CSS-Tricks in Limbo
vale.rocks
vale.rocks
That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
The worst part is that they're not replacing me! I'm still the one going out there, networking, asking questions and writing about what I find. Just so that their bots can hammer my website and use my work to metastasize faster.
Fucking parasites, the whole lot of 'em.
I will probably survive, but so many websites won't. Even if they do, they might drown in the noise of the torment nexus.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
GNOME declined the money.
Framework also offered money to KDE. KDE accepted the money.
Framework released a computer that ran Fedora KDE: Freedesktop.org Code of Conduct committee member starts crying about the fascism of it.
Later, when DHH got the Omacom foundation's money pledges in, he contacted Arch/AUR people to see about sending some money or resources their way. They declined.
Some reactions on Mastodon to the Omacom announcements:
PostmarketOS dev: "nothing quite as depressing as seeing a fascist get 8 mil and corpo backing to keep building their 'distro' while not even having the funds to hire folks to work full time.
Elementary OS dev to that: "yeah it seems the trick to financial success is to do as much harm as possible"
And they go on to compare Omarchy to servants of the Chaos God Khorne in Warhammer. You know, a god of bloodshed and warfare. Blood for the Blood God, Skulls to the Skull Throne.
Meanwhile, eg. everything I've ever seen of Vaxry has been orders of magnitude more normal than raving about Hitler particles, and somehow he has a multiyear sponsorship to work on Hyprland fulltime, the maker of Quickshell got hired by Omacom, and some other projects they use have received sponsorships. Only Arch declined.
> One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
Said guy moved most of his own company to that distro, and he and his business partner each put down a million dollars of their own money. Just a while ago, when the foundation paperwork wasn't done yet, DHH said the Vaxry and outfoxxed sponsorships came out of his pocket in case there was a snag with setting up the foundation.
> You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
People seem to have been capable of not shouting about Hitler particles, and somehow it's those people who've been sponsored now that one dude managed to scrounge up serious money. Funny, that.
(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-... Founding member, donating a million dollars.
Plus, it's an EU company. I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business.
I'm moving off Vercel / AWS. I kept DO for a Minecraft server for friends/family but that's dead.
Coolify's website [1] explains it better.
But for example, you can call a webhook once new resources have been created, so Coolify can push them to your CDN.
There were a lot of products and ideas that felt great during ZIRP but stopped making sense post-ZIRP. That's my take.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
And like the other poster said, they are actively working on M series support (building on Asahi's excellent work, of course) and making concrete progress.
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
Of course not but dhh makes it clear omarchy is not for everybody. And that’s all right.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".