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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT to write the CSS for me for that, and amusingly, it seems to be able to produce at least a dozen of solutions (often came with redundant rules, too: like having 5+ rules when 2 or 3 of them are enough).

It's hilariously stupid.

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Bless its heart for being so dang confident about every wrong answer it has.

That's not stupid, it's just redundancy to make sure it works on all browsers!

Oh wait, we better make it work in IE6!

How much we were held back by backward compatibility before useful standards for things came ... But nowadays I just ignore non-standard styling. Just use the standard, because support is sufficient and browsers not supporting the standard sufficiently to make the website unusable are rare. By using the standard one also gives their developers a set target to get implemented.

iOS Safari has so many odd bugs in layout and CSS that trips up its touch based scrolling, it is so much like the IE days where other browsers worked and the site looked good, then you load in IE (Safari now) and something is broken.

I once (~10 years ago, wow the time flies) found and reported a bug in iOS Safari where when you enabled touch scrolling on an element inside <body>, it would scroll vertically when you swiped horizontally and vice versa. But only when the page also contained an invisible <iframe> that we happened to need because reasons (GWT stuff). Apple fixed it eventually, but I'd love to know exactly what the root cause of the bug was…

Not sure of sarcastic or not, but prefixed rules (per-browser prefixes) are a thing of the past in modern evergreen browsers.

Ironic. But I was not really talking per-browser prefixes, those are newfangled 2010s stuff. I'm talking way back in the day, when different browsers (well, mostly IE) sometimes had completely different ways of achieving something, in some cases requiring ~~unthinkable hacks~~clever and elegant solutions to avoid interference.

OMG the nightmares. I still had to deal with legacy IE CSS until a few years ago. The obscure and endless vendor prefixs to fix something it was never intended for.

It’s just applying proper separation of concerns. ;)

> It's hilariously stupid.

No no, it's going to take our jobs!

You joke, but I am pretty sure, that in some heads that idea is already spinning. When can they hire fewer people and make those fewer people simply use ChatGPT or some other model. We might see an even further decline in web quality as a result, as we get even more copy&paste devs.

Great for me, I work in IT security, and that's gonna tank even harder if people start seriously using ChatGPT in the manner you describe!

Increased productivity and doing certain tasks in less time or with less people has been going on forever and certainly last 30 years in web development. The growing businesses use the extra capacity to expand in other directions whether new products or new features. The stagnant companies continue to struggle with less.

No, but the next breakthrough might...

Why do so many hackers have so much difficulty seeing that the current state of public LLMs is not the pinnacle of AI technology? Nobody ever even claimed that they were.

Meh, anyone who hasn’t been able to multiply their productivity with chatgpt is either is too stubborn to try it or, well, i’m not sure how you can mess this up.

From writing sql boilerplate to copy-pasting my entire pico8 game and going “add repulsion force to enemies so they don’t clump up on one tile” to using it to provide examples instead of synthesizing them from a manpage, it’s insanely good.

oh it helps, it doesn't multiply my productivity, I wish it did!

It marginally increases my productivity and reduces some friction, honestly I'm more than happy for it to write as much code as it can on my behalf, it just can't.

I suspect those for whom it is a big game changer, were likely engaged in lots of activity which is cookie cutter.

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