I'm confused - could you explain how the board/flag animation relates to Bend's compile time checking? Is it actually a direct demonstration of Bend running a check?
The check is happening in between the animations. When the AI edits the code, Bend will check if all laws still hold, mathematically so. If not, the AI repeats, until that's the case. So, the animations just show what happens to the app with and without Bend's involvement.
This is really great work, but I think a lot of folks on HN don't look kindly on the CSS Zen Garden or that era of CSS. They think the markup/stylesheet separation of concerns was a terrible idea, an idea that Tailwind exists to fix. (I think they're wrong, that separation of concerns is good, Tailwind is a hack, and get off my lawn while you're at it.)
The point is - now the modern vanilla web platform really can support first-class CSS-styled app components, from design systems, in production. This is really cool!
HTML and CSS were originally designed as document-oriented languages for digital document display; think MS Word or PDF with cross-document hyperlinks, and not an app SDK. The idea was simply "style your web site's titles, headings, paragraphs, footers, etc. in just one place; change it there and the whole site will update". That's the dream that CSS Zen Garden was meant to showcase. Interactivity and web apps came later, and CSS has taken a very long time to catch up.
But catch up it has, and I'll be glad when frontend web development sheds Tailwind and React in favor of the updated vanilla web platform; and I won't complain if we use super light web component libraries like Lit[0]).
I agree completely. Personally, Tailwind never really resonated with me, though I've used it several times, and we did even briefly consider it for this project. I always felt that it was an approach created by people who never understood the paradigm of CSS, and didn't want to. Since my career started with CSS, I've always been more of a purist.
I think a collection of basic utility classes (w-100, m-2-t) and layout components (<Flex dir="row" gap="2">, etc.) are equivalent ideas, and they are nice for quickly setting up a one-off layout that's very readable. But Tailwind turns this practical idea into a religion that locks projects in to using it and harms readability.
Human readability is a very useful proxy for good modularity and separation of concerns (and modularity increases scalability and reusability). Since LLMs take the whole thing in at once, they are terrible at module boundaries. (They also suck at theory of mind, and their comments reflect it, but I digress.)
That's what's glaringly missing. Nicotine. It's extremely mind-altering, and it's been u-bi-qui-tous in the Americas for millennia - and for centuries in Europe and the world.
Makes you wonder what kind of selective pressures it exerted on the evolution of modern man. Select for chill and veg out types? For believers in cure-all panaceas (and snake oil)? For people who enjoy sucking on things? Or for something more sinister. It is the most fascinating evolutionary pressure.
Because in March of this year 2026 Nature published research that revealed that nicotine and its agonist buddies that stimulate niconitic acetylcholine receptors in the brain majorly screw with the reward system in the effort department.
The Nature March 2026 research showed that nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it and vice versa makes meaningful effortful behavior meaningless. That displaces ambition and is very insidious cumulatively in all sorts of overt and sneaky ways. It's not even zombification, it's fundamentally creating bees that not only enjoy being worker bees but have zero ambition for anything else. I mean, we can talk about how profound this is and has been, but tobacco lobby will stifle any serious conversation before they even commence.
> nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it
*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.
To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?
It's clear that nicotine binds to those receptors, but exactly how that plays out is far more complex in practice, depending on a whole host of variables.
- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each
- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present
- etc.
You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.
Please state your conflicts of interest before you diminish the impact of that research some more. Can you make yourself argue for the positive effect that article has even a tiny bit? That we are a happy peoples who are discovering just how profound of an effect nACHR agonists like nicotine can have? Focus on the positives.
Authoritarian Communism and its variants mostly fail by the same standard: lots of misery and death.
A good principle here I think is “a thing is what it does.” It effectively banishes all the sophistry that these kinds of ideologies deploy in their defense. No, a thing is what it does, and these ideologies murder and impoverish.
I find it really disheartening that so many people today seem to want to revisit one of these two ideologies. These are the failed death cults of the early 20th century. They should be forgotten.
If what we have is not working we need new ideas, not these.
The modern right wants to replace democratic rule of law with enlightened despotism focused on eliminating perceived racial, sexual, and ideological impurities.
The modern left wants universal healthcare and high taxes for billionaires, similar to the well-known death cult of Norway. /s
The president has given up pretending to obey the law. He's torn down the east wing of the White House (which does not belong to him), he's issued Executive Orders that contradict a plain reading of the Constitution (14th amendment, among others), he has gratuitously and repeatedly violated the Emoluments Clause, he has used the DOJ to attack political enemies on the thinnest of pretenses, he is continuing an illegal "armed conflict" in violation of the War Powers Resolution, etc, etc. This has all been documented thoroughly elsewhere: the president acts like a king and demonstrates contempt for his oath of office.
