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I worked at a startup that had an unusually fancy landing page. I noticed that it was sluggish on my laptop. Someone pointed out there phone tended to heat up when showing it off to customers. We poked into what the contractor had done. They apparently used some bezier curves to animate stuff in a nice way. Each time the animation moved it computed the entire bezier curve to some superfine detail then picked a point in it and put the elements on the page.

It's there: https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/ascii-h...

My first impression when entering websites with such "hero animations" is noticing my gpu usage spiking and my power consumption increasing by 20W because somebody thought it was cool to have some pointless but "cool" canvas/WebGL/CSS (or whatever it is) animation.

Also on the HN homepage: https://cognition.ai/blog/frontier-code Not quite ASCII but pretty close!

explain why Craigslist, temu, etc. are all popular then? :p

I think they sort of do, it’s a form of signaling.

It’s the same game we play verbally with slang. Slang word gets made up, people use it so others know they’re in the group that uses the slang, usage spreads until it’s no longer a group indicator. You see it all the time as an age grouping. You can almost guess someone’s age by the slang they use for “good” (cool, lit, bussin, etc).

This is the same. Startups invent a new UI style to separate themselves from the incumbents, incumbents eventually copy the style, cycle repeats.

I think homogeneity is an unavoidable end game for the internet (unfortunately).

At work we’ve been discussing whether to migrate off our home grown component library to Material UI. I shudder at the thought, personally. However, a compelling reason to use a ubiquitous framework is that the ubiquity means folks intuitively know how to interact with your product.

Like many of us I was born into a deeply customizable Internet, all of my websites were green or red on black. They were a glorious amalgam of fixed width fonts and <blink> tags. With occasional wingdings characters for fun and games and complex <table>/<tr>/<td> tags for really epic layouts. They were l33t, honestly ^_^

But, as time goes on and more and more people use this thing, converging on the one-true-UX feels like a net good thing assuming the fundamentals are right. To some degree the LLM-ization of the Internet is essentially the end game of squashing the personality out of the Internet which bootstrap started.

We’re on the cusp of spoken word being the core UX of computers with a fall back to reading the LLM transcript, neither of which benefits from <blink>

It seems to me the parent commenter is saying the opposite: looking exactly like each other _is_ the point. It's a form of social signaling, to indicate that a project "belongs" to the in group of high-flying successful AI hype projects.

Note I'm not arguing that this is a good strategy. But given that so many people follow it I imagine it's not as bad as it appears on the surface.

Another way to get a lot of traffic is getting the top reply to the top comment on the top hacker news post. Speaking of which... https://github.com/SpyC0der77

I was in the Winston-Salem Flywheel coworking for eight years, good place. I hope the Greenvile site is as good.

In the marketing world this is called revealed preference. This stuff is A/B tested to death. Anyone trying to sell something is best served by watching people's behavior instead of listening to what they say, as the two are often different if not polar opposites.

I really wish there was a way to filter out the soy-O-face thumbnails entirely. I do not like them. I do not want to see them.

Its like when people say they hate politicians all the while they've been voting for the same Senator for the past 30 years.

I for one am happy never to have needed to use assembly.

Well, yes.

please share your few dozen components

The hard-coded Geico ad really ties it all together

My god, it's perfect.

> If you have any comments about our WEB page

Haha, this webpage on the inter network is amazing

Ok, now I'm tempted to buy BRK-B (BRK-A a bit too pricey...)

Ew. I mean 500 bytes of CSS would make this so much better.

If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.

They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.

I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.

I stopped doing that long before LLMs were commonplace because I couldn't see a point in it. Like, the entire concept of spelling and grammar is arbitrary anyway. Proper English and spelling of the 20th century is not the same proper English and spelling of the 18th century.

For example, "you" was originally the formal form of the second person pronoun, and thee or thou the informal form. Many writers who try to write midieval period pieces tend to get this wrong though and just use thee or thou as a direct replacement for "you."

And then English spelling and pronunciation is just chaotic anyway.

I won't go out of my way to misspell things and I'll do my best to use the best grammar and spelling I can, but I'm not going to consult an llm or grammarly to make sure it'll get no notes from an English teacher when my only purpose is to comment on HN or write a quick update on slack.

Claude's "write me a product description like a cool human would" is just using lower-case where it shouldn't be though.

The problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".

This is a great one to put in my vocabulary. It also ties into the "vocal minority" thing where people that aren't actually the best people to talk about an issue are the most visible.

Give me Navigator or give me death

Craziest m'island

Can you link to a genuine example?

Instructions unclear, am will.i.am

I hate

this

style of

"poetry"

Definitely using it for a hackathon project ( