What?

Your other posts have capital letters for technical abbreviations and "Sparkfun", but not for "I" and the first letter of sentences.

Sorry, from a bystander this looks like a straight-up lie, and why lie about such a small thing? It brings into question the truth of your other statements. Just say you like the style if that's the truth.

some are already words/abbreivations that are in my word list and some are me typing over later when i can, and some is a cut/paste if limor has something for me to add or does an edit as she looks at things. you can see my writings on the adafruit blog have caps, commenting on forums or hackersnews quickly, there will be some things someone does not like. we were at the doc with our 2 month old during this ... https://x.com/ptorrone/status/2011509017814659095

Congrats! It's insane to me that you'd have to defend any of this. I hope the visit went well.

> FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables

Wait, what? Where's the sense in that?

I think just an oversight—disposables weren't really around at the time the time that the ban happened. 2019, people were mostly smoking Juul and having those crazy custom rigs that they fill with the juice. Disposables really started to take off around 2021 - 2022. Atleast that's what I saw with people around me in NY and California.

Yeah, in my state, with disposable I can get any flavor. But if I want juice or pods, I can only get nasty tobacco flavor. It's an easy choice.

Also, when you do get juice online or from other states, it doesn't hit as hard / the same as whatever they put in the disposables. Someone told me it's because the disposables have vitamin E acetate in them that makes the nicotine get absorbed into your blood quicker.

I think the disposables go around more regulations, which mean the chinese manufacturers can put more addictive stuff in the pods / disposables.

Putting vitamin E acetate into vape liquid appears to be extremely hazardous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...

If true I wonder if that has to do with this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...

It isn't. That was illegal marijuana vapes.

The FDA just hates flavored nicotine products because they're appealing (to both adults and children), and the FDA doesn't want nicotine products to be appealing (because nicotine is perceived to be a public health problem on the scale of tobacco).

Weed disposables are a whole rabbit hole by themselves.

You want to buy a disposable? Ok, here, $20 and you're done.

But if you want to make the oil at home? Ok, $2000 for lights, timers, nutrients, seeds, and a grow tent. Plus another ~$10,000 for a basic short path distillation setup. And honestly to make anything close to what you get in the disposables, you'll need to hire an expert with experience. And you need a lot of space for your new secret lab. For 99.999% of people, it's super not worth it to make at home.

Your home grow prices are high (even setting aside that you can just buy flower instead of the disposable vape). The right range is hundreds of dollars. And I'm sure making good oil costs somewhat more, but you can make crappy dab sludge (wax?) with some scissors, $10 of isopropyl alcohol, and a baking dish ("QWISO"), and that sludge can be loaded in some kinds of reusable vape.

Im talking about making full melt distillate. Crappy dab sludge can't go in a cart. It requires actual distillation to make what they put in the carts. QWISO is a joke.

I promise you, if it was easy, you would see more people making carts. I tried C02, water wash, sifting, heat press, everything you can think of. Its nowhere near the same. And that's just for the bare minimum distillate. We're not even talking about live resin or anything fancy.

You basically need a small factory to get close to the quality of the carts.

And my home grow prices are low. You cant just grow 2 or 4 plants if you want even a small steady supply of full melt wax. Like, 20 plants minimum is more close. And they have to be good. Living soil, aeroponic, whatever you want.

And that's if you can get actually good yield. I've seen people get such bad yield that they turn 1 pound of flower into less than 3 grams of wax. That's why you need an expert. Even putting together a successful distillation operation is no joke. Besides chemistry knowledge, you need lots of "industrial equipment" knowledge. We're not talking about using a heat press or a curling iron to make "dabs". We're talking about making the real shit.

To be honest 10k is in the range of the cheapest alibaba eqipment. Most commercial outfits, even smaller ones, use much more expensive equipment.

This is why people prefer to just buy it from the store for $20.

I'm kind of in favor of non-persecution OTC at a pharmacy nicotine patches.

I hate anything added to the air. Even perfumes irritate and make me sneeze in high quantity.

Tangential, but: MainStage the best deal in the entire pro audio industry.

