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Stealing Is a Skill
71–80 of 159 posts
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#72Good artists copy, great artists steal, plagiarists copy and paste CSS wholesale
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#73Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work. If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work. It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters. This seems like the web design version of this.
This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you do this?
It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying. Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
> Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
According to pg who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times.
I'd say Navisoft[0] might be a better candidate.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#75Isn't this essentially what LLMs do? Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.
When people finally offload 100% of their brain and forget how to use their creative reasoning abilities my guess is we’ll just all use Tailwind defaults across the board. No need to try new things, nobody will experiment because it’s so easy not to!
(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#76I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together. As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong? The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.
The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.
Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#77Anything for a buck!
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#78I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together. As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong? The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.
Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#79This 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 implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."
Re: Stealing Is a Skill
#80The 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 went to the Mintlify page they copied.
Don’t actually know what the product is and why it might be valuable to me.
Sure is pretty though.