During the 00ish years it felt like your system gets killed by a new game.

With the advent of the online update some game makers went way to far, Gothic in Europe was a pre-alpha release that never really got finalized but was really anticipated by gamers here.

I stopped buying games, since this was a rat race.

Everything was evolving and with the utilization of the GForce CPU gaming reached a new hardware design phase where CPU, bus (!), ram, essentially everything had to be finetuned otherwise you would run into massive performance penalties so to say. The term bottleneck wasn’t used back then but describes very clearly the dilemma back then.

In essence everything was getting more expensive while design considerations were critical.

And the systems were so fragile.

Some boards couldn’t handle Intel’s cooling demand for the CPU, it was a crazy time.

I remember the infamous AMD diss that led the company somewhat to the top tier their were then with the Athlon, when a dude filmed what happens during runtime when you remove the heat fan from an Intel vs. AMD.

Weird time, glad it is over. So much hardware and money burned.

It was to fight ChatGPT and promote Gemini.

I think the guy does a very poor job or is simply not the right guy to appear as public figure for Gemini.

At least he tried. He is a man for everything that is not filmed.

Google doesn’t really have a person to give Gemini or AI a human face. And that is only consequential because Google never had any public person with any charisma like Jobs, Zuck, Altman.

I saw the inception of CSS, the infamous ACID test, IE6, web standards movement - anything and everything.

To this day, CSS is something that is not separating design from markup (try logic, you will get it), and as all things technology is now a mix of technical constraints, backwards compatibility, totally conflicting decisions.

I am traumatized with floats and clearfix, and there was a lot of debate around CSS 3, JavaScript.

Layout wise, “the web” aka web traditionalists or whatever went bezerk against any attempts to allow for what today is dominating: print layout as role model.

Formerly flow was all about responsive web design, being as fluid as it gets.

CanIUse had to be brought to life to solve the questions, what features needed to be done in JavaScripts, which not.

Stylus, BEM, bootstrap, SCSS etc.

All kind of conventions and preprocessing helpers.

CSS is hard and will stay hard, in fact I am stunned by the author’s total ignorance of where CSS came from, why something is the way it is.

Maybe he is just a young gun and thinks that CSS is only flow, grid and CSS3 and always waiting for cool new features which do what? What purpose do they have, which problem do they solve?

Tailwind is genius. There is pro and con for everything but looking back it is just another evolutionary step on the shoulder of the mentioned giants.

To this day no framework or system was more simple and elegant than Tailwind.

The author’s naive conclusion is a variation of the running gag that started with https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

Tailwind is shadowing native CSS functionality? I felt pain reading this because so what? That”s not the point.

We use preprocessors, postprocessors, optimizers - what I don’t want to do is using CSS’s own bad naming nomenclature which is used because of backwards compatibility.

In fact abstracting away basic functionality and simply let the compiler decide what is best given the situation is mentally helpful.

Working in large teams, or many teams. Guess what will happen: we build our own CSS framework, well we build ten because everyone knows best.

The author really should be thankful for the genius job Tailwind does, because he seems extremely inexperienced and never faced hard challenges.

In fact if your only problem is to decide between two frameworks, you are lazy and not considering other people.

Browser compatibility, breaking changes, different CSS as well as JavaScript engines - this was brutal.

Today? Luxury discussions.

The fact that Tailwind allowed for a gazillion of partly stunning CSS design systems and React components like ShadCN and others is proof enough that Tailwind is a platform with the best pro/con ratio so far.

This has never been the case before. This is a singularity.

I was founder and product lead for a huge and critical to business financial platform, seeing others easily augmenting your platform via interfaces or plugin patterns as a structured approach is genius.

Extensibility is a sign of elegance and perfect abstraction.

Are there downsides? Who cares with all these never seen before massive benefits?

The killer against laissez fair CSS is exactly this: have you ever lead an approach to develop a framework? Why do you want to build yet another TW?

Drop it. It won’t work. The question or better your solution hints at being a solo dev.

This is fine but you seem so one sided in your views, I am puzzled.

If I could use just native CSS boy oh boy - do you really know everything about it? Could you understand a floating layout? Could you see pro and contra for its use case or do you just not allow its usage? If yes, why if you cannot answer the question?

How do you make sure, there is standardization? How do you train and coach people so that they know and can use CSS?