As a keyboard player who mainly plays (and owns) classic electro-mechanical keyboards like Hammonds, Rhodes, Clavinets, and Wurlitzers, Apple's emulators that they brought from Logic are really top-notch - often better than what you get with dedicated hardware.

$30 is an insane price for what it delivers. I just wish it were available for iPad, and I'd use it more for gigging.

I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.

Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.

We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.

In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.

This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.

"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"

Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.

At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.

These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.

Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.

No, I think my stance is pretty clear.

If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.

Your stance isn't clear at all. Do you have any specifics?

Out of respect for your effort to keep it civil, I'll answer some of that:

I'm a liberal as defined up until 2012 or so.

Never been socially conservative at all. I'm not a libertarian, as I do support some social safety nets. That being the case, I am strongly against open borders and unchecked fraud.

You're actually right about a lot of the rest (minus the snark.)

Hell yeah I love being right. Thank you for being civil in response.

Also I was not implying that you are a libertarian, I don’t think that there are many true libertarians. I have just met so many fiscal conservatives who consider themselves to be libertarians and use it as an identifier because they feel libertarians are more intellectually respected than conservatives (which is very funny imo)

Sure. People only lost their jobs and what not ( which in US means.. well, slow, and without health insurance, likely unpleasant demise ). Totally different. On this very forum, I had someone tell me in a very subtle way that it is a good idea that I stay quiet if I know what is good to me. But pendulum swings. It always does. Only difference is,we are forcing people to live up to the world they have ushered in. I hope you said thank you, because wokeness got you to this very spot.

On the one hand ~1,000,000 deaths and on the other hand some people lost their jobs and you got a mean comment online?

> lost their jobs ... which in US means ... slow, and without health insurance, likely unpleasant demise

Those you would label "woke" are famously supporters of universal health care. Universal as in would cover everyone including every single Jan 6 participant. On the one hand people striving for health care for all. On the other hand https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/20/hospitals-s...

> we are forcing people to live up to the world they have ushered in

No, wht you are doing is supporting an administration killing ~1,000,000 people and taking away health care from everyone, including people in the group you identify with.

> denying said universal healthcare to republicans

How many do you claim hold that view? Can you cite some prominent examples? I want health care for all, including you.

> hyperbole

I posted https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."

and asked for data on the original "balancing out claim". You jumped in with mumblings of some unspecified number of lost jobs and vague claims about said job losers demise and then one mean online comment to you. That's where we're at, that's the tally based on the data you provided.

<<I posted

You posted a blog of some organization unhappy about the cuts. Not exactly a gold standard for unbiased opinions. YOu want to convince me? Do your own calculations. Show me your work. Show that you can think critically. Am I not seeing that now.

<< You jumped in with mumblings of some unspecified number of lost jobs and vague claims about said job losers demise and then one mean online comment to you.

So ... you can understand my perspective, but choose to minimize it. I guess its ok. At least you are honest about effectively saying 'anyone who complains about it is a loser'. I will admit that it does not sound like the best way to win hearts and minds, but what do I know.

I would like to say that you have achieved nothing by not convincing me, but you did manage to do something remarkable. You actually motivated me to vote for a republican this election cycle. I suppose I am no longer center.

You suppose

Agree with this. I didn’t agree with it in the past, but I can see now that it has caused the issue you raise. I don’t know if this is a great insight, but one reason I think people have not connected the results (Stephen Millers in the White House) back to the action (not speaking ill of the dead) is because THEY are not the ones affected. When Stephen Miller is in the White House, it’s all the non white people - including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens and citizens born here - that are living in fear of where the administration will go. I doubt others are aware that there is this fear, or even that the DHS’s official account tweets out threats to deport a third of the country.

The thinking is that not "speaking ill of the dead" is not just respect, but doing anything else is pointless.

You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.

They didn't, though. Plenty of people who had one reputation at their death have had that reputation change over time, especially with more information and awareness of what they did. Sometimes their reputations improve, sometimes they decline.

Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.

Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.

Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.

> Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.

It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.

I'm not saying it's right to not "speak ill of the dead". Just that that's the reasoning I've seen in my family.

