I mean, that post says basically nothing of substance, compared to the post linked by OP.
That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.
I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
> Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
What low level code would that be? Position every element manually with JS and position: absolute? Flex and grid are the low level layout mechanics used for any responsive webapp. Even most native frameworks use the flexbox model.
no you still probably use layout algos but most variation on top of them in css is human preference v capability (Extra HTML Elements v Pseudo Elements etc).
Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
If Linus Torvalds published it I don't think that would make it worth throwing millions of dollars at. When you stop paying for one thing and start paying for another, you're making a value statement about what you care about.
Framework tried contributing money to GNOME recently. Sadly they also contributed some to Hyprland and Omarchy. As a result, Jordan Petridis / Alatiera of GNOME said they must "contain Hitler particles" to even consider sponsoring... a window manager and a Linux distro.
GNOME declined the money.
Framework also offered money to KDE. KDE accepted the money.
Framework released a computer that ran Fedora KDE: Freedesktop.org Code of Conduct committee member starts crying about the fascism of it.
Later, when DHH got the Omacom foundation's money pledges in, he contacted Arch/AUR people to see about sending some money or resources their way. They declined.
Some reactions on Mastodon to the Omacom announcements:
PostmarketOS dev: "nothing quite as depressing as seeing a fascist get 8 mil and corpo backing to keep building their 'distro' while not even having the funds to hire folks to work full time.
Elementary OS dev to that: "yeah it seems the trick to financial success is to do as much harm as possible"
And they go on to compare Omarchy to servants of the Chaos God Khorne in Warhammer. You know, a god of bloodshed and warfare. Blood for the Blood God, Skulls to the Skull Throne.
Meanwhile, eg. everything I've ever seen of Vaxry has been orders of magnitude more normal than raving about Hitler particles, and somehow he has a multiyear sponsorship to work on Hyprland fulltime, the maker of Quickshell got hired by Omacom, and some other projects they use have received sponsorships. Only Arch declined.
> One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
Said guy moved most of his own company to that distro, and he and his business partner each put down a million dollars of their own money. Just a while ago, when the foundation paperwork wasn't done yet, DHH said the Vaxry and outfoxxed sponsorships came out of his pocket in case there was a snag with setting up the foundation.
> You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
People seem to have been capable of not shouting about Hitler particles, and somehow it's those people who've been sponsored now that one dude managed to scrounge up serious money. Funny, that.
In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
"people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns.
"people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
Imagine there is a latin dance club, most want to dance rumba. But a pair who happens to be of other race wants to dance tango. Would sending them to another dance club be racist?
If some behavior associates with race, it doesn't mean that it is caused by race. There are plenty of African or Muslim origin people who assimilate just fine. It's just that a larger proportion than natives, some "other" groups commit more crime or live off of welfare. Race associates with less merit, yes, but doesn't cause it. Cause is merit, not race, hence not racism.
Imagine you're making a pizza, but you're out of pepperoni. Your mother-in-law is allergic to bacon. Now imagine I'm leaving your house and riding my bike into the sunset.
Like I said, if an attribute is statistically associated with another, then one doesn't cause the other. Proportionally larger part of the immigrants produce less value to society and come to consume away what the natives produced, then basis for reducing immigration or "remigration" is merit, not race.
If you are unable to point errors in this line of thought, then making fun of it will unfortunately make your stance look even weaker.
-- Proportionally larger part of the immigrants produce less value to society and come to consume away what the natives produced
This is absolute nonsense in every way, in addition to being racist and xenophobic. You aren't special because you won the lottery of what line you were born inside of. Get over yourself.
There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population. He assumes that you are only british if you are white and that london is worse now because there are less whites there. That has nothing to do with meritocracy, and arguable little to do with cultural non-fit.
There's a lot more to unpack in that article aside from just that, but that is the most blatantly obvious one.. And for what it's worth, I don't disagree with DHH on mass immigration. But he seems to have a lot more severe beliefs than just "mass immigration is bad".
> There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population.
There are many people who are mostly or wholly culturally British. I am not white and I live in the north of England and the biggest cultural non-fit is that my speech is obviously southern.
London does not, on the whole, feel very different culturally, from when I grew up there in the 80s. The biggest change in terms of the cultural impact of immigrants has been that of Eastern Europeans: things such as the availability if Polish food.
