121–130 of 159 posts
The best way to make a really boring and generic product pop is... by copying a really boring and generic marketing page. God I miss the old internet. Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-early-...
I recently discovered that the author of gzip still retains that 90's feel on his home page: http://gailly.net/
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I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/ If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right. https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.
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You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either.
"You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothing to further the conversation, and it’s a criticism that can be leveled at literally any project that isn’t concealing the fact that they’ve used AI when everyone uses AI now except for artisan work.
Go on, I dare you to try to redo what I did. You won’t even know where to start, since I had to buy a book from the 2000s on Viaweb and implement templates based on the contents. Now kindly leave me alone.
Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? I think the line is pretty clear here. I remember the old Dan Mall's article on this topic which is much more inspirational (and "correct"): https://medium.com/@danielmall/stealing-your-way-to-original...
> Is the state of the webdesign really in a point where people bluntly copy others work for commercial purposes and celebrate these acts on their blogs? Yes and the reason is not subtle... We'll see much more of that now: people defending theft and then arguing that if you change the position of one comma in the entirety of Harry Potter , then it's an acceptable new product. It's crystal clear why: LLMs are very good…
History rhymes, indeed. Almost two centuries ago, Balzac wrote:
> A man spends ten years of his life searching for an industrial secret, a machine, some kind of discovery, he takes out a patent, he believes he is master of his thing, he is followed by a competitor who, if he has not foreseen everything, perfects his invention with a screw, and thus takes it out of his hands. [Illusions perdues, 1843]
And can I just say, thank you for writing something you can read in five minutes. Incredibly grateful for someone who respects the reader by not dropping 3,000 words on them - easy though it may be.
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If it is, I'm sure that you can easily produce that documentation.
https://kunekuneyokai.home.blog/2019/01/18/virgil-abloh-stea... from a quick look.
Some (not 100%) of this was from lesser-known designers; thanks to his reputation, I'm now aware of several of them. I recognize the ambivalence I personally would feel if someone famous "stole" my art, reposted it, and my original post was subsequently found and exploded in engagement, but never to the level of the post of the person who "stole" it (a hypothetical analogous to the subject at hand). By extension, I recognize that this isn't a perfectly clean practice.
If you read the blog, some of his work was explicit collaborations, though. Evidently, some people saw value in his "theft" and were happy to leave the doors unlocked.
And then there is, of course, the "macro-level" elephant in the room: the fact that he was a black man in a role mostly occupied by white people, in an industry with hundreds of years of history of the same kind of "theft" that he engaged in - often not of young creatives in stable and affluent Western democracies, but poor artisans in communities whose entire historical trajectory could have been changed with the proper attribution and remuneration for their work.
For better or worse, Virgil Abloh's career exists in and is recognized within that context, and his "theft" is tolerated because of the way criticism of it would seem to impugn the industry at-large, and perhaps force changes within it that would be rather uncomfortable for all involved. Much easier to just celebrate him as a visionary. Are they being true to the realities or just lying big? shrug Either way, don't hate the player...
(The important thing is that GGP is technically wrong :).)
(I expect disagreement, please just do it thoughtfully, based on what I actually wrote.)
This isn't stealing in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" sense. This is just straight copying/plagiarism. To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementatio…
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Gosh hacker news is so disappointing nowadays. You show a project, you say hey, this is hard, I’m proud of it, and someone comes along and tells you that ackshually it was easy because you used a few prompts. You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either. "You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothin…
But the intention to blatantly copy and then pass off as your own, that is just bereft of creativity.
My favorite quote that expresses this idea is from Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47: “Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field.”
A good example of why this is true I see in my bubble is in Indie tabletop RPGs. Fairly regularly if you follow indie rpg websites and forums, you get the following "I am sick of how Dungeons and Dragons does X so I made a new system". They will then proceed to describe Dungeons and Dragons but with some half-baked idea that is already done in some other game. So you might say "Hey this is already done in Traveller".…