That, in combination with his civil rights abuses, are tantamount to fascism. Under the guise of "immigration enforcement," he's unleashed a horde of undertrained, overpaid henchmen who apparently act above the law, killing people, including US citizens, and denying medical care to detainees, without any fear of accountability. He's also sought to withdraw citizenship from and cancel visas to those people who are legally in the US but, for whatever reason, displease him. This kind of capricious, content-based discrimination, without Congressional oversight, is exactly what the Founding Fathers fought to prevent.
I wasn’t talking about people who want social services like Sweden or Norway or more progressive taxes. That’s why I used a double qualifier of “authoritarian communism.”
That being said, I see that kind of rhetoric and adjacent rhetoric around.
Not really. I see it on social media though… the way I saw fascist and fascist adjacent ideas blossoming on social media in the 20 teens. It feels like it’s coming the way I saw fascism coming in 2014.
That makes me think first we will finish our current bad LARP of fascism with our tacky parody of Mussolini or Franco (Trump is more like them than Hitler) and then we will do some kind of bad LARP of communism in the 30s when youth unemployment and the total decimation of entry level jobs really starts to hurt bad. It will (like fascism is doing for the grievances it was marketed to) make everything worse, because these fascism and communism don’t work.
It’s probably waiting for a good populist (which means a charismatic malignant narcissist) like a tankie Trump. Imagine a more extreme Mamdani or Bernie Sanders with Trump’s narcissism.
Ultimately we are LARPing these bad ideas because there are no new ones. It’s a testament to intellectual bankruptcy that anyone takes fascism or Marxism seriously in 2026.
(Lack of anything entry level was already a problem before AI. Now we are looking at there being basically no entry level jobs in multiple fields other than “bot herder.”)
> what if your neighbor's political views are an existential threat to you personally?
Then you are uniquely placed to show them you're not the baddie they thought you were. Say hello, introduce yourself, smile and wave, bring cookies or stuff from your backyard garden once in a while, be personable.
Firearms lobby, institutionalized prejudice in law enforcement, Justice system, etc all have made this additional labor of the marginalized minority extraordinarily dangerous.
> Then you are uniquely placed to show them you're not the baddie they thought you were.
Great idea! If only we had thought of this sooner. We could have avoided Jim Crow and segregation if only black people had thought to be friendly to racist whites!
If you're in physical danger, then flee. I'm not talking about that. There's a bigger reality than your street - pay attention and be wise.
But at the same time, it is true than many white kids had racist parents but chose not to be racist themselves, largely because they rubbed shoulders with black kids and learned they had a lot in common with them. Don't underestimate the power of patience, kindness, generosity, and general personability to win, eventually. It took a generation of integration before racism disappeared from most US neighborhoods.
> I haven't talked personally with a racist in probably 25-30 years.
How do you know that you haven't talked with a racist? Are you in the habit of asking new acquaintances if they are racist, and then believing their answer? Or do you just assume that all racists wear the same uniform?
A racist is known by their speech or actions. Like making prejudicial comments about people of one or more other races, or demonstrating through actions that they do not view other races as equals. If someone does neither, then they're not racist.
The last people I heard do that were my grandparents - like "Did you hear? She married a black man." with raised eyebrows.
You didn't answer my question - do you have racist neighbors?
If your friends are not making unprompted bigoted statements, all it means is that they are tactful. I hope you can understand that bigotry is more subtle, in comparison with your grandparents' generation when it was more socially acceptable.
Do you know the definition of the word "prejudice"? It means "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience."
You say you think a lot of my acquaintances are racist, without even knowing who I am, let alone who they are, let alone what they act like or say. That's pretty extreme prejudice.
Don't judge people before you've at least learned who they are.
> You say you think a lot of my acquaintances are racist, without even knowing who I am, l
Nothing personal. The fact is that a lot of people are racist: that's the basis of "implicit bias" which I gather you did not bother to read about, despite my encouragement. Given that, it's statistically likely that everyone knows a racist. I know plenty of racists, and I wish I didn't. I'm not judging people, I'm just playing the odds.
As I understand it, structural racism is less of a notion and more of a series of facts; eg: post WWII white servicemen largely got easy bank loans and a greased entry into generational family owned housing, black servicemen didn't, real estate agents and HOAs redlined (?) rental and purchase applications to separate out black American families, infrastructure tended to destroy and break up black communities over white communities, etc.
Fair enough then, you don't reject past structural racism existing as a fact, and likely acknowledge that has cast a shadow that continues into today's US society.
You might want to be clear to the other commentator (I'm just a drive by) what the "notion" is that you reject.
> I reject the notion of "structural racism". That's not about civil rights, it's critical theory masquerading. It's a destructive ideology.
It's clear that you didn't read past the headline of the article that I linked, since the article makes it clear that structural racism is not the same as implicit bias.
