> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.
Especially as
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
and
> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
I believe a lot of this expectation is that as people replace Google searches with LLMs, or even enriched LLM results pushed at the top of Google results, far less click through to the actual sources happens.
This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.
The syntax of Prolog is basically a subset of the language of First Order Logic (sans quantifiers and function symbols), it doesn't get any more minimal than that. What's special in Prolog compared to imperative languages including functional languages is that variables aren't "assigned" but implicitly range over potential values until satisfying the context, like in math formulas for sets. Yes you can express that awkwardly with tons of type annotations and DSL conventions so that you never have to leave your favourite programming language. But then there's the problem of a Prolog "engine" doing quite a bit more than what could be reasonably assumed behind a synchronous library call, such as working with a compact solution space representation and/or value factoring, parallel execution environment, automatic value pruning and propagation, etc.
The integration of a Prolog backend into a mainstream stack is typically achieved via Prolog code generation (and also code generation via LLMs) or as a "service" on the Prolog side, considering Prolog also has excellent support for parsing DSLs or request/responses of any type; as in, you can implement a JSON parser in a single line of code actually.
As they say, if Prolog fits your application, it fits really well, like with planning, constraint solving, theorem proving, verification/combinatoric test case enumeration, pricing models, legal/strategic case differentiation, complex configuration and the like, the latter merely leveraging the modularity of logic clauses in composing complex programs using independent units.
So I don't know how much you've worked hands on with Prolog, but I think you actually managed to pick about one of the worst rather than best examples ;)
> A few decades ago XML emerged from the pit. XML [...] could be used for documents, data transfer, and a bunch of other things, and people genuinely liked it [...] They liked it so much that a concerted effort was started to take HTML and rebuild it on top of XML.
XML didn't "emerge" and was repurposed for HTML; it was designed for new vocabularies on the web. The first sentence of the XML spec reads:
> The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.
Any advance in JavaScript and outrageous browser complexity is cheered at here on HN, but waking up to the fact that their actual purpose is unskippable ads and browser monopolies is not so funny.
What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left, Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so there's hope left, isn't there?
> Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so
Those are all hardware upgrades that Apple profits from. What incentive does Apple have to make the App Store better, or improve the visual clarity in the iOS and macOS interface? Shouldn't we be seeing downward pressure there too, if innovation can be generalized to software?
Most users don't have a say in the matter, and Apple has exploited their ambivalence for decades. If you're the sort of person who cares, you're not Apple's target audience.
Worth noting you can't define special parsing rules using custom elements, such as for inferring omitted tags like is done for predefined elements all the time. The behavior of parsing HTML fragments with customized standard elements using the browser API is basically underspecified since it lacks a context element which however is needed for inferring required omitted elements such as <head> and <body>, or <html> itself. What about custom elements appearing as child content of other custom elements?
For merely defining custom elements you need JS anyway, so these aren't a technique intended for text authors. Yet as another way to organize code in webapps, custom elements are competing with JS which already has multiple module and namespace and OO import features that are much more flexible.
So as usual, random people on github (aka WHAT working group individuals aka Google shills) reinventing SGML, poorly. Because why not? The end goal always has been to make ad blocking an infeasible arms race and gather "telemetry."
Not sure the number is up from last year (I think there are fewer O/T talks this year even) but there are many talks that have nothing to do with hacking even if some of them might pigue my interest, such as the following:
Then there are topics merely having "computer" in them like everything in this day and age but aren't about hacking, and it's disappointing because I know for a fact other talks had to make room for these:
I think you're missing the ethos of the event in general, and the fact that you are pointing to tracks in the ethics track or the arts track in particular.
These days new uses are mostly for public interfaces (business-to-business services like orders/invoices), services in regulated markets (energy, telco, medical) and eGovernment (tax statements and other financial reporting eg based on ISO 20022), as opposed to internal microservices. Other than that, it's kind of a "boomer" thing in the sense that it was the wire format to choose around 2000 when most businesses went online, and it just prevailed. Same thing with EDIFACT which was established earlier and still rules logistics.
The actual point of using a markup language for service payloads that aren't intended to be read by humans in the SOAP times was just that you can simply style it up (using CSS or XSLT back then) without having to go all the way to bring a full frontend toolkit/JavaScript into the stack along with insular know-how for merely viewing messages when your primary backend language was eg. Java.
We can do better than "known for decades, on a layman's level" folklore and the answer actually isn't as straightforward ([1]). Recently there's even been discussion (by a Brit scientist I believe but I have no reference) on skin cancer vs more serious forms of cancer, and also about skin pigmentation playing a role here.
Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.
Especially as
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
and
> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
ie. data is lacking.
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