if you zag when the world zigs, you're getting zapped
The age of average
61–70 of 493 posts
Re: The age of average
#62Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true. They didn't take that description and give it to ar…
I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling. The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or De…
5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format.
Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.
Re: The age of average
#63I completely agree. Same goes for websites, fashion ... and even the way people think. It's too sad
Re: The age of average
#64This article can be described as the age of cherry picked samples. Most people really want silver cars (but since they want to comply with crash tests and most people want high efficiency cars you get the same designs). AirBnBs won’t sell if it doesn’t look like every modernist interior design and asking many people to output a work of art will basically look like if you take stable diffusion with some boring parameters…
If you want to see exciting cars you have to pay for it. If you want to see fun skylines you have to go to unique places (I am spoiled by Chicago). If you want a cool place to stay at you really shouldn’t do Airbnb . Unfortunately using services that are cheap or don’t have must history then everything looks the same.
Re: The age of average
#65Ehh, pearl clutching over homogeneity in art and architecture is par for the course. What the writer needs to do is expand their horizons, and possibly, their vertices. There's tons of options out there if you take a minute to look outside of -/checks notes/- ... AirBnB? Really? Is AirBnB a good place to find a representative sample of interior design diversity?
Also, homogeneity is great when properly deployed. Imagine going to a city and not having to think about how the street numbering system works, or how to navigate the metro, or how to find an ATM because of a human-centered design aesthetic that is built around routines of daily life, instead of the 9-5 commute.
Re: The age of average
#66I used to think that the convergence of similar branding (logos, colors, etc) was the product of corporations hiring the same marketing consultants, but the part about the instagram aesthetic blew my mind. Looking through my wife's feed, a lot of women post pics in similar clothes, in similar poses, in similar locations, doing similar activities. We're dumb heard animals, apparently.
Perhaps we try to do the same as others (wear the same clothes, pose the same way, buy the same things, etc.) so as not to be an alien too much?
Re: The age of average
#67An interesting perspective on "user generated content all being the same" is the research "Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos" where time-lapse videos are reconstructed from the variations in the pictures of the same scenery being extracted to show the actual changes made over time. Even if changes in content may seem minute, it still does communicate samples of the underlying information distribution and its changes over time.
Re: The age of average
#68[deleted]
Re: The age of average
#69Another blogger notes similar trends and labels this 'refinement culture' - https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/refinement-culture
I appreciate the original poster's conclusion though – average is an opportunity for distinction. The takeaway seems to embrace uniqueness instead of trying to make your product look like everyone else's.
Re: The age of average
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured people were going to take issue with the opening anecdote about art, but that was simply the author trying to frame the story in an interesting way. The rest of the article was more compelling. The ubiquity of the 5-over-1 architecture in the US is very striking. The NY Times had an article recently called "America the Bland" [1] which challenged people to tell if apartments were in Nashville, Seattle or De…
5 over 1 is the result of regulations of various kinds converging resulting in economic pressures dictating that building format. Also unless land is just atrociously expensive, the marginal cost of adding floors doesn't go down. In fact it really goes up at some point. I've still never actually worked out how sewage works in supertall buildings.
I'm no expert but sewage seems rather simple in a tall building. You have gravity on your side so you "just" need longer pipes.
Its getting the fresh water up that should get exponentially more difficult as building height increases.