3 ms·

Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, with

by mmcnl 9mo ago

Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company? I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it. Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.

agentifysh 9mo ago
this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore. the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.
- imiric 9mo ago
  > this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards Both of those can be true.
  - omnimus 9mo ago
    Both are true. And thin abstraction doesn't mean it's not valuable abstraction.
- mmcnl 9mo ago
  It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.
  - fantasizr 9mo ago
    the ai companies are presented as just 'existing', when in fact there is money being made it's just be routed to them.
  - _qswe 9mo ago
    I'm not going to dogpile criticism on Tailwind or Adam, whose behavior seems quite admirable, but I fundamentally agree with the thrust of the parent comment. It's unfortunate for Tailwind and anyone who was invested in the project's pre-2022 trajectory, but no one is entitled to commercial engagement by unaffiliated third parties. Here's a similar example from my own experience: * Last week, I used AI to help me prepare a set of legal agreements that would have easily cost $5k+ in legal fees pre-2022. * I've also started a personal blog and created a privacy policy and ToS that I might otherwise have paid lawyers money to draft. Or more realistically, I'd have cut those particular corners and accepted the costs of slightly higher legal risk and reduced transparency. * In total, I've saved into the five figures on legal over the past few years by preparing docs myself and getting only a final sign-off from counsel as needed. One perspective would be that AI is stealing money from lawyers. My perspective is that it's saving me time, money, and risk, and therefore allowing me to allocate my scarce resources far more efficiently. Automation inherently takes work away from humans. That's the purpose of automation. It doesn't mean automation is bad; it means we have a new opportunity to apply our collective talents toward increasingly valuable endeavors. If the market ultimately decides that it doesn't have sufficient need for continued Tailwind maintenance to fund it, all that means is that humanity believes Adam and co. will provide more value by letting it go and spending their time differently.
    - mmcnl 9mo ago
      Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation. It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation. I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.
- monooso 9mo ago
  You're clearly not a fan of Tailwind, and that's fair enough. However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem. In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS). That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.
chuckadams 9mo ago
The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"
- reddalo 9mo ago
  That was an internet meme. The real ad said "You wouldn't steal a car".
gnarlouse 9mo ago
I’m not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it’s a “do anything platform” won’t the first anything be to cannibalize low hanging anything’s, followed by progressively higher hanging anything’s until there’s no work left? Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  > Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value. So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
  - gnarlouse 9mo ago
    > they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete. > No dark patterns https://www.palantir.com/ https://www.palantir.com/ > No enshittification https://google.com https://google.com https://bing.com https://bing.com > No taking your data hostage blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.

by mmcnl 9mo ago

agentifysh 9mo ago

this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore. the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.

imiric 9mo ago
> this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards Both of those can be true.
- omnimus 9mo ago
  Both are true. And thin abstraction doesn't mean it's not valuable abstraction.
mmcnl 9mo ago
It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.
- fantasizr 9mo ago
  the ai companies are presented as just 'existing', when in fact there is money being made it's just be routed to them.
- _qswe 9mo ago
  I'm not going to dogpile criticism on Tailwind or Adam, whose behavior seems quite admirable, but I fundamentally agree with the thrust of the parent comment. It's unfortunate for Tailwind and anyone who was invested in the project's pre-2022 trajectory, but no one is entitled to commercial engagement by unaffiliated third parties. Here's a similar example from my own experience: * Last week, I used AI to help me prepare a set of legal agreements that would have easily cost $5k+ in legal fees pre-2022. * I've also started a personal blog and created a privacy policy and ToS that I might otherwise have paid lawyers money to draft. Or more realistically, I'd have cut those particular corners and accepted the costs of slightly higher legal risk and reduced transparency. * In total, I've saved into the five figures on legal over the past few years by preparing docs myself and getting only a final sign-off from counsel as needed. One perspective would be that AI is stealing money from lawyers. My perspective is that it's saving me time, money, and risk, and therefore allowing me to allocate my scarce resources far more efficiently. Automation inherently takes work away from humans. That's the purpose of automation. It doesn't mean automation is bad; it means we have a new opportunity to apply our collective talents toward increasingly valuable endeavors. If the market ultimately decides that it doesn't have sufficient need for continued Tailwind maintenance to fund it, all that means is that humanity believes Adam and co. will provide more value by letting it go and spending their time differently.
  - mmcnl 9mo ago
    Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation. It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic without 0 compensation. I'm not sure how this should codified in law or what the correct words are to describe it properly yet.
monooso 9mo ago
You're clearly not a fan of Tailwind, and that's fair enough. However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem. In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS). That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.

chuckadams 9mo ago

The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"

reddalo 9mo ago
That was an internet meme. The real ad said "You wouldn't steal a car".

gnarlouse 9mo ago

I’m not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it’s a “do anything platform” won’t the first anything be to cannibalize low hanging anything’s, followed by progressively higher hanging anything’s until there’s no work left? Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.

TeMPOraL 9mo ago
> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value. So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
- gnarlouse 9mo ago
  > they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete. > No dark patterns https://www.palantir.com/ https://www.palantir.com/ > No enshittification https://google.com https://google.com https://bing.com https://bing.com > No taking your data hostage blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.