What are your naming conventions? Why this way, no other way?

How do you deal with devs leaving, new joiners?

Who is overseeing the repository? Who has merge rights? Who does the code reviews?

What do you do if there was an emergency and some big shot or very important order had to be accommodated and now you have garbage CSS in your platform that you must maintain and everyone can use?

Boy oh boy - I love Tailwind. The versatile solution that was 30 years in the making.

All you delusional freaks out there with the hubris belief: tell me how it went.

I just covered a few questions. Deployment is yet to debate etc.

I totally missed the acquisition - but well deserved. I am currently re-evaluating PF again for my upcoming project, and happy to see that it is more than simply thriving.

I know the European scene since the 80th and know, that all projects are not what the rest of world think they are: free, and an alternative to anything that is US based.

European software devs are activists in the old-school meaning. In the 80th, they were crackers, hackers, and they looked for likeminded people. BTX scandal is only for very old veterans, as well as von Gravenreuth or Highscore.

I was part of the C64, Amiga scene and still have many friends their. Nevertheless we have very different attitudes today.

Without any irony I finally hope that people finally value that is provided by GitHub or other services from the Valley.

Trashing them or thinking, you just needed to host a service outside the US makes it a viable option is naiv.

I respect EU's and European devs' decisions, but I would never ever rely on them. I love the US and happy to be almost 100% not using European services.

Yes it reads "Software development, but free! Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort..." but you didn't know Germans or the fineprint. Codeberg is organized as "eingetragener Verein" and here you have the basis for what is considered free: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....

Folks, this is politics, this is power struggle, this is what Germans call "Grabenkämpfe". If you aren't used to the lifestyle, you won't understand nor enjoy the ride.

I build an extremely successfully eV myself which still lives and thrives for 30 years now - without me.

Value GitHub, stay away from European "alternatives". They aren't.

Victimhood par excellence: "My brain is a 200+ IQ machine desperately waiting for input. However, I cannot feed it! It is the walls, I guess."

It should be legally enforced to place every author's smartphone usage statistics into such articles. No interior design on earth can compensate for 40 hours TikTok usage per week.

And we didn't mention other streaming services as well.

It might be the smartphone usage as well as time spend.

Math is something humans invented and is a model, nothing else. There is no logic per se, but a model that works quite well for us.

I studied Math and CS as a very highly gifted and quickly found out, there is no beauty of Mathematical Logic, only humans approval of what they deem most accurate.

A good example is set theory. Cantor was not openly welcomed after he introduced his "theory" to others. In fact, he was received quite some pushback and hostility - this doesn't sound like someone received love the mathematical logic's way.

In fact, the story of Cantor is really a tragic one. He left math for quite some time, due to the pushback.

Only later humans accepted his theory and found it useful. Well, well, what is Mathematical Logic and what not is after all just broad consensus by humans.

And if you go deeper, you will hear more of these stories. Math is anything else but logic. Proofs are religious things, often so complicated, they are simply accepted as "approved by a committee". Many profs cannot really explain simple proofs, they refer to the textbook.

This doesn't sound like romance nor easily reproducible logic.

After all, we deal with human beings.

I am not the least addicted to it. I suspended TikTok, because it is of low value.

YouTube is useful - only with the subscription to get rid of all the ads.

Sorry, addictive design is once again another strawman. No one forces you to use these crappy apps. Same with the iPhone.

Need free time? iPhone will serve you. All Icons colorless? iPhone!

Excuses, excuses, excuses.

There is a problem, if you see people being sucked into their smartphones - however, you cannot have one without the other. Many public services require a smartphone. Where is the alternative?

It is human nature, that's all. Fighting Facebook is so low, absolutely low.

Diminishing marginal utility.

Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so).

On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself.

What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature."

The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets.

Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more.

The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries.

In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore.

For this reason, content is all that remains.

As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long.

That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

What exactly were you looking for? APIs?

Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.

EU regulation requires such settings.

While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.

Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.

Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.

In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.

Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.

Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.

In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.

But nevertheless a nice posting.

It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.

Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...

I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.

Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.

By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.

Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").

The reason is quite obvious if you have dealt with such a huge code basis in production with thousands of developers contributing for decades to it coming from different vendors and countries.

Code has a meaning attached to it. And paradoxically being able to cleanly cut out such dead code raises my suspicion. There is a reason why such code exists in there often times and since almost always stakeholders give a damn about documentation, and developers traditionally have a hard time writing even JavaDocs, JSdocs, whatever and not to mention maintaining them.

In earlier times CPU time was precious and comments were deliberately left off due to space and processing considerations.

So why is this all important?

Because until you cannot find the one guy who uses this code for a good reason, I would never kill it. Good reasons in these cases are almost always so called application owner, an app admin and hosts, who serves according to ITIL specs as deployment and production person.

Dead code can be actually quite lively under the right circumstances. And since sometimes people have to be very creative to serve regulation requirements and compliance, sometimes release pressure or missing tools can make such code an important script or deployment tool or fix for a reboot or whatever.

Believe me, dead code isn't. What you can do is, watch it at least over a period of two years.

Here is why.

Most processes have yearly deadlines. Many fall on the 1.1. of each year, while others somewhere at the end of the year. Some processes need to be served once a year due to compliance to laws.

And why two years then? As I said, human beings. Maybe that one time a guy had an exception running for it or there is a maintainer, who uses a different method - his own dead code so to say - because these scripts are rarely shared and maintainer's best kept secrets. The lesser a company knows, the more important these last line folks feel and they are blackboxes when something is or isn't working. (I hated this, this was not way of working and I changed it. It is not their company and a keeper is a Red Flag for me.)

But rarely the same person will serve the process two times in a row. Vacation times vary as well as positional changes.

Hence the two years period and even then, there are smarter, more easier ways than to use linters.

Hint: it is the frontend first paradigm.

How do I know? Because I invented it. Proof: Huge international Bank. dbCORE.

In my experience, within weeks now concepts written in stone get shattered and the next paradigm has to be used in order to max out AI in an development environment.

What is the case for AI? To handle basic work? Augment the work? Add work?

Why I think dev will be in a good spot if they adapt is the simple fact, that while laymen are using ChatGPT etc. every day, this is like driving a Tesla vs a formula 1 car.

If you take ChatGPT away from the laymen, they are helpless with IT. Devs aren't.

AI isn't static, and every turn evolves into complexity, only devs may handle when they adapt to frequent paradigm shifts and go into high level mode.

It will be again the interface between men and machine, laymen and AI. The gap won't close anytime as expected (The programming manager - remember 6 month ago?), but widens more and more.

What I see is that in day to day work many services have arms race with AI updates. The managers are more and more overwhelmed by the workload but how to automate systems is still devs' area to shine.

The business case is still hidden and unclear, but only one aspect is clear to me: low level programming is mostly configuration work now and bug fixing for AI very seldomly now.

It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another.

Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you.

I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll.

Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment.

Upvotes and downvotes show you the way.

So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.

Between 2018 and 2020, I lived in a newly built, 90-square-meter rental apartment in Germany. It was luxurious, had a fire-rated door, and was very well soundproofed as well as equipped with a very spacious bathroom and walk-in shower.

What made it sadly special was its so called thermal design concept: thanks to a natural air circulation system, the heating could only reach a maximum of 19 degrees in the winter. That’s how the system was designed and specified. The walls very well insulated, but there were slits that connected the rooms to the outside world to allow for air exchange. Not large or long ones, here and there hardly noticeable.

It’s crazy how restrictive the legal regulations are. So the 20-degree limit is by no means just a matter of perception—quite the opposite. As a consequence we placed electric heaters in almost every room. What a farce...

A/C is one reason. I bought one for my condo two years ago after experiencing 35+ degrees Celsius over weeks one or two years ago.

It was the single best decision ever, it is increasing quality of life massively. It cost me roughly 2000EUR - an investment, not a hefty sum.

I feel no difference in sleepiness, mood etc. at during summers where nights show 25+ degrees.

3 month per year for 2 years and counting means such a bargain for me given this summer. Imagine moving to a hotel for 3 month with A/C - 6-9 month at a day rate of around 200EUR. Now put that into perspective with the 2k investment.

Energy costs surprised me extremely. I expected to have to pay adional 200-300EUR as a result of its usage during summer month.

And I was stunned to be reunded 6EUR instead. So it seems to save energy magically, too. ;)

PS: I rarely join any events during summer given the fact that an event with 1k to 20+k guests would not be considered heat sinks. Today a friend of mine goes to an Open Air concert which starts at 18:00. I wished her well, since the heat indicators shows 37 degrees there. I have to bite my tongue to call it a nutjob. In the Italy for example, understandably since decades Open Air events start around or after 21:00. Maybe is has to do with the sun.

I remember the - today we would say shitstorm - negative buzz when JetBrains evolved from one IDE with Plugins to many IDEs with language specific plugins and introducing a subscription based model where all where available.

So more than 15 years, but since then nothing beat them and it is my longest running subscription. I benefitted many years of the early rabat that people got when they joined the subscription mode. Many years JetBrains spared the early joiners of price increases, which was cool.

Before that people would have bought IntelliJ for a hefty price tag, but it was fair.

Fortunately JetBrains never lost their focus and goal. I was so glad that JetBrains seemed to give AI a pass until they saw a way to let users benefit from its utilization. My guess is, that an Agent AI IDE is in the works, kind of like DataSpell and DataGrip.

Nothing bad to say about JetBrains, and I didn't get all the buzz about VSCode. Plugin-System was a mess, not a strength, highly conflicting, while of course some were really nice to have but not really thought through or tested on devs for productivity.

Especially in the beginning VSCode feels really handy, but was an annoyance over the long run. Plugins broke, security. Also in team environments and especially large to very large amounts of teams VSCode is hell due to no possibility to enforce plugins via policy - at least at the time I tried around 2020.

JetBrains have the added benefit of simply working consistently and I find it helpful to not have a superapp for all programming languages integrated into one but separate instances with distinct features depending on the language context.

JetBrains IDEs are used to build stuff that is reliable and the fact they they have to earn money it great: the customer is the focus, not a community of people cheerleading only.

I had the honor to talk to the product lead of VSCode (he joined Google) around 2024. We talked for over an hours exchanging ideas and insights, stories from the trenches. Nice dude.

I don't bad mouth VSCode, it just doesn't click for me for the professional usage for the most popular programming languages.

A perfect fit however, was in a niche, where nothing from JetBrains could match it: - M68k programming for Amiga 500 - 6510 assembler for C64 demo coding

Turbo Pascal was very buggy and disappointing, but VSCode is unmatched and top notch when it comes to Amiga and C64 coding cross platform.

I think you are contradicting yourself. If a previous work has been copy and pasted, and a novel reader doesn't know, wouldn't the reader benefit from the option to actually read the previous work as a whole?

All credible authors I read mentioned quotes from earlier works. In fact, that is on the one hand an ego boost as a prolific writer, and also helps sell more copies in case of being purchasable.

Most credible university profs in Germany from the 1990th for example always referenced their former work and mention changes of the context, or in case of a theory, modifications.

Books for example, are reprinted and it has been mentioned whether changes to the content has been done.

Personally I really see no problem, leaving the decision, whether you copied something or not, to the reader.

They were the ultimate in to small for my fingers, couldn't stand it.

Still the best form factor has the iPhone 4 in my opinion. And here comes the revelation: the iPhone 17 have grown again and the base models all start at 6.3"

The pro max is now 6.9" - the iPad mini is 8.3"

What a massive burden to carry around and still the iPhone aren't good enough for reading long time - a book for example - like the iPad Mini is.

I guess that many "content creators" edit their TikTok stuff when they are on the move and that the iPhone tries to more and more fit for that market.

Also larger device sizes allow for larger batteries - good for local AI and again video editing and consuming as well.

I Own a iPhone 16 and couldn't handle the pro/max option. Too bulky - and the camera lens has sharp edges combined with a slippy surface.

So size is one thing, form another.

The max options are crazy large especially if you consider a case for protection.

Two things

Noise cancelling is a treasure.

And what I really like about them is the ease of use.

The moment I start talking to someone, automagically the NC is paused as well as any audio you were listening to.

It sounds so easy but is really running smoothly. Over time Apple really perfected the workings.

This blend is what makes them so valuable for me. I don’t have to manually do anything, simply speak and interact without having to touch them.

This is what bothered me really well, especially at work. Headset on, headset off - not anymore.

And people now don’t feel neglected when you keep the Pods in your ear.

Social reconditioning was part of the problem so to say. This tool is now accepted.

Well deserved. I am buying another pair of the AirPods Pro. I want a bit of safety after I temporarily lost one ear pod - I felt so disturbed, suddenly not being able to enjoy freedom acoustically anymore. Just to make sure and switch between them.