The point is that if he truly felt strongly about the subject then he wouldn't live the hypocrisy. Google has poured a truly staggering amount of money into AI data centers and AI development, and their stock (from which Rob Pike directly profits) has nearly doubled in the past 6 months due to the AI hype. Complaining on bsky doesn't do anything to help the planet or protect intellectual property rights. It really doesn't.
Yeah, it's typically a shell built-in since you'd want cd to change the cwd for the shell process itself. Child processes (like commands being executed in the shell) can inherit the parent shell's cwd but AFAIK the opposite isn't true.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.
In fact, the intent here is exactly the opposite of what you're hoping for (less AI badgering). They're trying to get people to actually use Copilot after recently missing internal adoption goals on all the AI products they're trying to shove down people's throats. The badgering is only going to get worse, and they're going to continue removing functioning, free features to do so. You should not be glad that Microsoft is killing a free lightweight product for a bloated, ecologically harmful and economically wasteful one.
IntelliCode has 60M downloads and is the 11th most downloaded extension for all of VS Code. Also consider that there's 6 official Python-related extensions above it that could all be rolled into one, and Copilot just above it which (to my knowledge) is installed by default in newer versions of VS Code.
Just because it doesn't affect you personally doesn't mean it affects no one. You aren't in fact the centre of the universe.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape. The issue here is taking a free, functioning capability and arbitrarily disabling it in favour of a paid product. Microsoft is currently "updating" its internal adoption goals for the AI features it keeps shoving down consumers throats, but I'm sure that pumping the numbers by removing features is surely just coincidental and not desperate at all.
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.
That's the entire point when the goal is to achieve a public, immutable, decentralized ledger that prevents double-payments without needing to trust a third-party to adjudicate properly. It being inconvenient makes it exceptionally difficult to edit history.
Whether that's a useful goal is less clear when nearly all of modern society relies on trusting parties at some point along the way (will the thing you bought be delivered to you? Will the service you purchased actually be rendered? etc).
> Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology
A financial process being unwieldy hasn't really been an issue historically. Why are most publicly issued stocks in the US owned by Cede and Company for example? No one that has stocks really thinks about the underlying system (the fact that they have contractual rights to stocks rather than actually owning stocks), as long as it ultimately works.
Where things have broken down in my opinion is how centralized the systems have become with massive exchanges being the only realistic way to interact with them. In the same way that a bicycle wasn't designed to be a moving van, these systems weren't designed to be centralized. With that being the reality though, the entire blockchain backbone is mostly useless, and at that point it really is an inconvenient database.
I'm curious about this. I'm not a frontend engineer but enjoy tinkering on simple frontend UIs for my hobby projects, and I've found Tailwind nice for creating encapsulated components more easily. It's funny that it skips the entire cascading part of Cascading Style Sheets though. Are there major downsides besides that?
> It's funny that it skips the entire cascading part of Cascading Style Sheets though. Are there major downsides besides that?
I think cascading is a bad default. It's useful, but only sometimes, and often causes headaches like unintended coupling and confusion about why rules are being overridden. The utility class approach (like Tailwind) makes a lot of issues like this go away. I don't see a good reason why the traditional approach is worth the extra pain or discipline.
CSS can be laser-like specific if you want it to. Want to only affect that thing? Use ids, inline styles or learn how to write proper selectors.
I am by no means a CSS expert, but 90% of CSS issues I heard complaints about boiled down to the complainers not having spent the time necessary to learn the basics. And the other 10% were solved by :has()
That being said, most other styling solutions I had used (e.g. in GUI libraries) will quickly make you wish you had CSS.
> CSS can be laser-like specific if you want it to. Want to only affect that thing? Use ids, inline styles or learn how to write proper selectors.
You've still go all the normal CSS problems like having to debug complex selectors, jumping between files to debug styling, having to name lots of things you're only going to use once, verbose media queries, verbose styling attributes, and not knowing when it's safe to delete styling because you don't know where it's shared.
And for what benefits? To say we're writing CSS "the right way", when it was designed for styling traditional documents and not for complex UIs?
