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.
As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.
This is why "running lean" for a B2C business is never something to take as a good sign from the consumer standpoint. Let alone the client. Those savings are not being passed to you, quite the contrary. they will in fact have their care and eat it by trying to throw more costs at you despite the supposed lower overhead.
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.
We don’t treat Next.js as a default. We use it only when it clearly fits the problem, and we’re careful about how much of its abstraction layer we actually rely on.
In practice, we keep architectures simple, maintain clear boundaries between frontend/backend, and are strict about security and deployment hygiene. When Next.js would add more complexity than value, we choose a simpler stack instead.
So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool?
That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.
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.
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.
Yeah, I agree on the AI front. Although outside of the AI page, I don't believe we have other content on it. It was intentional to keep it separate from the rest of the docs. I know we've recently discussed making changes / removing some of that content.
I love web components (one of the things that got me into Astro), but it can be helpful to reach for something like Solid when you get into more complex UI. Most Astro projects will never need to reach for that, which is why there's no UI framework available by default.
Astro definitely tries to stick to a minimal defaults approach by design. We'd rather people start from a simple, minimal boilerplate, and reach for solutions (e.g. UI frameworks, on-demand rendering) only when they run into a problem it solves.
I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.
But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.
I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.
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.
I need a name for people who dismiss an entirely new and revolutionary class of technology without even trying it, so much so that they'll not even read about any new ideas that involve it.
I've of course seen this note many times, but am inspired to seek the word's source. "Curmudgeon" has an interesting etymology --- unknown origin though a few possibilities and false starts:
I'm not entirely sure that's a fair association. The Luddites weren't against technology in general, they were fighting for their livelihoods. There very well could be a fresh luddite movement centered around the use of AI tools, but I don't think "luddite" is the right term in this specific case.
And I need a name for shills that handwave the whole magic thinking in a blog post and conclude with "oh my claude code pointed out correlations between atlas shrugged and steve jobs" I'm so much smarter and ready for the future that's coming.
You are damn right I didn't try it out. I try things published in journals, vetted by peers, with clear explanations and instructions. On the other hand, when the tone is "It's All Magic Sprinkle(TM)" my pseudoscience alarm goes off.
Why are you reading this comment section? Nothing here has been peer reviewed. In fact, all my comments here are written by an LLM, because I can't be bothered arguing with closed-minded people.
Oh but everything here is peer reviewed all right: it's sheep-reviewed. All sheep singing the same note. Where's the explosion of groundbreaking, uber-creative, world-shattering, reliable software from MagicDust LLMs that turn you into a 10x engineer? If anything, it generates a lot of noise. Tell you what: being 10x more productive with a statistical engine that will only bring out the most normal of normal solutions is the dream of the incompetent.
- 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.
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