The racist accusation has been overused so much it's not just having diminishing returns, it's having no effect. If you can't argue someone's point but just throw labels at them, you are going to lose because the labels lose value the more broadly you apply them.
And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.
> Secondly, constantly berating him for having the wrong opinions and not explaining why those opinions are wrong are more likely to entrench his positions and anyone that is sympathetic to those opinions.
I do indeed accuse him of being a pseudo-intellectual troll, and that is the kindest interpretation of things he has actually written, including “As I Remember London”, which is creepy, deliberately misleading, has clear white-nationalist subtext and openly supports a crooked bigoted thug.
Nope, sorry. There are things in that article that are really a long way beyond having been deceived. They cannot and must not be minimised in that way. And nobody who criticises them should feel any blame if he doubles down; he is a wealthy privileged white man who is solely responsible for the things he says.
> There are things in that article that are really a long way beyond having been deceived
I don't believe so. Can you explain exactly how it is impossible he is deceived?
> They cannot and must not be minimised in that way.
Why not? To me what I described is what fits 100%. You just asserting that is the case hasn't explained why I might be incorrect.
You clearly haven't taken what I've explained to you on board at all. I suggest you bother checking out any of how this occurs in any other conspiracy circles, e.g., UFOs or just watching something that promotes conspiracy theories, such as Hunting Hitler (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5248878/). It's the same mechanism, just a different form.
> And nobody who criticises them should feel any blame if he doubles down; he is a wealthy privileged white man who is solely responsible for the things he says.
I am not saying people should feel blame for criticising him. I am saying that should be blamed for brow-beating him.
Are you telling me he cannot be deceived because he is wealthy? Plenty of wealthy and privileged people are/have been deceived.
I am not going to waste my time watching videos about UFO nuts to try to gain insight into why what DHH said about London is somehow a result of him being deceived and not his own fully formed opinions that he affirmed by deliberately writing them in his blog.
All you are telling me is that you are going to be wilfully ignorant. That is intellectually dishonest.
Constantly reiterating that he can't have been deceived when I've told you how it happens to people and there are similar examples elsewhere is being an ignoramus.
Is he, or is he not, fully responsible for the words in his blog that he wrote a year ago and has not amended or corrected despite very clear corrections of his misstatements of fact? (This is not even the only article where he has done that)
I don’t really give a crap if he was deceived, or how much pushback he gets, or whether he feels trapped by his own actions. He’s a big boy, he wrote what he wrote.
What he wrote is xenophobic pseudo intellectual nonsense tinged with white nationalist tropes, in support of a crook and a thug, and he is a fully grown man who is responsible for his own words on a commercial blogging platform he runs. He has access to all the same sources of information anyone else has.
You can call me names all you like but I think it’s kind of weird that you would go to bat for him like this.
What I find strange is that you said specifically that he couldn't have been deceived and then described Tommy Robinson as a crook. Your internal logic isn't consistent.
What I am trying to explain to you is that this may not be because he is some sort of unrepentant racist. It happens because it is partly a reaction to people like you who are preachy and moralistic and due to him listening to the wrong people after his worldview is rocked.
DHH probably sees the information you are referring to as being manipulated because he has been deceived. He literally doesn't believe that, so arguing from that starting point is completely pointless.
I've fallen down the political/conspiracy rabbit hole myself. I've seen it happen to other people. So I can empathise with someone else doing the same. Just because he has money doesn't mean he is immune to this.
The fact that you are unwilling to even bother entertaining any explanations is a moral failing on your part.
> You can call me names all you like but I think it’s kind of weird that you would go to bat for him like this.
You were unwilling to bother doing some basic investigation. This is quite frankly unacceptable tbh, especially after you expressed such strong views. That is being wilfully ignorant.
Also, there is nothing weird about what I am saying at all. I suspect, like others have done to me, you just want to call me a secret fascist simply because I don't want to condemn someone because they have expressed an unpopular viewpoint.
I am also fed up of this being brought up every time the project is mentioned. I am not the only one that is fed up of this sort of stuff. Recently I had two friends fall out recently over the Russo-Ukraine war. One of them simply said, "Look, dude, I don't care, I am bored of hearing it." The other lost the plot. I've also said this to some people I know someone on the right when they start going on about woke shite and leave our convo group after we said "I don't care about this stuff".