You are welcome to disagree with the extent that structural racism is present in American society today, but it makes no sense to dismiss the idea of structural racism. Slavery, as practiced in the US before the civil war, is a clear example of structural racism. Or do you think that race did not play a part in slavery?
> It teaches us to suspect everyone around us, which promotes division and hatred, not love and unity.
Perhaps, but that's an argument from outcomes, not from principles. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I read the first few paragraphs. It's all critical race theory and intersectionality. A worldview I reject. It leads to odd conclusions like saying it's impossible to be racist against white people, or that a black person can't be racist.
That's absurd. It's possible for anyone to judge another person by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character or their actual traits. No race is morally superior or inferior (and to say otherwise is very racist).
> It's possible for anyone to judge another person by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character or their actual traits.
It might be helpful if you understood the definition of "racism" as used in this article before you reject it. Racism is not the same as discrimination. I agree that anyone can judge another person by the color of their skin: that's racial discrimination. Racism (again, as used in this article, not necessarily as used in everybody life) is defined as a particularly hierarchical view of the races based on social order. Thus, by that thinking, black people can't be racist because they aren't in a position to oppress white people.
But all of that is a digression from the original point of this conversation, which is implicit bias, according to which everyone is somewhat racist because they judge people at an automatic, unconscious level. You might find this article less challenging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype
> I haven't talked personally with a racist in probably 25-30 years.
Let me guess, you mostly mingle with white people? It's a different story among Latinos, Asians (toward blacks and other Asians), but especially among African-Americans.
> Let me guess, you mostly mingle with white people? It's a different story among Latinos, Asians (toward blacks and other Asians), but especially among African-Americans.
Fascinating. I've found the perfect example of "white victimhood." Thank you for sharing your truth that "minorities are the real racists."
Oh, you must be one of those anti-White racists...
> White Democrats showed the effect: they imposed a somewhat weaker norm against offensive statements targeting Whites than against statements targeting other racial groups.
> So there is genuine evidence of something reasonably described as selective tolerance of anti-White prejudice among White Democrats.
> The present study demonstrates that Whites (in comparison to other Americans) are also more likely to perceive a social norm governing anti-White prejudice. Interestingly, the strength of this norm follows a political ‘gradient’ and is most pronounced among White Republicans.
> Within this context, an interesting question is whether this norm can be expected to spread outside the core of White Republicans? For instance, it is possible that racial minorities within the Republican party will come to adopt the same position as White Republicans on the social inappropriateness of anti-White prejudice (in much the same way that White Democrats have come to adopt norms around anti-minority prejudice). At the same time, the social norm appears strongly linked to the Republican party. And given current levels of affective polarization in American society, efforts at norm propagation will likely make little headway among Democrats of any race. These considerations therefore suggest that the norm against anti-White prejudice is likely to remain a ‘particularistic norm’ for some time to come.
> What we used to call "politics" now encompasses some fundamental aspects
That's less true IRL if you just talk to people and be personable. There's something about seeing someone face to face and chatting that helps you intuitively understand you have a lot in common with them (or not) - and regardless of their political opinions either way.
I find that the sorts of life choices people make and the character they have as a result is a far better discriminator of what they actually have in common (or don't) with others.
I do talk to people. A lot. I live in a politically mixed area, a lean-red town in a solid-blue US state. Most people keep their "political" leanings to themselves but it doesn't take very long to get a clue. I'm thinking of one friend-of-a-friend with whom I interact fairly frequently. I know their views on current events not because they've said anything directly to me but they're active on Facebook and other friends have shown me some posts. What do I do? Pretend it doesn't bother me that they have chosen to advance causes that I believe are actively undermining our society? Right now I'm polite to them. But I feel like it's dishonest on some level.
Speaking from my own moral compass - I don't think there's a moral obligation to bring up politics with people I know with whom I disagree. They have their opinion, I have mine.
I think that's even true when a horrible ideology is gripping a nation. The Bolsheviks and Red Guards were not to be reasoned with by neighbors in their heyday. "The wise man sees trouble coming and hides himself."
I'm reconsidering here - there's a long distance between "someone believes in a harmful ideology" and "someone is an informant". So yes - there's ample room to talk with people.
"He who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins" (James)
- helps agents and engineers make better data model, data structure, design pattern, naming, and algorithm choices
- surfaces incorrect irregularities or outdated exceptions to a rule
- enables clean, independent upgrades of parts of a system to improve performance
- reduces stale references in code and comments (and the confusion that results, both from agents and humans)
Bad modularity is basically a summary of what usually constitutes pathological code in general, but AI systems seem particularly disposed to sling lots of it (at least humans are constrained in their output rate). How often have you tried to grok an AI-built project and found trivially unreusable code, unnecessary duplication (everywhere!), bad data structure and algorithm choices, and stale references?
I'm confused - could you explain how the board/flag animation relates to Bend's compile time checking? Is it actually a direct demonstration of Bend running a check?
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