This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.
This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.
This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.
This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
I'm using Linux since the Slackware-on-a-CDRom days and systemd is a lost cause: it only got worse and worse and only kept meddling more and more into the Linux ecosystem.
The XZ "I only work on systemd distro" backdoor was the final straw (people are going to say it's unrelated but the fact is there: non-systemd Linux distro weren't affected).
I've been gradually switching my workflow to VMs and containers and my idea is to, eventually, run the VMs under FreeBSD's bhyve instead of running them from a systemd Linux distro (Proxmox in my case).
At long last I should soon be, once again, totally free of systemd (last time it was before it existed).
I think prompt engineering is obsolete at this point, partly because it's very hard to do better than just directly stating what you want. Asking for too much tone modification, role-playing or output structuring from LLMs very clearly degrades the quality of the output.
"Prompt engineering" is a relic of the early hypothesis that how you talk to the LLM is gonna matter a lot.
Prompt engineering didn't imply coding agents. That's the big difference: we are now using tools write and execute the code, which makes for massively more useful results.
Prompt engineering was coined before tooling like Claude Code existed, when everyone copied and pasted from chatgpt to their editor and back.
Agentic coding highlights letting the model directly code on your codebase. I guess its the next level forward.
I keep seeing agentic engineering more even in job postings, so I think this will be the terminology used to describe someone building software whilst letting an AI model output the code. Its not to be confused with vibe coding which is possible with coding agents.
The promise er sorry propaganda used to be “attend the big blockbuster movies so they can spend the extra money on riskier indie films”. Essentially trickle down for the movie business. Here we are.
Right your cost is distributed and covered by others. Internet, electricity, a computer are three things not listed in the subscription price. So not free.
Utilities in America refers to the service relative to ideas of basic needs for survival in the US so they are often public infrastructure with private operators but in the case of some things like the internet, it’s purely privatized.
> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.
This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.
This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.
This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
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