gulugawa

Great work! It sounds to me like something a startup would use to vibe code a UI.

I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake of getting better ratings.

Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events, even when on the page for a group I'm an organizer for.

After seeing this emphasis on "impact" cause Meetup's UI to degrade, I'm skeptical about the company's long term future.

I've looked at Luma and have mixed thoughts. The UI is a massive improvement over Meetup. However, it seems to be following the standard VC funded business model of attracting users and pushing excessive monetization once users are dependent.

I think we should try to build local hobby-specific websites and then have aggregator sites for event discovery.

I made one for in person board game events in the Washington DC area at https://dmvboardgames.com/

I think their approach to state management using a context is limiting like a React context. Lit is working on signals, and I think signals provide poor complexity isolation for medium to large applications.

When working on front end projects in the past, maintaining code quality was a challenge. Every React project I worked on turned into a unmaintainable ball of spaghetti, regardless of how experienced myself and the other developers were.

This sounds incredibly dangerous.

Local LLMs are going to make people sit on their phones instead of taking to real people.

Considering what Bending Spoons did to Meetup.com after buying the site, I wouldn't trust them to improve a product. Here are some of the issues I noticed.

- Group searches consistently return irrelevant results across multiple cities. As a test, I tried searching for soccer groups in Dallas, Texas, and one of the results was for a backgammon group. Users will also often have a hard time finding events I host on Meetup. - An organizer being charged $357.98 per year to host a group on Meetup.com. - The pages for my Meetup events are full of clutter and duplicate data, while relevant information such as RSVPs is hidden. - My Meetup.com home page is full of pointless distractions, including a banner asking me to become an organizer when I already organize events. - When editing an event, Meetup shows an option to generate a description by using generative AI. Generative AI is a scam and I try to avoid it.

That being said, you are right that they are becoming more expensive and ship features faster. I describe Bending Spoons as Italian private equity.

I describe Bending Spoons as an Italian private equity company. The CEO openly admits that the business model involves buying companies and trying to squeeze as much profit out of them.

The ideal way to find similarities between two books is to read both of them. If an LLM is finding links between two books, that means that the LLM read both of the books.

To determine if a book is worth reading, I think it's better to ask someone for their recommendation or look at online reviews.

There's a Vite plugin that can be used to insert identical HTML on multiple pages without JavaScript. I use it for the navbar and footer: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-handlebars

For repeated content where JavaScript is required, I use web components.

Astro is enabling vibe coders with a section of the documentation that gives advice on using AI, an Astro docs MCP server, and a copy of the documentation that is specifically formatted for LLM use.

The first thing I would do is stop trying to support AI tools, and remove any comments about AI from the documentation.

Generative AI is not suitable for building content-driven websites because it lacks context to understand subjective user preferences.

Also, having .astro files to implement island functionality is unnecessary. Interactivity can be implemented with Javascript using web components.

Why not just print out: "Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail".

Ripple seems like a great React alternative outside the support for LLMs.

LLMs are unsuited for frontend development, and its sad to see LLM support ruining otherwise great frameworks.

How are you dealing with the challenges of using Next.js?

Next.js is an overcomplicated abstraction that causes security flaws and massive tech debt.

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. ChatGPT is scam tech that doesn't have a way of making legitimate revenue.

Vite. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces/frontend/src/branch/m...

This is making me even less interested in trying Astro.

Websites should not be vibe coded.

I found that Vite does a great job of deploying static websites. All I had to do was add Vite as a dev dependency in my pacakge.json and make sure all the page routes in vite.config.js.

I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.

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This page has some advice: https://p-nand-q.com/programming/languages/java2k/

I've had luck blocking scrapers by overwriting JavaScript methods

" a.getElementsByTagName = function (...args) {//Clear page content}"

One can also hide components inside Shadow DOM to make it harder to scrape.

However, these methods will interfere with automated testing tools such as Playwright and Selenium. Also, search engine indexing is likely to be affected.

Companies are building AI off LLM scam tech, and using layoffs to pretend their AI is useful.

Scam technology like LLMs aren't going to solve the loneliness epidemic.

LLMs are a scam and should not be used to address loneliness.

I think the solution is for the app to advertise public social events where people can make connections and exchange contact information in person.

Allowing random people to message each other without meeting in person is a mistake. The nonverbal cues people get from in person interactions are helpful for discovering shared interested and personality compatibility.

Drive up demand for third places where people can meet new friends.

I'm working on a decentralized open source Meetup alternative where people can find social events and meet new friends. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces

It's also possible to write code or read scientific textbooks for the goal of promoting social connection.

I think teaching people so that they can teach others is a necessity. I've fond that the most effective meetups are the ones where people have a shared sense of ownership, which includes being welcoming to people who are new. One board game group I am a part of ran for 2 years without an official host for this reason.