I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.
I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.
“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]
He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.
[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
that's why they are also more egocentric, racist, etc. When people do not feel the threat of society it is easier to have opinions that verge out of the norm or could restrict further employment (and also opinions that are wrongfully or rightfully policed in society)
Probably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.
traveling more would inspire one to think positively of capitalism, rather than the reverse. to quote andrew carnegie roughly, the status quo has always been misery for everyone, and just recently have we begun to extricate ourselves from it. not to mention that it is sheer derangement of luxury to have plenty of funding for one's own family, and yet vocally dissuade others from taking the same steps, for some "end game theoretical" that certainly won't arrive in single digit generations
a) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside.
b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter.
He worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly.
Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that.
It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.
It’s worse. The guy in charge, and the folks working in the FOI response department repeatedly asserted that the force do not use AI, and did not use AI on this occasion.
Not sure you can pass that off as a hallucination.
Yeah well there's the whole UK post office/Toshiba scandal that cost suicides and jail sentences for wrongly accused postal employees but the cause was Toshiba's faulty software and the lies of the UK postal service.
I have a lot of concerns about your presentation of this.
A. It’s also true that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and yet we sort of see experimentation with alcohol as a rite of passage.
B. I mean, so is walking out your front door. I don’t see this as adding much to point A.
C. This is a big jump. First, we see more openness about sexual behaviour. While I’m prepared to agree that it has likely gone up, I would not be comfortable with the degree you imply. Second, while I do think it is likely that pornography has indeed contributed to this, pornography has also likely contributed to an increase in experimentation in general, with other sexual behaviours also likely seeing an increase (for example oral/anal sex, water play, etc).
D. I find this very hard to accept at face value. Do you have studies/evidence to support this claim?
E. Yes, I would likely agree, although whether “encourages sexual experimentation” is a bad thing or not is a question for further debate.
F. This conflates some very weird things. “Fighting words” are a specific type of restricted speech (i.e. you can’t go round shouting “I’ll kill you”). Sharing misinformation is broadly not illegal (except in very specific sets of circumstances-fraud, inciting violence, etc.). It’s also broadly speaking not against the law to tell the truth. “Some people like to choke each other during sex” is a true statement, even if it’s harmful.
Do you support a ban on porn all together? That’s quite a radical view.
I'll just say that I didn't know until now that he was under cancer treatment and I wouldn't wish Cancer on 99.9999999% of the population. I have my opinions on home but he does not not meet that prestigious landmark.
Once you learn how to read it, it's actually pretty clear.
This element has a small amount of x and y padding that is suitable for (for example) keeping text away from the edge of the container. The text is white. The corners of this are rounded.
The background is the default intensity 'sky' colour, which darkens slightly on hover and darkens further when it's active.
You can take this from 77 characters to 189 like this:
Tailwind simplifies consistency, and frankly is pretty readable. It's not like <button type="button" class="button">Button</button> is exactly the pinnacle of human clarity and simplicity in the first place.
Of course there are other ways to do it, but this faux outrage demonstrates not that this is some 'fresh fucking hell' or some 'crack induced nightmare', but rather that you simply don't get it.
I didn't say I can't read it. I asked who thought it was a good fucking idea. I guess you've answered that implicitly.
Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work.
I can now see exactly why OP made this post. If a client told me they don't want to use something akin to bootstrap or any other sane css library, and that instead I will need to ensure that every element has every manner of css states expressed as a faux class, I wouldn't even stop to make a coffee before telling them how far they can jump.
This sounds perfect for front end “developers" who struggle even with css, and want any reason possible to pad out their billable/working hours doing nothing productive.
Oh what's that, you want to change the style of standard button everywhere in the codebase?
No of course we can't just update a single css file you silly goose.
I feel like half the bad problems in web development are because JavaScript developers saw that j2ee guys had ant and whatnot, and said "hey what if we started inventing reasons to have a build step"?