I was not weighing in on whether one should or shouldn't speak ill of the dead, only trying to answer:

> Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.

Adams stated he was racist and thought that was aok.

I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.

For anyone else reading this comment, know that it is a blatant lie. I suggest you look into it for yourself.

The mendacious speaking that Scott Adams did of the living was a hell of a lot worse that speaking factually about him after he died.

The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them

>The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them

I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise.

We can't "do" anything for the dead. They're dead. What's more, since they're dead they don't care what we do or say because they're, you know, dead.

Anything we might do or say in reference to dead folks is for the benefit of the living and has nothing to do with the dead.

That said, you're absolutely right. We should remember folks for who they were -- warts and all -- to give the living perspective both on the dead and the dead past.

Respect is earned by your actions and deeds, not by your death.

When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.

Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.

So, no need to speak of them at all

>We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again,

We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.

I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.

The difference is Orson Scott Card only seemed to have been called out for being a bog-standard Mormon, at least as far as I know.

One good reason to avoid it is because you're probably wrong.

Wrong about what?

Are you saying that Scott Adams was right and, say, white people _should_ avoid black people? Or are you saying that we shouldn't remember how awful people were once they die?

What exactly was the bad stuff? He was insensitive about empirical reality or he was literally wrong about something in the sense of being very confident about something despite having little data? Or something else? I only remember the cartons really but was aware some people seemed to be irked about him recently.

Some random internet poll said many people of race A agreed it was "not OK" to be a person of race B. Adams said if that were true, then people of race B should probably not hang out with people of race A that thought it was not OK to be race B. The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context, and tried to cancel him. He dug in his heels and doubled down. He also liked a certain president that many dislike. And here we are.

> The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context

Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:

"I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."

>Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:

you quote, but you did not include the context, so your attempt not to be out of context is a fail.

Did you support Scott Adams when he called out bigotry? Why / why not?

I was directly responding and replying to jchallis, but a mod detached my comment from its parent and now it makes less sense without the proper context. Great job.

The moderation on this site is really such garbage. Filled with all kinds of weird and subtle manipulation, almost never openly acknowledged and they are more than happy to gaslight you when you confront them about it.

Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before?

I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.

I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.

> Is "calling out the bigotry" useful?

There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.

Making the bigotry known is helpful, because while it might not cause a reduction, it is valuable information for all members of society.

Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.

In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.

It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.

I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.

I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.

How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.

And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.

> I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.

Don't be so hard on your friends, let them be offended if they want.

I think this is a question of who you're talking to, and is something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.

And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)

In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.

On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.

I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.

---

That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.

People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.

Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!

If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.

Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.

I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.

Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."

And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.

Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.

But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.

By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out.

I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.

I think there's a big difference between the following:

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship

I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".

Is it fine to pirate such works, then?

I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.

We can hold people today to modern standards.

You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.

I can agree with this when it comes to actual violent actions, but not with regard to words or thoughts.

First of all, I think we can definitely say that certain words are bad. if somebody is saying that they want to have sex with a child, we can tell them this is something bad and that we don't agree with this.

And pretty much all countries in the world limit what we can say. You're not allowed in the US to, for example, threaten the US president with murder, even if it's just words.

Laws are words

Laws consist of words, but making a law is something different than just saying something. It is an act, and indeed American laws are often (or always?) called Acts.

In any period of history, there are people who know things are wrong and are vocal about it. There are artists prior to the Civil Rights Era that were not bigots. The problem you have is the artists that were celebrated AT THAT TIME which we know about were also those accepted by the status quo which allowed them to be known.

People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.

People also "knew" that being gay was wrong, being atheist was wrong, universal suffrage was wrong or consuming marijuana was wrong.

This isn't a reliable method of determining morality.

Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.

What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.

FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.

Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.

Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.

edit: spelling

"What's wrong with this tho?"

The thing that is wrong about it is that the purity spiral may get out of control and result in wholesale purging of art, Iconoclast-style (or perhaps Cultural Revolution-style).

I don't trust people with an instinct to purge history. They rarely know when to stop.