Why are you comparing someone that said a mild anti-abort thing to DHH tho? can you describe with your words what is DHH main talking points? mild racism? mild eugenics?
No idea who Jeff Geerling is, but about Rossman: He has his opinion about trans people. Some people have the opinion that he is a bigot as a consequence of that. I don't see the issue with that? Also, it's not like he'll lose his platform or his company over that, so I doubly don't see the issue here?
I don't support vagrancy and shitting in bushes. I would think most people can agree with that. That's a pretty low bar. You're the only one seeing races here.
It really lost something when Chris Coyier stopped writing for it. He just had a way of writing fun and approachable tutorials for this stuff, and the other contributors didn't hit the same style.
(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)
The author of this post is complaining about CSS-Tricks not getting paid.
If the person who works ("works") for Digital Ocean but is not getting paid, should pretty leave immediately if that is the case. :) I.e, demanding on some moral premise that this other guy who I don't like is getting money, is quite a "far-left" way to go about it.
The author of the post (Vale) is talking about how the editor of CSS Tricks (Geoff) is not being paid by the owner of CSS Tricks (Digital Ocean)
This is not the first issue since Digital Ocean acquired CSS Tricks.
I’d encourage you to educate yourself more on the situation instead of discounting people as “far-left” (whatever you think that means in this context)
Well, the post is calling David Heinemeir Hansson "far-right". I'd instead encourage him, and perhaps you, to educate yourself on what that means, then read up on his blog post(s).
Here’s a section from the Wikipedia page on far right politics:
> Key to the far-right worldview is the notion of societal purity, often invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines or a combination of them
It sounds like DHH is talking about “societal purity” and is “invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines”
If he is, then that sure seems like far right politics to me.
Right, but DHH's argument isn't about cultural homogeneity for the sake of it, but rather the consequences of what the other cultures have brought. Reading further from links from the blog, either to his other posts, to the Tommy Robinson march, etc., would tell you that. I.e, you conflate race with merit - because they do associate in the statistics sense, but one is not the other.
The OP on the other hand demands funds from a private company, main argument being that "this other person, who I don't like, got money, then a website I do like, should too".
I don’t really want to argue with you about whether DHH is far right because it’s tangential to the main point of the article and based on your response I don’t think we’d agree.
It’s not about “giving money to a website” it’s about the fact that Digital Ocean purchased a business and hired an employee and then ghosted that employee and stopped paying them (without firing them or shuttering the business.) Thats messed up
While unfortunate that the website is inactive, then any employer is pretty much free to let go any employee (and the employee dispute this if they have grounds for it from contracts). Not to circle back to the left/right topic, but if you think this is "messed up", then I'm not sure how you think the world works at all.
If the love for that site is so great, I'm sure someone will pick it up. Otherwise, I'd doubt "size of love" we are talking about here.
Gotta say, given the list of security issues that continue to be found in Omarchy, if I were an enterprising explorer, I'd be probing for shopify employees running Omarchy.
Tailwind is basically already EOL in its functional inability to support newer CSS features. Both of these projects seemed like the creator being fine with getting out with a nice paycheck, and that's ok by me, although it's unfortunate DO lied about how it would handle CSS Tricks going forward, and generally abandoned the tech writing aspect it was initially known for.
It's basically an app store and service manager for self hosting. You can deploy databases, auth providers, Git forges, a static site, anything you want with one click in a nice web UI. Hetzner only gives you a base Linux install and everyone knows setting up Docker from scratch is a pain.
Often politics, lack of vision, people being shuffled around, etc (e.g the stakeholder that decided of the acquisition just got moved to an another department, this kind of things)
Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
> Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
You're going to be singing an entirely different tune when the "call to pray" is sounded through out your country, your women are dressed head to toe in burkas and your 9year old daughter is being married off to elder men.
Western and eastern cultures don't mix. I could care less what they do over there. But I do care what they do over here.
There is a difference between someone who comes to a country and assimilates into the cultures of that country and someone who comes into that country to destroy it.