> button class="button"
The thing is, that is more readable for a sane code base. If I can glance and know it's using the correct standard button class, it means I don't need to memorise the fucking pixel sizes and states of button paddings.
I get it alright. It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist, and instead found a crowd of "developers" looking for anything shiny to pad their resume and keep themselves looking busy.
100% with you on this, know you’re not the only one bewildered by the insanity of ignoring the cascade, styling everything from scratch, and placing it all in a list of classes.
> Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work.
Critical difference: media queries are unavailable to inline styles, making impossible to implement responsive designs this way. And anyway, CSS is so much more verbose than Tailwind that it really wouldn’t be very readable outside of toy examples.
Personally, I have used CSS since it was first created. I also have used Bootstrap and Foundation, but found them brittle and cumbersome. Now I just write 95% of styles with Tailwind.
Which everyone says is only really useful if you use in a JSX Component...
So you're writing it in XML...
But then that gets converted into JavaScript....
Which then writes out some HTML and CSS?
I will absolutely not be surprised when someone declares that the XML part of JSX is too verbose and creates a library to generate the JSX code. Fuck it who am I kidding, it probably already exists doesn't it?
Clearly you’ve made your mind up so I won’t push harder, except one point:
> Oh what's that, you want to change the style of standard button everywhere in the codebase?
Tailwind excels when you are using component based frameworks. This change should be at least as simple as updating main.css, except it’s in Button.tsx
I think these debates ultimately come down to what you’re making with these tools: is it documents or application interfaces? If it’s documents, then plain HTML, CSS and a touch of JS sprinkles on top works very well, as they were designed for this. If you’re making software, though, at some point you’re going to need some additional tooling to make it feasible.
> at some point you’re going to need some additional tooling to make it feasible.
I mean sure, most people will pick some kind of abstraction over parsing and constructing raw HTTP messages.
But it boggles the mind that apparently a large chunk of "developers" cannot see the insanity in writing XML to generate JavaScript which generates HTML and CSS because they want to write `<Button variant="primary">Save</Button>` rather than... `<button class="primary">Save</button>`.
Like I said earlier: so much of the folly in the NodeJS community looks like bizarre adoration of early-2000s J2EE stack.
You have a language that requires no AOT.. ah better invent increasingly convoluted and ever-changing build processes for it.
You're writing output that's essentially just a string to be sent over the wire... ah better create a wrapper for the wrapper that creates the service which renders the string.
But sure. That is totally a rational approach to development, and the nodejs community has never shown itself to be prone to chasing shiny useless things or cargo culting. I must just be overreacting.
> But it boggles the mind that apparently a large chunk of "developers" cannot see the insanity in writing XML to generate JavaScript which generates HTML and CSS because they want to write `<Button variant="primary">Save</Button>` rather than... `<button class="primary">Save</button>`.
I'm wondering if some of the disconnect here is that you don't have personal experience with this type of development, so you might not see what pain points it solves.
The first thing I would mention is that components encapsulate function and styling. Buttons don't illustrate this well because they're trivial. But you can imagine a `<DatePicker>` that takes a `variant` property ("range" or "single"), `month` and `year` properties, and perhaps a property called `annotations` which accepts an array of special dates and their categories (`[{date: "2026-07-04", code: "premium_rate"}, {date: "2027-07-07", code: "sold_out"} ...]`). The end result is an interactive picker that shows the desired span, with certain dates unselectable and others marked with special color codes or symbols. You're going to have a very unpleasant time implementing that with globally scoped CSS classes.
And this isn't a string sent over the wire. The "document" that the browser renders is changing continuously as you interact with it. If you were to open Chrome Devtools and look at the subtree of the DOM containing the date picker, you would see elements appearing and disappearing, gaining or losing classes and attributes, in real time as you select/deselect/skip forward/etc. That's what makes it work, rather than being a static drawing of a calendar.