Plus, standards change a lot. Picasso had a teenage mistress. It wasn't as scandalous back then. Should we really be so arrogant as to push our current standards on the entire humanity that once was? If yes, we will be obliterated by the next generation that applies the same logic to us, only with a different set of taboos.

"Acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better" and purging art and history are different things. The comment you replied to above did not call for a purging of Adams' work or life from history.

It seems to me that, even here in this discussion, people call for avoiding work of such authors. Would that entail, say, pressure on galleries not to show such art? If so, that is more than half way to a purge.

People often like to conflate criticism and personal choice with censorship, but they're not the same.

We're allowed to avoid consuming the work of artists we think are horrible humans. We're allowed to encourage others to do that too even. None of that is purging or censorship.

That's not purging at all, words have meaning. If you grep my comment you might be encountering a massive bug if you found the word purge.

You can still stream all of Crystal Castles songs on every platform, you can still buy their music, their albums still have hundreds of seeders on trackers. Just as I'm sure you can buy your Dilbert books.

Telling people to maybe look up to better humans, which it needs to be stated have always existed and aren't a modern invention, should be encouraged.

One of the other threads in here an OP states that we should use this moment to reflect and do better in our own lives, what is wrong with this viewpoint?

We've seen countless examples of people getting sucked into social media holes and I've yet to encounter a single case where this has ever led to healthy outcomes.

Personally avoiding consumption and calling for a purge from history are not equivalent.

Even calling for a boycott or lack of commercialization of something is not purging from history.

The purity spiral on the other side is already batshit. "If you support that we're going to say you're bad and not buy your work" is quite a way from widespread physical and media violence.

Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.

He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.

The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.

"His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority."

Isn't this rather common in artists? Bono of U2 comes to mind as a very pronounced example.

The problem with being a well-known artist is that you have way too many sycophants. Imagine getting dozens of ChatGPT-like fawning messages every day, but from real people, and not just over e-mail, but whenever you stray out of your house and someone recognizes you.

That will mess with self-image of almost everyone except the most stoic personalities.

Why is it so difficult to separate the work from its creator?

Without the creator no work. Can i like the work and hate the creator? Absolutely.

Personally I think this (admittedly long) video makes a good agument on the subject.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5EpzGmAtA&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...

My TL;DR Choosing not to financially support a creator for ethical seasons makes sense as an ethical stance. But that doesn't mean the media we like needs to always reflect our values.

In the modern era it's usually said because the dead person cannot defend himself.

Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).

But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.

When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.

We've done this with our kid(s). Saying "you're being bad" or "you are bad" is very different from "You're choosing to do bad things."

No. Disbelief has always been around. That there is no Church of Disbelief is a feature not a bug. Not speaking ill of the dead has a range of connotations, probably most prominent being avoiding easy targets that can't defend themselves. Want to show righteousness and strength of conviction? Then try a live target. There are many.

Interesting to see the difference in opinion on "AI-first".

I'm working on what might be called an "AI-first" programming language too, but for syntax I'm focusing on familiarity. Both because I presume LLMs will have an easier time generating familiar code, and because humans will have an easier time reviewing it.

Syntax is only a small portion of being AI friendly though, IMO. A huge part of my own effort is safety and compile-time feedback: a sound static type system, sandboxed execution, strong immutable patterns, linting, and advanced type system features like ADTs, distinct types, extension types, units of measure, etc.

My god, how is this flagged? It's extremely relevant to Hacker News.

Are you surprised that HN users are fine with their big tech overlords?

I just clicked here to certify this would have been flagged. HN does not disappoint.

The only thing I like more than this confirmation are those posts you see sometimes of people smelling their own farts talking about how HN is oh so special because someone posted a reply that happens to be well thought out because they are competent in some narrow technical subject.

The best thing to do right now is politely email hn@ycombinator.com to bring the mistake to their attention. I’ve worked with them in the past, and I’m confident they’ll unflag it.

Whether they unflag it, the community still flagged it.

Any forum is only good as the community that posts there.

Most communities tend to only be as good as their worst members.