Sorry bro, but most immigrants today are here to take over and destroy the culture of countries. They should be deported or jailed and I'm not going to idle by while my country is over taken. I'll gladly be called a racist if that is the case.
> Let's call it what it is, someone crying because their project isn't getting the love it wants while someone new did. Welcome to life. This happens all the time in business. CSS-Tricks is old, it had it's time and now it's time to move on. DO can do whatever they want. If they want to focus on getting Omarchy popular, then so be it.
CSS Tricks was a massively useful resource. However tailwind and/or other frontend frameworks have abstracted a lot of this away and tbh I've haven't even bothered looking at the site in several years.
> And dude, what is with all the DHH hate??? The dude isn't a Nazi, fascist or racist. The dude sees the country he loves turning into a cesspool and wrote about it. We're seeing the same thing here in the US with all these immigrants taking over Michigan.
Unfortunately political polarisation is affecting everyone and everything.
The topic is an almost obligatory mention any time Omarchy gets mentioned. I've seen stuff like this webpage https://stopomarchy.neocities.org/ where they are claiming Jeff Geerling to be a fascist, which is obviously ridiculous.
I don't believe DHH to be a fascist or whatever (yes I read the blog post, it is standard reactionary politics that been around for about a decade now). I am not sure why feel the need to constantly mention it, I understand he may have some views that people disagree with, but he cannot realistically affect any change. The obligatory mention feels performative IMO.
Moreover, I deeply disagree with the politics of many prominent people (of all political persuasions) that are often front and centre in tech, you won't hear me mentioning it unless it is relevant to their work or they are in a position to actually affect change.
> I understand he may have some views that people disagree with, but he cannot realistically affect any change.
You keep saying that, but I think what you’re missing is that he can affect change. He’s a public figure with a large amount of influence, as made evident by the companies giving him money. His reach gives him the power to contribute to the normalisation of certain topics, thus moving the Overton window, and his opinions attract like-minded powerful people with political influence.
Ignoring him as just some powerless guy who cannot enact change is frankly naive, and a mistake the world has made before.
I am sorry but you severely misunderstand how politics work if you believe the amount of money and some notoriety online will translate into votes / enacting legislation.
Pretending that support for a Linux distro is going to translate directly (or at all) into political lobbying that is going to eclipse large donor groups that will sink hundreds of millions behind a candidate is delusional.
I find these sorts of conversations tiresome. Almost nobody who isn't interested in particular parts of the tech remotely knows who DHH is. He managed to secure some funding for his Linux distro. None of this directly translates to the broader political landscape.
I think you and others that pretending that this is the case, is borderline delusional.
> I am sorry but you severely misunderstand how politics work
I'd say you are the one that doesn't know but that's exactly how far right propaganda works.
They are all saints fighting their evil enemies for a noble cause - "their country!!!" as you mentioned while also having strong racist/xenophobic opinions about other countries.
I am quite aware how it works. What you are describing is nationalism which isn't what is happening online these days. Nationalism is an older form of propaganda / State control. I am not a Libertarian/Ancap but this is a concise description of the mechanism.
> Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage. If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.
May I politely invite you to fuck off with your racism.
Indigenous? What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously? Why are you so happy to be racist in public?
Stop getting your news from social media. Come over to London, have a pint in a Desi pub and try telling us that we're living in hell. See how that works out for you.
> Indigenous? What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously? Why are you so happy to be racist in public?
That's not an argument. Do you think it would be "racist" if Japanese people don't want to be largely replaced in their home country with white or black people? If not, why not?
Wow, Omarchy is hot right now. Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop. Good on Digital Ocean for making such a substantial commitment.
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
Omarchy is a highly opinionated distro. For example I remember DHH falling in love with alacritty a few minutes after switching from being a Mac hardcore user-evangelist (Mac users were furious in Twitter!). Now alacritty is in Omarchy as one of the four terminals available.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
> Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop.
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
Aren't all Linux distros ultimately a bunch of scripts on top of the Linux kernel? Compiled scripts, but scripts none the less. If someone made a bash compiler maybe that would help. Reminds me of when I used to compile DOS batch files to .com executables back in the day to make my work look more important lol
Getting linux to work flawlessly on M Macs is "just a bunch of scripts"? Wow. Since when tech folks judge the open-source projects so harsh and so much just after they only started?
