And this isn't some esoteric use case used as an excuse. The core need the author has is "export my diagram to SVG and have it render the same in all browsers".
That's probably by historical incident. I'm a big advocate of open source design tooling, and I think the reason they haven't taken off as much is because design tools are generally ignored by developers. We spend loads of free time building open source developer tools, but there doesn't seem to be as much excitement as building solutions for the design side.
There's an element of that, but I think design tools tend to be ignored by designers as well. It took well over a year to get my last design team to even consider looking at Figma seriously. I've worked with several that have big gaps in understanding their day to day software. To some degree the issue can be lock in, but people also just seem to want get in and bang something out, even if the process is sub-optimal (and that can be valid.)
I've used several tools over the years and am not afraid to jump into a new UI or workflow, but have come to believe that's an exception and probably driven by the dev part of my brain.
Yeah I can see this. I think Figma might have changed the culture a bit, though that perception could be driven by the more vocal explorers on Twitter who post about new features and such.
It could be that much of design tool "output" is source-of-falsity, i.e. experiments, drafts, non-production work that is left in an ideation stage. For stuff like that, there's more breathing room for less-sophisticated products to shine.
Penpot is pretty great even in production environments. It hews much closer to web standards in for things like layout (flexbox and grid), supports working completely offline and doesn’t use a proprietary file format.
What they don’t have is the inertia of Figma and being as-good-as or maybe a little better isn’t enough to get the traction they need.
I sincerly hope that they remove this feature and apologise for its integration in the first place.
I don't think a reference website should include any sort of feature that can hallucinate incorrect documentation for you on demand.
It's bad enough that they have to include a disclaimer[1] on their upsell page, which states that the "AI Help" may occassionally return incorrect results.
Please no. The site is an important resource for people learning JS and other web technologies and AI is great at explaining code snippets which would otherwise be follow-up look-ups and at explaining what the often very dense MDN content means. And AI is actually really good at generating code as well, you just have to review it like it was written by a junior dev.
I think most of the hate for current AI tools comes from the fact that people expect the computer from Star Trek which always provides perfect answers.
Edit: So yes, it needs to be made super obvious to users that it might give you wrong answers.
I'm really not sure how you can argue that "AI is great at explaining code snippets" while also acknowledging that it will just give you flat out wrong answers some times.
Either it's good at explaining and is right, or is bad at explaining and is wrong.
Applying the logic of it being "right most of the time" seems really bad for a tool applied to a reference documentation website.
Sorry, if that wasn't clear but I think MDN is not only reference documentation. I agree, for the reference part the AI shouldn't do more than trying to point you to the right parts of the text. But for learning things, nice explanations, even if sometimes slightly off, can be a lot better to digest than reference documentation.
I'm not saying it's great yet, but there is potential for having something that can hand-wave away some details like a human would when explaining something to a beginner.
It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.
Honestly the direction of this website in recent years seems to be highly paid wage slaves bitching about not being highly paid enough. It has merely followed the direction of the industry. 15+ years ago the industry was smaller, pay was lower and you still had to be kind of a nerd or an iconoclast or something to get into it. Now it's filled with people who have no love for the tech and frequently even no knowledge of it, just showing up for the buck. So many people on HN now seem like people who would never start a business.
These kind elitist comments surprise me. Tech should make one humble, you seem to have gone the other way round. This was the kind of condescending behavior I was talking about in my comment, and you just proved my point. Calling others 'highly paid wage slaves' and thinking they have no love for tech without even knowing them because they criticized your favorite OS? It can't get more lower class than that. And what has 'loving tech' got to do with starting a business? So only those who start a business are worthy of being on 'Hacker News' in your esteemed opinion?
Dude, someone wrote a blog post about how they wanted to set up a machine for their son because, I quote his post (which was a fun read), "I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install."
I pointed out that Linux was the perfect OS for this and your reply was that you hate using Linux on your corporate job because you have to do all those things. I mean fine you can hate it, it's not right for your job, OK. But in addition to being negative, you were off-topic. It spawned a bunch of guys debating the merits of Linux in a corporate office which is not the freaking topic of the blog post and to the extent you want to rattle on about it, you're arguing with a straw man. It shouldn't be a huge surprise you got flak. Sorry if this comes across as elitist but in the context of what this post was about I don't really care that Linux sucks in your office, I did not suggest you should use it there.
What Linux won't do is shove mass shootings and Tiktok ads down his son's throat. Again I quote the post: "What the actual fuck? That kid is 10, and TikTok is one of the things I am actively trying to prevent from getting into his world as long as possible." I maintain: Linux sounds great for this guy and his son.
I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.
This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.
According to this article, it seems they want to sell it directly to chat applications.
"There's a company called Thorn that is lobbying for the scanning contract and would love to get a government mandate for its software to be installed into your chat clients," he said.
Apparently Apple didn't want to pay and developed their own in-house, only to scrap it after complaints from the public.
[5] Yelimeli, Supriya (February 24, 2021). "Berkeley denounces racist history of single-family zoning, begins 2-year process to change general plan - Council unanimously approved a resolution that will work toward banning single-family zoning". Berkeleyside.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210301140957/https://www.berke...
Accurate or not, I hate that all of these references are from one 6-month regional news cycle. They may as well be 1 citation, rather than 5. The excess just makes the inclusion of claim look more motivated by political investment than a desire to be informative.
I hate that people's instinct is to play 4D chess with the intent of some random Wiki editor instead of even glancing at the data contained in the references. Here are some aged references for your discerning palate:
This disputes the claim it originated in SF and the reasons listed. Odd that Wikipedia is centered on SF and its claim is backed up by (several experts believe.) Looks to me like another example of Wikipedia pushing a narrative and pretending it’s fact.
Looks to me like another example of HN guy pushing a narrative and pretending it’s fact. Or maybe someone just made a mistake and a more charitable reading would show that there is perhaps not a conspiracy going on but instead just a misunderstanding.
This article lists a large amount of pitfalls when trying to do just that: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/just-paying-figma-15-dollar...
And this isn't some esoteric use case used as an excuse. The core need the author has is "export my diagram to SVG and have it render the same in all browsers".