This is a very interesting community. It could be that some just flag politics, I'm sure there could be analytics on the flags by user to help filter out the hysterical lightweights and the 4chan adjacents. I personally would like to follow the flagged posts first then the rest lol I do understand some posts need to go though and the flagging feature is still probably useful.

Disastrous response from the hacker ethic group.

I guess it’s like how the hippies were mostly bought out by the 80’s - what was that saying from SLC Punk, “I didn’t sell out, I bought in”?

Ethics? Gruber spent the past decade applauding every Apple mistake; the App Store monopoly, client side scanning, even Liquid Glass.

We didn't get bought out, Daring Fireball did. I have genuinely zero interest in watching him document the fact that Apple's monopoly ignores his demands. The true "hacker ethic group" recognized this decades ago, and stopped supporting Apple long before their ideology synchronized with pedophiles.

It is possible - and even so happens - that from time to time, even a person with whom you vehemently disagree with most things is right about something. As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

You're about to find out just how unethical an App Store monopoly can get.

I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead.

The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.

Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.

I really don’t understand this idea that seems to be prevalent to let the LLM generate everything from scratch instead of using existing battle tested frameworks. Be it for css or backend code.

Good modular design of software and separation of concern are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will remain smaller, reducing the context for both llm and human.

CSS simply doesn't need a framework - there's no "from scratch". For humans or LLM authors.

Tailwind is a lot of overhead conceptually and tooling wise to just not have to write classnames, and it's actually anti-modular.

That's not the full picture.

If you're a senior CSS developer you will invariably reach a point of using "object oriented CSS" which is where you combine classes to an effect.

At that point you're not far off Tailwind. TW just took it all the way.

Can you explain? Tailwind massively reduces overhead for abstraction, classing, documentation, and maintenance.

AFAICT, Tailwind is largely (not entirely) a different, shorter syntax for writing inline styles. (E.g., "class: 'bg-white'" = "style: 'background-color: white'".)

If you've rejected structural CSS to begin with, I sort of get the point that it saves a lot of typing; otherwise I don't see how it helps all that much over SASS or just modern plain CSS.

Tailwind is a dirty hack, normally you are supposed to declare a class, which you apply to items of the same concept. This is the cause for CSS to exist.

Front devs got lazy, and started writing for each element, position: absolute; left:3px, top:6px, color:red;...

You could write <font color="red">Hello</font> this would be similar "cleanliness"

Can’t wait for Headwind CSS implemented as custom elements.

Supply chain risk is real. Granted in CSS it’s probably less of a concern than in code, but it cannot be denied. LLMs make the proposition of supply chain reduction not irrational at the very least.

I’ve had zero problems getting Claude to generate CSS.

I generally ask for the following, from scratch for each project:

- A theme file full of variables (if you squint this actually looks a bit like Tailwind)

- A file containing global styles, mostly semantic, rather than just piles of classes

- Specific, per component styles (I often use Svelte so this is easy as they live in the component files and are automatically scoped to the component)

IMO there’s even less need for Tailwind with AI than there was before.

When I see people talking about how good AI is with Tailwind it just feels like they’re lazily copying each other without even trying to avoid unnecessary complexity.

Totally agree with this, and I think it's what will likely happen. IMO Tailwind got to the point where you are adding dozens of classes to the tag and it gets a little unwieldy. There are some options to get around it but if AI just does't need it it's even better.

There's nothing stopping you from requesting the AI write bare CSS. They're pretty decent at that too. And feed back screencaps, ask it to fix anything that's wrong, and five iterations later you have what you want. Just like a developer.

Bonus point: It'll appreciate one of those "CSS is awesome" mugs, too.

I'm not a fan of Tailwind, but I can see that it's probably reasonable for code gen to be able to write / extend projects that use Tailwind, since it's in pretty widespread use. For a new project, maybe it could ask if you want to use Tailwind or just keep things vanilla?

Tailwind is almost too simple to bother using an LLM for. There’s no reason to introduce high-level abstractions (your “real” CSS, I imagine) that make the code more complicated, unless you have some clever methodology.

