> There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
There has never been. We are running supercomputers. And somehow every app is a dog-slow barely moving monstrosity incapable of showing a page of text without stuttering.
Compacting mostly gets rid of reasoning tokens, and honestly it would be nice of reasoning tokens did not constantly follow every follow up query. Asking even a simple/trivial question can have Claude use thousands of tokens. Compacting is good for getting rid of those.
I've had Claude immediately fall back to its usual verbose style immediately after compaction.
To be fair, I've had it do that immediately after re-reading the output style instructions, too.
My chat history is filled with "Yes, I broke the language rule. Let me rephrase that and update my memory. — You already have that in memory — Yes, true, I ignored that" (because "Memory" is a yet another .md file)
Claude Code supposedly supports a "post-compaction" hook, so you could have it automatically run the prompt "We just compacted the context, quickly refresh yourself on the rules in CLAUDE.md etc..".
Depending on what you've got in those files, maybe that will just use up all the context again though.
> supposedly supports a "post-compaction" hook, so you could have it automatically run the prompt
Keyword "supposedly" :)
I've had it in my settings forever, and still...
Asking it to analyse and fix the issue it produced a plausible "my training supercedes/overrides settings especially if triggered by certain words in the phrase" (paraphrasing the long text)
I had Fable flag my question as unsafe with tag [bio] for asking it to ... use Unicode graphemes. In Elixir code that already was using this function elsewhere: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/String.html
Happened to me with ChatGPT and Gemini too often, that a harmless change in my own picture is marked as harmful content (just changed the tie color). And the AI refuses and future edit.
My opinion is that no one should re-implement CSS layout orimitives and algorithms. Those are rather unique in how (by necessity and quirks if history) awkward, stange and bolted on they are.
Well, hang on, there are several different layout algorithms in CSS, right? They keep the old ones for backwards compatibility, and they have to interoperate which makes things more complicated; but flexbox and grid are relatively new and quite nice.
The people saying CSS is unfit for UI have probably never actually built a good UI in anything, and also realistically don't even know how to use CSS.
Flexbox on its own is a simple and very capable algorithm that you can use anywhere. You can do a lot with flexbox alone (see Yoga: www.yogalayout.dev) so it's a great place to start. Taffy supports a few more layouts (block, grid) which have their own separate use cases but flexbox is enough for most things.
I used to teach a CSS to college freshman class a decade and a half ago.
An assignment that I had that they always seemed to enjoy was picking a stadium scoreboard (I initially forced Fenway park but loosened it up in later years) and recreating it responsively exclusively in html markup and hand coded CSS (JS only allowed to pass arrays). Had to go through all 3 major media queries.
That assignment was in week 4 out of 15. 95% of the kids came in with no CSS knowledge at that time.
If you learned CSS through the aforementioned frameworks that abstract it into a mishmash of barely recognizable selector abbreviations I totally understand why you would think that it was complex and unapproachable. But once you understand positioning and the box model selector by selector sky's the limit.
Blame bootstrap for the nature of today's HEADER ROW BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK ROW BLOCK BLOCK ROW state of web design. CSS has very little to do with that.
They mentioned Fenway Park, which is a baseball stadium. Baseball scoreboards are quite complex with a lot of detailed stats, similar to cricket scoreboards.
that's TAL-U-NO-LX in the screenshot, right? Bit self-defeating as an example. That UI is a skin. Fixed bitmap, every knob position and hitbox hardcoded, window can't be resized at all. I don't know offhand whether TAL is on vstgui or juce, but it doesn't much matter, with juce you write resized() by hand and chop up a rectangle with removeFromTop/removeFromLeft until you run out of controls. Either way there's no layout algorithm in there. It's what you end up with when you don't have one...
Photoshop is a strange pick too. The extension layer was CEP, which is literally Chromium, and UXP that replaced it ships flexbox. There's a browser version now as well.
> And when they started moving to more and more web tech, they couldn't even get the most trivial of the app's layouts correctly
Nothing in that post complains about layout. It's all regressions in usability.
What you are referring to as "layouts" is not what everyone else is talking about. In the context of this entire thread "layout" is the algorithms which decide the size and position of UI elements.
> In the context of this entire thread "layout" is the algorithms which decide the size and position of UI elements.
And yet the apparently amazing layout algorithms in CsS haven't lead to people easily creating actual complex layouts, and all CSS frameworks re-implement the same dozen or so trivial components.
The few companies that manage to do something complex do that at gereat expense and over untold man-hours of engineering.
There's absolutely nothing complex about the layout in that Cubase screenshot. It's likely mostly (if not fully) manually positioned which you can do with CSS. The rendering is more complex because a lot of it would need to be represented as images/SVGs to render all those lines at least somewhat efficiently.
The thread you linked kind of touches on that, too, by pointing out that sometimes you need to drop down to handling layout+rendering yourself. Doesn't matter if it's a desktop or web app. It is actually the best option to do sometimes because it can be less hacky and more performant.
Somehow "there's nothing complex" and "rendering" or something, and there are no layouts in CSS even close to the complexity of this layout. Except perhaps a few examples or useless stuff like "let's render Mona Lisa using CSS only".
And if you try to layout this many elements, the browser will just sit down and cry.
> It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
iPhone sales pay for the entirety of Apple's R&D. 10 times over.
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
Another thing that happens is your local shop will set up one Etsy store, the el cheapo junk stores may set up a huge number of different shops selling the same set of products.
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