I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.

But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.

I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.

I find it unlikely that there's some fundamental property of OpenAI's models' "personality" or style which Anthropic (or any other serious AI firm) wouldn't be able to match if they wanted to.

Copyleft and the whole software licensing ecosystem only matter when producing that software actually requires serious human effort and dedication.

If this is the kind of thing you can do in the open as a "reputable" company with VC investment, I can only imagine the kind of horrific industrial-scale social media spam+slop botnets for hire that exist less publicly.

Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol

There have been lots of cool technical challenges through the whole process of building this, and a very nice variety of different kinds of work.

I'm working towards using the outputs from this language to build out levels and assets for a browser-based game I've been dabbling with over the past few years.

I've fixed that issue with the `set_default_material` problem; tyvm.

> maybe a wireframe "type" material

I have that actually; it's bound to the W key. Invaluable for debugging and inspecting stuff for sure. N switches to normal texture too

I might have to make the docs for keybinds a bit easier to find

> Change the Normal Map, Roughness Map, and Metalness Map XY scales

Yeah these are all currently controlled by a single "texture scale" param in the material editor. I could definitely see situations where adjusting them individually would be valuable; I'll add that to the TODO list

Anway, tyvm for checking out the project in such detail and for the feedback; I genuinely appreciate it very much

There have been lots of cool technical challenges through the whole process of building this, and a very nice variety of different kinds of work.

I'm working towards using the outputs from this language to build out levels and assets for a browser-based game I've been dabbling with over the past few years.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573566

Points: 37

# Comments: 4

I''m personally a big fan of Wasm; it has been one of my favorite technologies ever since the first time I called malloc from the JS console when experimenting with an early version of Emscripten. Modern JS engines can be almost miraculously fast, but Wasm still offers the best performance and much higher levels of control over what's actually running on the CPU. I've written about this in the past.

The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps. In this regard, I'd have to agree. It could be the continued lack of DOM bindings that have been considered a key missing piece for several years now, or maybe something else or more fundamental.

I've tried out some of the Wasm-powered web frameworks like Yew and not found them to provide an improvement for me at all. It just feels like an awkwardly bolted-on layer on top of JS and CSS without adding any new patterns or capabilities. Like you still have to keep all of the underlying semantics of the way JS events work, you still have to keep the whole DOM and HTML element system, and you also have to deal with all the new stuff the framework introduces on top of that.

Things may be different with other frameworks like Blazor which I've not tried, but I just find myself wanting to write JS instead. I openly admit that it might just be my deep experience and comfort building web apps using React or Svelte though.

Anyway, I strongly feel that Wasm is a successful technology. It's probably in a lot more places than you think, silently doing its job behind the scenes. That, to me, is a hallmark of success for something like Wasm.

I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).

It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.

Here's an important quote from the doc:

"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"

It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.

To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.

But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.

If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.

Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.

Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.

[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437214

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409368

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The kinds of sites that go down when receiving unexpected traffic are usually built in such a way where they're making multiple DB requests to render each page. Or they have a dozen poorly configured perf-expensive WordPress plugins running. Or likely all of the above