This also strikes me as a "if everyone learned to do it properly, there wouldn't be a problem" statement. It's ignoring the reality that nobody can agree on the proper way to write CSS, and writing discipled CSS is fatiguing and time consuming. And even if you could get everyone to adopt the same approach, the above issues are still a big deal.
It's a real failing when a language or methodology requires you to invent your own complex discipline to tame it (e.g. C and C++), and get everyone on the team to follow this. At some stage, it's better to scrap everything and try again with what was learned to avoid the mess.
> 90% of CSS issues I heard complaints about boiled down to the complainers not having spent the time necessary to learn the basics. And the other 10% were solved by :has()
I really don't agree, I understand traditional CSS and how to use complex selectors and it's just not a good approach except mostly for styling traditional Markdown-like documents and adding your own utility classes. If laser-like specific selectors is something I want more of the time, I want this as the default and for it to be easy.
Tailwind is a very thin layer above CSS and you can't use it properly without knowing CSS. Coupled with the way you reuse styles in Tailwind by using templates (instead of sharing via classes), it solves most of the problems with CSS in a simple way that people find simple to follow.
Tailwind's major downside is it isn't the "traditional" way (which nobody can agree on anyway for complex UI styling), so Tailwind gets attacked for being the wrong way without its benefits and tradeoffs being examined properly.
Jumping between the files? The cascading part means you can always add in a file after and overwrite it. I don't see how this would get better without the cascading part.
My point isn't that CSS is perfect. My point is that someone has yet to show me a better styling language that isn't purely hypothetical. I am happy to learn new languages if there are clear benefits.
I mean having to jump between the HTML and multiple CSS files (which often you have to track down by using the browser inspector) to make edits to while styling things. When HTML and styling are tightly coupled anyway and almost always edited together, it just slow everything down for no good reason vs co-locating them together via utility classes.
> The cascading part means you can always add in a file after and overwrite it. I don't see how this would get better without the cascading part.
If you mean overwriting styles set somewhere else, this is what makes CSS confusing and hard to refactor. Cascading is just best avoided whenever you can.
> I am happy to learn new languages if there are clear benefits.
I can recommend looking at Tailwind. Make sure to use it with some kind of templating language e.g. so a "button" component goes in a template file, as that's the way you reuse styling (vs copy/paste) which critics seem to miss. It makes styling much simpler and quicker (everything is co-located, no need to write selectors, no need to make up class names, very concise syntax especially for mobile), especially if you're doing complex responsive designs.
I am editing my CSS files predominantly in the browsers inspector this has the benefit showing you what it looks like directly, potentially even with mobile preview.
I also don't need to hunt down CSS files because I rarely ever got more than 5 css files in projects I authored myself usually more like three: style.css for general stuff, fonts.css for fonts and multiple foo.css for page/section-specific stuff that isn't needed elsewhere thus only one of those is ever loaded.
For most "theming"-like stuff I make extensive use of css variables I want all my things to look like the button? Well just add the same styling with the variables in place.
As for the divide between HTML and CSS: to me HTML is 99% semantic. That means I describe the information as it should be described and the rest is done in CSS. Nowadays I rarely ever feel the need to create useless divs or go back and edit the HTML to fix styling issues thanks to grid layouts.
It wasn't always that way, but thst was to a degree the point of the linked article as well.
> As for the divide between HTML and CSS: to me HTML is 99% semantic. That means I describe the information as it should be described and the rest is done in CSS.
How do you visually group and align elements in designs like this one by only using semantic elements? I agree there's a few things in there that could be ol/ul/li tags but there's a lot of divs that are just flex containers or flex items. I don't see what useful semantics they could all have when they're mostly for cosmetic reasons.
This is an interesting move, and I wonder what that means for accessibility in Plasma. Wayland simply isn't designed with accessibility in mind, so each compositor ends up having to implement their own non-standard APIs. I know virtual keyboards are lacking for example.
That sentiment comes across a bit oddly... if the people in power in Germany hadn't started using terror and violence against those they didn't like, WWII wouldn't have happened.
