CSS-Tricks in Limbo
vale.rocks237 points by edent 14 hours ago
237 points by edent 14 hours ago
The more relevant post is by Geoff himself.
I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
> Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
> it's not just an anti AI rant, it's a genuine open question
There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.
Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
https://janetdocs.org/ is growing pretty fast, but that's because the community's forging an anti-AI niche of fun hobby coding.
Complaining that they give money to people you don't like is not a good look when you want them to give money to people you do like.
Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
"One dude" that has been one of the lead and most well known contributors to open source for decades now.
In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
CSS-Tricks didn't get paid $4m. They got acquired. The previous owner of CSS-Tricks got $4m.
Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
"people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns. "people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
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That's the verbiage racists use to try to make it sound like it's not racism.
Spoiler: it's racism.
Based on his own blog post (https://web.archive.org/web/20250925050154/https://world.hey...) I would argue he does come off as racist.
There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population. He assumes that you are only british if you are white and that london is worse now because there are less whites there. That has nothing to do with meritocracy, and arguable little to do with cultural non-fit.
There's a lot more to unpack in that article aside from just that, but that is the most blatantly obvious one.. And for what it's worth, I don't disagree with DHH on mass immigration. But he seems to have a lot more severe beliefs than just "mass immigration is bad".
> There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population.
There are many people who are mostly or wholly culturally British. I am not white and I live in the north of England and the biggest cultural non-fit is that my speech is obviously southern.
London does not, on the whole, feel very different culturally, from when I grew up there in the 80s. The biggest change in terms of the cultural impact of immigrants has been that of Eastern Europeans: things such as the availability if Polish food.
I think it’s a very good look when the people you complain about are racists.
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they arent being called racist, they are racist. not a small difference there.
DHH is pretty evidently racist in a lazily-disguised form, and he sounds a lot like a wealthy 1930s pro-Nazi pseudointellectual when he spouts off.
He's also spoken in favour of an agitator who appears intent on sparking a race-and-religion-driven civil inflagration in the UK.
Pretty solidly applicable terms, I am sorry to say.
Maybe no worse than JD Vance, Pete Hegseth or Trump, but then none of those people are figuratively one of our own.
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There's a difference between when people have a platform. Made a mistake 10 years ago? Fine.
But that's very different than using your huge platform today to spread your hate.
Pretending those two are the same is dangerous. One of them does actual harm today.
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> Someone will dig through some old forums/news group/twitter posts that someone made and use that as a stick to beat them with.
This is not about digging up some old careless post. It’s about his current views which he posts proudly online.
I’ll note your post pulls a classic trick:
- these views are not that important to who he is
- anyway even if he did hold those views it’s not that big of a deal
- but also I agree with those views (even tho I am but a humble, reasonable centrist)
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> Secondly, constantly berating him for having the wrong opinions and not explaining why those opinions are wrong are more likely to entrench his positions and anyone that is sympathetic to those opinions.
People have tried that.
DHH is at best a pseudo-intellectual troll.
Everything I've read has been accusatory, including the two articles linked on the topic we are discussing.