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Comment by theturtletalks

3 days ago

Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.

Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.

[0]. https://www.refactoringui.com/

(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library.

If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.

  • I should’ve clarified. My apps are all open source so it didn’t feel right putting their UI for free out there. It does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to design components myself.

>>Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design.

In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.

Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.

  • Not only are you wrong (LLMs are horrible at reproducing anything that isn't fairly ABUNDANT in the training data), but it's also quite sad.

    AI can write a whole book on anything. You can take anything, even make up a phenomenon, and have an AI write a whole factual-sounding book on it.

    How that isn't clearly an indicator to you that it produces loads and loads of BS, I'm really not sure.

    • It works because if you want some information on React or say Python, or say Prolog. Whatever information ChatGPT generates is quickly verifiable, as you have to write code to test it.

      Even better many times, it shows me new insights into doing things.

      I haven't bought a book in a while, but Im reading a lot, like really a lot.