On the off chance this isn't just trolling: Getting linux to work on M-series Macs was a ton of work and basically none of it was done by the folks behind Omarchy. Exactly the point being made in this argument and elsewhere is that the funding would be better off going to the people who really did the hard parts of that work (e.g. Ashai developers among others)
You might be missing most recent tweets, where there is ton of progress from omarchy team in this area. Also they have a dedicated team now working full time just on that.
Omarchy went and sponsored vaxry so he's able to work on Hyprland full time for 3+2 years, hired Quickshell creator outfoxxed and a kernel developer, sponsored upstream projects like mise, and tried to offer resources to Arch/AUR, who refused them.
And like the other poster said, they are actively working on M series support (building on Asahi's excellent work, of course) and making concrete progress.
https://geoffgraham.me/why-css-tricks-has-been-quiet/
That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
GNOME declined the money.
Framework also offered money to KDE. KDE accepted the money.
Framework released a computer that ran Fedora KDE: Freedesktop.org Code of Conduct committee member starts crying about the fascism of it.
Later, when DHH got the Omacom foundation's money pledges in, he contacted Arch/AUR people to see about sending some money or resources their way. They declined.
Some reactions on Mastodon to the Omacom announcements:
PostmarketOS dev: "nothing quite as depressing as seeing a fascist get 8 mil and corpo backing to keep building their 'distro' while not even having the funds to hire folks to work full time.
Elementary OS dev to that: "yeah it seems the trick to financial success is to do as much harm as possible"
And they go on to compare Omarchy to servants of the Chaos God Khorne in Warhammer. You know, a god of bloodshed and warfare. Blood for the Blood God, Skulls to the Skull Throne.
Meanwhile, eg. everything I've ever seen of Vaxry has been orders of magnitude more normal than raving about Hitler particles, and somehow he has a multiyear sponsorship to work on Hyprland fulltime, the maker of Quickshell got hired by Omacom, and some other projects they use have received sponsorships. Only Arch declined.
> One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
Said guy moved most of his own company to that distro, and he and his business partner each put down a million dollars of their own money. Just a while ago, when the foundation paperwork wasn't done yet, DHH said the Vaxry and outfoxxed sponsorships came out of his pocket in case there was a snag with setting up the foundation.
> You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
People seem to have been capable of not shouting about Hitler particles, and somehow it's those people who've been sponsored now that one dude managed to scrounge up serious money. Funny, that.
Spoiler: it's racism.
Incredible
If some behavior associates with race, it doesn't mean that it is caused by race. There are plenty of African or Muslim origin people who assimilate just fine. It's just that a larger proportion than natives, some "other" groups commit more crime or live off of welfare. Race associates with less merit, yes, but doesn't cause it. Cause is merit, not race, hence not racism.
If you are unable to point errors in this line of thought, then making fun of it will unfortunately make your stance look even weaker.
I guess you haven't felt the consequences yourself yet.
This is absolute nonsense in every way, in addition to being racist and xenophobic. You aren't special because you won the lottery of what line you were born inside of. Get over yourself.
Immigrants commit fewer crimes
Also, Muslim is a religion not a race
There are a lot of non-white british people (just like there are non-white americans), and he basically ignores that entire population. He assumes that you are only british if you are white and that london is worse now because there are less whites there. That has nothing to do with meritocracy, and arguable little to do with cultural non-fit.
There's a lot more to unpack in that article aside from just that, but that is the most blatantly obvious one.. And for what it's worth, I don't disagree with DHH on mass immigration. But he seems to have a lot more severe beliefs than just "mass immigration is bad".
There are many people who are mostly or wholly culturally British. I am not white and I live in the north of England and the biggest cultural non-fit is that my speech is obviously southern.
London does not, on the whole, feel very different culturally, from when I grew up there in the 80s. The biggest change in terms of the cultural impact of immigrants has been that of Eastern Europeans: things such as the availability if Polish food.
And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.
But that's very different than using your huge platform today to spread your hate.
Pretending those two are the same is dangerous. One of them does actual harm today.
This is not about digging up some old careless post. It’s about his current views which he posts proudly online.
I’ll note your post pulls a classic trick:
- these views are not that important to who he is
- anyway even if he did hold those views it’s not that big of a deal
- but also I agree with those views (even tho I am but a humble, reasonable centrist)
People have tried that.
