Even if the OP is overreacting and this has some substance behind it I can really relate to his disdain for the current trend of flashy landing pages with only a "subscribe to our mailing list" box, youtube videos with hipster guys extolling the virtues of a (nonexistent) product in "layman terms" and overall modus operandi of "collect emails of potential customers, raise funding and figure it out later".
The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
more than 3000 lines of inline css in the site source code, that's not a good sign
They're probably using their own system to design/maintain the CSS classes, and inline CSS is merely the output.
Not exactly "no walled garden" then if the output can't be managed by anything but the original program.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#53This seems like a good idea, and certainly do-able. Whether the people doing it can bring it off is a separate issue. It looks like they like grid layouts. Everything is a rectangle. (On their site, a flat-shaded rectangle, like Windows 8+.) That simplifies things. You have some text and some pictures, and probably some action blocks (buttons, forms, zooms, etc.), and need a layout. View this as an optimization probl…
Thinking about it, I like the idea of using automated A/B testing to automatically drive layout optimization. That would be fascinating to watch. Provide the system with a supply of images and copy, maybe 5x as much content as the site shows, and let it optimize for maximum clicks.
Someone could probably get VC funding for that.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#54Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#55It seems to me that reacting to their marketing and reacting to their implementation approach are two different transactions. I'm a backer and am very impressed with their tech: noflo and constraint based style sheets and not only novel, they are very functional. And the idea that web publishing should abstract presentation away from content isn't new, but their implementation is very clean and emphasizes minimal friction for authoring, curating and sharing content with a self-hosted site. They have built a platform like tumblr but automation around styling and image processing. They store content as md files hosted in git and feed those into functions that do a nice job of automating presentation of that content according to some best practices and image processing that uses established AI technology. Take out the AI for color processing and you really have just a nifty publishing workflow that has built-in imagemagick support.
My understanding of their challenges in shipping have little to do with some AI grand vision and more to do with color theory. They have trained their ANN to pick the best color based on given inputs but the outputs doesn't always yield pleasing color combinations. The challenge is making colors work well with the supporting image of a content block while still being cohesive with adjacent blocks and the overall site. They should probably try solving for every style at the page level rather than trying to coordinate between blocks.
The flashy marketing video is doing its job: capturing interest and building support that leads to conversion. AI means something to somebody who is tired of wordpress and Facebook that is very different than a CS person that works on machine learning.
I hope they pull it off. I would be pretty shocked if they didn't, given the have come this far. I don't think that developers having thin social profiles is any indication that the project isn't going to be successful.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#56It seems to me that reacting to their marketing and reacting to their implementation approach are two different transactions. I'm a backer and am very impressed with their tech: noflo and constraint based style sheets and not only novel, they are very functional. And the idea that web publishing should abstract presentation away from content isn't new, but their implementation is very clean and emphasizes minimal fri…
They are basically asking people to pay $96 to buy a pig in a poke. So in exchange for saving $204 (which is what a one year subscription is claimed to be offered at) when the product is "done", you are putting $96 at risk against the possibility that the product won't be right for you, or worse, that they will declare that the product has reached "1.0" status with only the barest bones feature set.
Sure, maybe the site will automagically "adapt" as you load more pictures, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you might think that it looks ugly. And maybe how the site "optimizes" for particular goals is by using some canned stock phrases that you don't like and you can't customize.
Or maybe it will do the job implied by the marketing video. There's no way to know! No money-back guarantee (and if the company goes bankrupt, no recourse in any case).
Is that really worth $96? I personally don't think so. I'd much rather wait until it's done --- especially since they have VC funding --- and then decide for myself whether the resulting product is fit for purpose.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#57As a person who is building something similar, I do know this is certainly possible with today's technology. And most probably not a scam. The team is the same team behind noflojs.org, so they do have some credibility. But there is a misconception about Artificial Intelligence in general and its kind of true that the term is being overused. Putting couple of If/Else statement nowadays or using a Machine Learning libr…
Curious to hear how NoFlo imparts any amount of credibility to the team.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#58Currently, the absolute pinnacle of AI technology are programs which, in the highly specific contexts for which they were explicitly programmed, trick 33% of people into thinking they have the language skills of a 13 year old.
No.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#59As a person who is building something similar, I do know this is certainly possible with today's technology. And most probably not a scam. The team is the same team behind noflojs.org, so they do have some credibility. But there is a misconception about Artificial Intelligence in general and its kind of true that the term is being overused. Putting couple of If/Else statement nowadays or using a Machine Learning libr…
Curious to hear how NoFlo imparts any amount of credibility to the team.
It was a kickstarter proj they delivered on. Don't know anything about them, and only little anout this project. However, blindly, I would def. rather back someone who has delivered a project over one who hasn't.
Re: The Grid: Certainly Misguided, Probably a Scam
#60Currently, the absolute pinnacle of AI technology are programs which, in the highly specific contexts for which they were explicitly programmed, trick 33% of people into thinking they have the language skills of a 13 year old. No.
Yeah, anyone describing anything that Kevin Warrick is involved in as the pinnacle of anything* obviously wouldn't know a scam if it bit them on the face.
*Other than possibly hype generation