thibran

Imagine a world where we have better technology and someone looks 20 years back at an old codebase. Everybody would have a hard time to understand anything. Everything of the old web tech would look overly complex und laughable overengineered. Nobody would probably be able to understand how a piece of CSS influences a part of a web page or how all the abstractions work in the code base and why they are there in the first place.

Modern web is a mess. I wish it wasn't, but it is.

The future of HTML/CSS and hopefully JavaScript is, that it no longer used and replaced by a new technology stack.

Especially CSS is such a miss fitting technology for what it is used today, that web frameworks actively fight it, by trying to keep its scope to components.

When looked at web tech from a distance, it is cristal clear to me that we need something new.

Instead of all the abysmal complicated rules of CSS, we would probably be much better served by something like ElmUI (a modern advanced version of the idea) + some scripting for dynamic things.

Jep, and a lot of believes will be wiped away with it too.

In the end they will rewrite all low-level code in Rust anyway. Because it will be crystal clear to anybody, that we can't keep all the C/C++ at the base of the modern world.

Anthropic models are ridiculously expensive. I've stopped using any of their models months ago.

I love VIM-like TUIs, but the discoverability of of them is absolutely awful.

This does not work great. What if you have a grid of 30 item, do you press 20 times tab to focus finally the item you want to interact with?

Keyboard design is much more, its also about how and where to place items, how things should move... it's a whole world. In the mouse world we have "discovered" those things and now we "just copy" other designs that we know work fine.

That's not what I mean. The site you linked is about how to make a mouse-first website more keyboard friendly, but what I would like to exist is a mature keyboard-first guide.

I mean something like this (my wip keyboard-first file manager): https://ibb.co/G3WBW5C1

The hard part is, there seems to exist no UI & UX design language I can follow to create a nice keyboard-first app, so I have to think through everything (which is fun but tiring).

The problem with keyboard navigation is that there seems to be no mature GUI keyboard-first UX concept. "Mouse things" are the way they are, because they fit the mouse-way. We need the same for the keyboard-way. Until then, there seems to be no design concept that can just be copied.

Not showing the model cost in the Cursor UI is the biggest failure of Cursor.

Instead of needing a familiar metaphor to understand a new system (reasoning by analogy), they grasp the core conceptual mechanics directly.

It’s not that the 2/3 can't think abstractly, it’s just that they use analogies as a temporary processing step to get there, while the 1/3 starts there.

You described reasoning by analogy, which two thirds of the population does.

Nice, now make it 20x cheaper.

So you are repeating narratives without checking them?

For me there is no point in using Claude Opus 4.7, it's too expensive since it does not do 100% of the job. Since AI can anyway only do 90% of most tasks, I can use another model and do the remaining 15-30% myself.

When taking a bird eyes view on CSS it will be hard to oversee that CSS is a mixture of different concepts that evolved over time with a lot of inconsistentsies. It is possible to make it work, but it's not pretty.

Same for HTML. If the web would be reimagined today, there is a very low chance that we would create HTML as is.

Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?

CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.

We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.

I use the Terminal all the time and write my own CLI tools, but I'm feeling more and more the limits of the current system. With the years I have used almost all available shells (EShell was even my default for some time). Right now my favorite shell is Nushell, but still, it feels dated compare to what is possible on modern computers.

> Make a better system, and we'll consider using it. It's on my TODO list, but it will break with all conventions and tools (no TTY). My idea is to bring the chain-things-together idea to the 21st century using a keyboard first GUI.

Its almost ironical that we still use the Terminal - and many use it like in the eighties using Bash - and seem to have forgotten that we should invent a better terminal & shell than doing all the workarounds to handle the quirks of the current systems.

Escaping problems or wrong handling of non-visible characters.

PBT allows us to test more combinations without writing hundreds of tests. Yes, it's about user flow inside a single module of our gigantic application.

I use quicktheories (Java) and generate a determistic random test scenario, then I generate input values and run the tests. This way I can create tests that should fail or succeed, but differ in the steps executed and in the order with "random input".

I'm doing propety-based test since years for frontend stuff. The hardest part is, that there is so much between the test inputs and the application under test, that I find 50% of the time problems with the frontend test frameworks/libs and not in our code.

You forget that you got a say for that money in a lot of parts of the world, which is one of the primary reasons the US is so wealthy.

Europe took the deal that the US "handels the war stuff in the world" for some influence.

If we handle the "war stuff", the US influence will be gone in Europe.

Maybe increase the living conditions for people under 60?

All this talk is just about the symptoms, but the cause is that young people are born into a deeply unfair world where losing is by design (so that the baby boomers can continue to profit).

If someone in their 20 can start a family without being financially broken, things will improve.

Mozilla wasted probably hundreds of million dollars trying all those "features", but all we want is a stable browser.

I get your point and think in a similar way. The difference between AI and the coconuts is -> there is no way deaths by coconuts increase by 10000000x, but for AI it's possible.

The reasons we have not - and probably will not - remove obvious bad causes is, that a small group of people has huge monetary incentives to keep the status quo.

It would be so easy to e.g. reduce the amount of sugar (without banning it), or to have a preventive instead of a reactive healthcare system.

Wouldn't be the trick to let AI code the app on first requests and then let it run the code instead of have it always generate everything? This should combine the best of both worlds.

auto rebase, simple undo (jj undo), no staging area, easy splitting and merging

jj is so good, finally a tool to replace Git.

SVN -> Git -> jj