DHH is at best a pseudo-intellectual troll.
I don't believe so. Can you explain exactly how it is impossible he is deceived?
> They cannot and must not be minimised in that way.
Why not? To me what I described is what fits 100%. You just asserting that is the case hasn't explained why I might be incorrect.
You clearly haven't taken what I've explained to you on board at all. I suggest you bother checking out any of how this occurs in any other conspiracy circles, e.g., UFOs or just watching something that promotes conspiracy theories, such as Hunting Hitler (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5248878/). It's the same mechanism, just a different form.
> And nobody who criticises them should feel any blame if he doubles down; he is a wealthy privileged white man who is solely responsible for the things he says.
I am not saying people should feel blame for criticising him. I am saying that should be blamed for brow-beating him.
Are you telling me he cannot be deceived because he is wealthy? Plenty of wealthy and privileged people are/have been deceived.
He is a grown man. Be serious.
Constantly reiterating that he can't have been deceived when I've told you how it happens to people and there are similar examples elsewhere is being an ignoramus.
I don’t really give a crap if he was deceived, or how much pushback he gets, or whether he feels trapped by his own actions. He’s a big boy, he wrote what he wrote.
What he wrote is xenophobic pseudo intellectual nonsense tinged with white nationalist tropes, in support of a crook and a thug, and he is a fully grown man who is responsible for his own words on a commercial blogging platform he runs. He has access to all the same sources of information anyone else has.
You can call me names all you like but I think it’s kind of weird that you would go to bat for him like this.
What I am trying to explain to you is that this may not be because he is some sort of unrepentant racist. It happens because it is partly a reaction to people like you who are preachy and moralistic and due to him listening to the wrong people after his worldview is rocked.
DHH probably sees the information you are referring to as being manipulated because he has been deceived. He literally doesn't believe that, so arguing from that starting point is completely pointless.
I've fallen down the political/conspiracy rabbit hole myself. I've seen it happen to other people. So I can empathise with someone else doing the same. Just because he has money doesn't mean he is immune to this.
The fact that you are unwilling to even bother entertaining any explanations is a moral failing on your part.
> You can call me names all you like but I think it’s kind of weird that you would go to bat for him like this.
You were unwilling to bother doing some basic investigation. This is quite frankly unacceptable tbh, especially after you expressed such strong views. That is being wilfully ignorant.
Also, there is nothing weird about what I am saying at all. I suspect, like others have done to me, you just want to call me a secret fascist simply because I don't want to condemn someone because they have expressed an unpopular viewpoint.
I am also fed up of this being brought up every time the project is mentioned. I am not the only one that is fed up of this sort of stuff. Recently I had two friends fall out recently over the Russo-Ukraine war. One of them simply said, "Look, dude, I don't care, I am bored of hearing it." The other lost the plot. I've also said this to some people I know someone on the right when they start going on about woke shite and leave our convo group after we said "I don't care about this stuff".
He's also spoken in favour of an agitator who appears intent on sparking a race-and-religion-driven civil inflagration in the UK.
Pretty solidly applicable terms, I am sorry to say.
Maybe no worse than JD Vance, Pete Hegseth or Trump, but then none of those people are figuratively one of our own.
Proudly ignorant and supportive of racism. Typical.
(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)
The editor of CSS Tricks who was hired by Digital Ocean is the one who is not getting paid.
I think it is morally in the right for employees to get paid by their employers
If the person who works ("works") for Digital Ocean but is not getting paid, should pretty leave immediately if that is the case. :) I.e, demanding on some moral premise that this other guy who I don't like is getting money, is quite a "far-left" way to go about it.
This is not the first issue since Digital Ocean acquired CSS Tricks.
I’d encourage you to educate yourself more on the situation instead of discounting people as “far-left” (whatever you think that means in this context)
> Key to the far-right worldview is the notion of societal purity, often invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines or a combination of them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
Here’s a quote from DHH’s post “As I Remember London”
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
It sounds like DHH is talking about “societal purity” and is “invoking ideas of a homogeneous community based on cultural, ethnic, national, racial, or religious lines”
If he is, then that sure seems like far right politics to me.