I don't really like Tailwind, but it's a really good fit for LLM tools because there's basically no context needed like you get with normal CSS inheritance, etc. What you see is what you get.

AI is great at any styling solution via system prompt + established patterns in codebase. Tailwind is just slightly more convenient since it's consistent and very popular.

You could prompt the LLM to define styling using inline `style` attributes; and then, once you've got a page that looks good, prompt it to go back and factor those out into a stylesheet with semantic styles, trading the style attributes for sets of class attributes.

Or you could tell the LLM that while prototyping, it should define the CSS "just in time" before/after each part of the HTML, by generating inline <script>s that embed CSS stanzas as string literals, and which immediately inject those into the document using CSSStyleSheet.insertRule(). (This can, again, be cleaned up afterward.)

Or, you can keep your CSS and your HTML separate, but also keep an internal documentation file (a "style guide") that describes how and when to use the CSS classes defined in the stylesheet. This is your in-context equivalent to the knowledge the LLM already has burned-in from training on the Tailwind docs site. Then, in your coding agent's instructions, you can tell it that when writing HTML, it should refer to the "style guide", rather than trying to reverse-engineer the usage of the styles from their implementation in CSS.

The problem is training data. How many modern web sites use raw CSS?

Enough that in my experience Claude is great at it and there’s even less justification for Tailwind if you’re using AI.

Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design mistake and it shows even more in this particular case.

With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.

I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I personally know of works that way anymore.

Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.

If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.

> Just about everyone uses component-specific styles

Yeah.

At which point you can simply use e.g Tailwind.

What component-specific styles look like:

class="menu-item"

Styles-in-HTML (Tailwind):

class="m-4 mb-2 p-2 border border-radius-sm border gray-200 hover:border-gray-300 font-sm sm:font-xs [...]"

You can be completely insensitive to or unbothered by the difference, but that doesn't mean they're equivalent.

I'm not saying they're equivalent. I'm saying that the latter is better, especially in the context of reviewing LLM output.

With the former, I need to cross-reference two different stacks (HTML and CSS) and construct a mental model every time I move between components. With the latter, I can simply look at one output (HTML) and move on with my life, knowing that the chances of conflicts/issues/etc are fairly limited.

You guys are advocating for keeping the semantic separation that we originally aimed for with HTML/CSS, but in an LLM world this is yet another distinction that probably "does not matter".

No, because many components have internals that need to be styled consistently with parts of other components.

With plain CSS components can easily share styles and use them by adding the correct class name to elements.

With Tailwind you have to copy your list of super fine-grained classes to each component, and try to keep them in sync over time

If you're arguing down that route, LLMs can bulk-apply style attributes exactly where they're needed. Every element precisely described, no need for CSS and style-sheets at all.

And then you'd wind up with a needlessly noisy approach, and then you will reach for Tailwind to do basically the same thing but in a more terse manner. ;P

I maintain some very highly used npm package and this situation just has me on edge. In our last release of dozens of packages, I was manually reading though our package-lock and package.json changes and reviewing every dependency change. Luckily our core libraries have no external dependencies, but our tooling has a ton.

We were left with a tough choice of moving to Trusted Publishers or allowing a few team members to publish locally with 2FA. We decided on Trusted Publishers because we've had an automated process with review steps for years, but we understand there's still a chance of a hack, so we're just extremely cautious with any PRs right now. Turning on Trusted Publishers was a huge pain with so many package.

The real thing we want for publishing is for us is to be able to continue to use our CI-based publishing setup, with Trusted Publishers, but with a human-in-the-loop 2FA step.

But that's only part of a complete solution. HITL is only guaranteed to slow down malicious code propagating. It doesn't actually protect our project against compromised dependencies, and doesn't really help prevent us from spreading it. All of that is still a manual responsibility of the humans. We need tools to lock down and analyze our dependencies better, and tools to analyze our our packages before publishing. I also want better tools for analyzing and sandboxing 3rd party PRs before running CI. Right now we have HITL there, but we have to manually investigate each PR before running tests.

> Does no one at Google know RISC-V?

These are not current Googlers.