I personally do not like the Javascript frontend ecosystem. It's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. But, do you know another way to deploy software that's cross-platform and basically free of gatekeepers? Sometimes we just have to do weird things because they're really useful.
> I personally do not like the Javascript frontend ecosystem. It's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. But, do you know another way to deploy software that's cross-platform and basically free of gatekeepers?
One way is what I call the "Modular MVC pattern" that involves pure js routing and manual DOM manipulation without using any framework at all. You handle complexity in two ways: by modularizing the "controller" parts into multiple js modules for each route, and "view" parts into multiple HTML partials - and using the event bus pattern if your app gets too complex (as alternative to modern reactive frameworks like react/vue).
Shameless plug: I've tried to implement this exact pattern with limited success in Abhyasa Quiz App[1], a side project.
> you don't have personal experience with this type of development, so you might not see what pain points it solves.
That all depends what you mean by "this type of development".
Do you mean development targeting a browser? Do you mean development targeting client-side interaction in a browser? Or do you mean writing JSX/React/Whatever flavour of the week is hip with the NodeJS community?
If you meant either of the first two: I have about 20 years experience.
If you meant the last: No. If I wanted to be a masochist that badly I'd buy my wife a leather whip and a strap on.
As much as I generally avoid front-end dev when I can now, at one point it was a much greater part of my work. I've written modular/resuable client-side libraries/widgets (i.e. self-contained elements that other developers then used in their own separate projects to add functionality... you know, a "component" by another name) since IE6 was not just in-use, but current and popular. So to rebut your claim: I'm well aware of the "pain points" developing code like this for re-use.
> You're going to have a very unpleasant time implementing that with globally scoped CSS classes.
Have you ever used CSS or Bootstrap before? You know that bootstrap is meant to be a starting point for your codebase, right? Even the most bare-bones official Bootstrap "example" designs use custom CSS specific to that use-case. If you're trying to create anything beyond the most basic hello world page with nothing but bootstrap classes on your markup, you're doing it wrong.
If your argument for using Tailwind (and apparently by necessity, JSX components) is to avoid having someone write a handful of CSS rules specific to the widget you're creating, I can't help you mate.
> It's hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. But, do you know another way to deploy software that's cross-platform and basically free of gatekeepers? Sometimes we just have to do weird things because they're really useful.
My argument isn't against using Javascript for interactivity on webpages/webapps. As I said, I've been doing it for a couple of decades now. I have my issues with JS, but for browser interaction it's mostly fine.
You see the "current ecosystem" the NodeJS/Javascript community has created, complain about it being "hacks upon hacks" and then still defend the batshit crazy stuff when someone calls it out.
I see the batshit crazy stuff and just ignore it. Just because something new exists, doesn't mean you have to use it. The browser environment for JS is slowly improving, gaining native abilities that we once had implement in libraries or from scratch.... and the majority of the JS-focussed community seems to continue to be obsessed with adding more and more and more layers of abstraction.
If you told 20-year-ago me that the browsers would all supported a native way to implement custom elements (i.e. Web Components) that can be initiated using regular markup in the page, it would never once have occurred to me that the JS developers of the day would then find some way to not just use the built-in capabilities and instead have a dependency chain and build system so complex there are fucking memes about it.
Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place?
Preference I guess. I’m not bashing anyone who prefers writing CSS that way. But there are a lot of people who think it’s very important to share that they don’t like how Tailwind looks.
I mean, if they knew who was requesting the password reset, then you wouldn’t need to reset the password, just accept whatever auth mechanism allows them to know who is resetting the password.
Kudos to them afaik they were trying to pay their people well. I think they were paying more than 100k/year. I remember they had open position for double that.
Sure, but even 200k/year is an order of magnitude less than 1.2mil/year (which is what the great-grandparent comment claimed, given their 100k/mo estimate).
It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.
I don’t know how big the “team” was, but 75% suggests maybe 4 engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8 full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.
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