The OP on the other hand demands funds from a private company, main argument being that "this other person, who I don't like, got money, then a website I do like, should too".
It’s not about “giving money to a website” it’s about the fact that Digital Ocean purchased a business and hired an employee and then ghosted that employee and stopped paying them (without firing them or shuttering the business.) Thats messed up
If the love for that site is so great, I'm sure someone will pick it up. Otherwise, I'd doubt "size of love" we are talking about here.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-... Founding member, donating a million dollars.
I'm moving off Vercel / AWS. I kept DO for a Minecraft server for friends/family but that's dead.
Coolify's website [1] explains it better.
But for example, you can call a webhook once new resources have been created, so Coolify can push them to your CDN.
[1] https://coolify.io/
Plus, it's an EU company. I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business.
There were a lot of products and ideas that felt great during ZIRP but stopped making sense post-ZIRP. That's my take.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
(says something racist)
Let me say that the generalisations made in here about a far right minority march as if it is 'all brits' is brazen, but not naive.
He want's you to think all Brits think like this, in order to push his racist agenda. Let me tell you his mate Tommy Robinson is despised by many.
Don't fall for it. Divide and conquer. As old as British Imperialism.
Western and eastern cultures don't mix. I could care less what they do over there. But I do care what they do over here.
There is a difference between someone who comes to a country and assimilates into the cultures of that country and someone who comes into that country to destroy it.
Sorry bro, but most immigrants today are here to take over and destroy the culture of countries. They should be deported or jailed and I'm not going to idle by while my country is over taken. I'll gladly be called a racist if that is the case.
CSS Tricks was a massively useful resource. However tailwind and/or other frontend frameworks have abstracted a lot of this away and tbh I've haven't even bothered looking at the site in several years.
> And dude, what is with all the DHH hate??? The dude isn't a Nazi, fascist or racist. The dude sees the country he loves turning into a cesspool and wrote about it. We're seeing the same thing here in the US with all these immigrants taking over Michigan.
Unfortunately political polarisation is affecting everyone and everything.
The topic is an almost obligatory mention any time Omarchy gets mentioned. I've seen stuff like this webpage https://stopomarchy.neocities.org/ where they are claiming Jeff Geerling to be a fascist, which is obviously ridiculous.
I don't believe DHH to be a fascist or whatever (yes I read the blog post, it is standard reactionary politics that been around for about a decade now). I am not sure why feel the need to constantly mention it, I understand he may have some views that people disagree with, but he cannot realistically affect any change. The obligatory mention feels performative IMO.
Moreover, I deeply disagree with the politics of many prominent people (of all political persuasions) that are often front and centre in tech, you won't hear me mentioning it unless it is relevant to their work or they are in a position to actually affect change.
You keep saying that, but I think what you’re missing is that he can affect change. He’s a public figure with a large amount of influence, as made evident by the companies giving him money. His reach gives him the power to contribute to the normalisation of certain topics, thus moving the Overton window, and his opinions attract like-minded powerful people with political influence.
Ignoring him as just some powerless guy who cannot enact change is frankly naive, and a mistake the world has made before.
I don't think any of this is politically motivated (the Linux stuff). I don't see anything on the site that even mentions anything remotely political.
Also, perhaps read up on lobbying and historic cases like Citizens United v. FEC, if you think money plays no part in politics.
I think you and others that pretending that this is the case, is borderline delusional.
I'd say you are the one that doesn't know but that's exactly how far right propaganda works.
They are all saints fighting their evil enemies for a noble cause - "their country!!!" as you mentioned while also having strong racist/xenophobic opinions about other countries.
> Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage. If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.
https://mises.org/online-book/anatomy-state/how-state-preser...
May I politely invite you to fuck off with your racism.
Indigenous? What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously? Why are you so happy to be racist in public?
Stop getting your news from social media. Come over to London, have a pint in a Desi pub and try telling us that we're living in hell. See how that works out for you.
That's not an argument. Do you think it would be "racist" if Japanese people don't want to be largely replaced in their home country with white or black people? If not, why not?
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
Of course not but dhh makes it clear omarchy is not for everybody. And that’s all right.
And like the other poster said, they are actively working on M series support (building on Asahi's excellent work, of course) and making concrete progress.