I mean, whatever, man.

This line, as one example:

> For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

Like a lot of tech Flash had its moment in the sun and then faded away, but that “moment” lasted a decade, and plenty of people got their start because of or built successful businesses around it. Did they have to pivot as Flash waned? Sure, but change is part of life.

I’m sorry but I find the take expressed in this piece to be absolutely miserable and uninspiring.

But, hey, congratulations on the 20:20 hindsight, I suppose.

Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality.

(And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)

It’s funny: I’d never given it a moment’s thought until I saw this piece but I’ve realised I’m probably the same. The only time I’ve used a mouse since maybe 2012 or so is on the odd occasion I’ve fired up an FPS on a laptop rather than on a games console. And that’s it.

(I’ve tried playing FPSs with trackpads as well but, even with Mac trackpads, which remain far and away the best, it is not a good - or even acceptable - experience. Mouse all the way for fragging action.)

Trackpad works fine for everything - but mouse + keyboard still wins by far for FPS.

"Right click and drag" is just not something a trackpad does well.

> You don't even write code, but you're getting a self-inflated sense of worth.

That’s because when it comes to delivering value, code doesn’t matter: outcomes do.

If I spend 10 hours hand coding something versus prompting an LLM to create a solution that delivers the same outcome in a few minutes, and I can get that solution into production in under an hour from the moment my fingers first touch the keyboard to start writing the prompt, well, whilst these solutions might both deliver the same value, the ROI differs significantly.

I mean, fine, I don’t love scrollfade either, and I realise this site is trying to prove a point but, FFS, most of the problems can be solved by forcing the scroll fade to complete in 100 - 300ms as opposed to some glacially slow multi-second pace.

Like I say, I don’t love it, but when we create sites we all have control over animation durations and there’s enough UX guidance around response times to easily avoid it completely sucking.

So the real problems isn’t scrollfade, it’s that - in the face of overwhelming data - it’s both mandated and implemented poorly by people with no taste.

If you’re going to implement any animation of any kind at least do us all the bare minimum courtesy and take 5 minutes to do some research into what works and what doesn’t first.

> Personally I usually see the opposite effect - people first reach for a too-naive approach and implement some O(n^2) algorithm where it wouldn't have even been more complex to implement something O(n) or O(n log n). And n is almost always small so it works fine, until it blows up spectacularly.

Same. People solve in ways that are very obviously going to cause serious problems in only a few short weeks or months and it’s endlessly frustrating. If you’re building a prototype, fine, but if you’re building for production, very far from fine.

Most frustrating because often there’s next to no cost in selecting and implementing the correct architecture, domain model, data structure, or algorithm up front.

> I'm no expert but this sounds strange.

A cynic might suggest the theory might exist because nobody could figure out how life got started on its own on earth.

The thing is I've never found the asteroid theory particularly satisfying either because it simply inserts another abstraction layer, explaining the problem away rather than explaining it.

That's not to say it's wrong but, in its current incarnation, it's just a bit meh.

I suppose perhaps that's part and parcel of it being a very hard problem to solve.

I don't mind you testing stuff out - it's the only sensible way to make the app better - but you need to give people choices to switch to different behaviours if the behaviour you're testing on them isn't working out well for them.

In other news, Claude Code login is down, so if you have time it would be sensible to proiritise fixing that:

Authorization failed Redirect URI http:/localhost:53025/callback is not supported by client.

MacOS Sequoia, VS Code 1.111.0, Firefox 147.0.4 (although also fails on Chrome 145.0.7632.160).

This just started happening as of this evening. I've tried restarting everything, and it doesn't help.

There’s more than a bit of irony in the author complaining about A/B testing and then, because they’re getting a lot of traffic and attention on HN, removing key content that was originally in their piece so some of us have seen it but many of us won’t.

Whilst I broadly agree with their point, colour me unimpressed by this behaviour.

EDIT: God bless archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr.... This provides a lot more useful insight that, to me, significantly strengthens the point the article is making. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start picking apart binaries (though it wouldn’t be the first time), but how else are you supposed to really understand - and prove - what’s going on unless you do what the author did? Point is, it’s a much better, more useful, and more interesting article in its uncensored form.

EDIT 2: For me it’s not the fact that Anthropic are doing these tests that’s the problem: it’s that they’re not telling us, and they’re not giving us a way to select a different behaviour (which, if they did, would also give them useful insights into users needs).

Are you finding this happens even in “Plan Mode”?