user has requested dark-mode, websites responding with their best version of a dark-mode experience is an example of user empathy in action.
I operate in dark-mode 24/7 myself, and I've been pleasantly surprised at websites slowly supporting a dark-mode experience and automatically showing that by default.
There should probably be a one-click "override dark/light mode on this site" button somewhere, so that you don't have to dig into your OS to change it back. But the defaults here seem like the most reasonable, most user-respecting thing that could possibly exist.
Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -
https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s...
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Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar grain' (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )