> Notably, some instances of back button hijacking may originate from the site's included libraries or advertising platform. We encourage site owners to thoroughly review their technical implementation...
Hah. In my time working with marketing teams this is highly unlikely to happen. They're allergic to code and they far outnumber everyone else in this space. Their best practices become the standard for everyone else that's uninitiated.
What they will probably do is change that vanity URL showing up on the SERP to point to a landing page that meets the requirements (only if the referer is google). This page will have the link the user wants. It will be dressed up to be as irresistible as possible. This will become the new best practice in the docs for all SEO-related tools. Hell, even google themselves might eventually put that in their docs.
In other words, the user must now click twice to find the page with the back button hijacking. Even sweeter is that the unfettered back button wouldn't have left their domain anyway.
This just sounds like another layer of yet more frustration. Contrary to popular belief, the user will put up with a lot of additional friction if they think they're going somewhere good. This is just an extra click. Most users probably won't even notice the change. If anything there will be propaganda aimed at aspiring web devs and power users telling them to get mad at google for "requiring" landing pages getting in the way of the content (like what happened to amp pages).
I think your mind might be blown when you discover a third type of environment. It's neither a small shop of yak-shaving idealists, nor a desperate code factory.
The third environment is a large business maintaining services long term. These services do not change in fundamental ways for well over a decade and they make a shit ton of money, yet the requirements never stop changing in subtle ways for the clients. Bugs pop up constantly, but there's more than enough time to fix them the right way as outlined by their contract where expectations have been corrected over the years. There's no choice to do it any other way. The requirements and deadlines are firm. Reliability is the priority.
These are the stable businesses of the broader working world and they're probably what will remain after AI has driven the tech industry into the ground.
The second environment I was describing fits what you’re describing more than “yak shaving idealists”.
We were working on control systems for large industry that had to work reliably and with minimum intervention. A lot of these systems were being renewed but the plant was often 30+ years old. We were also dealing with quite limited hardware.
This is not correct. CSS is the style rules for all rendering situations of that HTML, not just your single requirement that it "looks about right" in your narrow set of test cases.
Nobody writing production CSS for a serious web page can avoid rewriting it. Nobody is memorizing anything. It's deeply intertwined with the requirements as they change. You will eventually be forced to review every line of it carefully as each new test is added or when the HTML is changed. No AI is doing that level of testing or has the training data to provide those answers.
It sounds like you're better off not using a web page at all if this bothers you. This isn't a deficiency of CSS. It's the main feature. It's designed to provide tools that can cover all cases.
If you only have one rendering case, you want an image. If you want to skip the code, you can just not write code. Create a mockup of images and hand it off to your web devs.
Eh, I've written so much CSS and I hate it so much I use AI to write it now not because it's faster or better at doing so, just so I don't need to do it.
I think the idea is to show we don't know the exact lengths of any paths that aren't constructed from our handful of mathematically known curves and must approximate using them instead.
If you measure with GPS coordinates, you still run into the same problem. The number of points plotted onto a curve affects the result, and then you are possibly also adding more error than you'd have compared to tracing from aerial photos.
This is the way. There's nothing inherently wrong with using AI as long as it's used responsibly.
I highly doubt there are any managers or executives who care how AI is precisely used as long as there are positive results. I would argue that this is indeed an engineering problem, not an upper management one.
What's missing is a realistic discussion about this problem online. We instead see insanely reckless people bragging about how fast they drove their pile of shit startup directly into the ground, or people in denial loudly banging drums to resist all forms of AI.
If you're seriously trying to understand the nuance of the act itself, you should consider reading what is standard issue for law enforcement and military.
"On Killing" by Dave Grossman is a classic.
If you only want to understand and stay in the realm of politics, I don't think you'll ever find a good answer either way. There's hypocrisy in every argument for or against violence. None of that is on the minds of people "in the shit" at that time. All that stuff comes later. As you're well aware, PTSD is no joke.
What I would take away from this is to recognize all the other ways in which we are compelled to act against our own self interest under what are sold as higher moral purposes.
From that perspective, it's not that hard to see how people can treat violence as just another tool. Whether it works is a question of how much those people value life above all else. If you're surprised that's not always the case in every culture, you may want to study that first. Beliefs may devalue life for persistence against a long history of conflict. This is where you may start to find some glimmers of an answer why we in the west sometimes think violence works to get those people to "snap out of it", but it really is ultimately about control of those people or that land at the end of the day.
> Pure strategy, luck, or a bit of both? I keep going back and forth on this, honestly, and I still don’t know if this was Apple’s strategy all along, or they didn’t feel in the position to make a bet and are just flowing as the events unfold maximising their optionality.
Maximizing the available options is in fact a "strategy", and often a winning one when it comes to technology. I would love to be reminded of a list of tech innovators who were first and still the best.
> I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills.
That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.
The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.
Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.
Making something sustainable is a different problem and a different set of skills.
I have nothing against anyone who wants to do both. I'm just saying some variant of what I'm thinking has to be why it's not as popular as you want or expect.
Something else worth considering is that people can actually be much better at (and better off) doing things they're not so passionate about.
This isn't just about devs being precious about their feelings or capacity to work. It's about control. Corrupting the direction of the project was my original point and where most of my disagreement comes from.
I would not expect most workers in any field to be so naive. The amount of convincing and money it usually takes to get someone to give up control is necessarily greater than what it was originally worth to that person. More often than not, creative people are also sophisticated enough to see that they may not fully appreciate the meaning of their project longer term right now, and the default answer has to be "no" possibly forever.
Someone asking a creative person to give even an inch of control is the one in need, not the other way around. They have to be on the creative person's level to get anywhere. Even just simple collaboration or discussion can be difficult if they don't feel it's fair. This is a very tall order and at that point they might as well stop begging and manipulating and just do it themselves.
That's what makes open source so great. Go ahead and fork it, but you're not getting the passion or skill or vision as part of the deal.
At some point you have to take a step back and wonder what you thought you were buying by giving the creator any money. This is where it falls apart.
Again, this isn't even stubbornness or selfishness. Negotiation is a skill that only gets tougher the more value is at stake. Most devs can make enough money just fine doing something else and still maintain full control. This is almost exactly why the jobs that pay the best are some of the most meaningless. Nobody is fighting for control over that stuff.
They already have it all just by being themselves. They are the stewards of true value keeping the world from becoming a hellhole foolishly and singularly concerned with money. In other words, if they didn't know something you don't, you wouldn't be offering them money (and only money). :-)
That's really fascinating, thanks. You've given me lots to think about.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the different structures associated with patronage. I remember that at one point David Bowie released a public offering of shares in his future value. If memory serves, the outcomes were mediocre but not a loss.
I actually think that this is kind of awesome. To me, the key detail is modest returns. Every asset class is volatile but our society has taken a really hard turn towards celebrating rent seeking. If someone has capital and can be convinced to give someone the financial leverage that they need to, for example, buy a truck instead of becoming the employee of a guy who bought a fleet of trucks with someone else's money, that's a formula for raising a lot of people up through middle class ranks.
Now, some people would take that advance and go to Vegas and do the least responsible thing, for sure. But I'm into giving people the benefit of doubt when possible.
I don't think we really disagree so much as I'm holding optimism that there are still big ideas and techniques that we haven't thought of, yet. I am guided by a confidence that we are more likely to succeed when we don't assume that things need to work in a certain way.
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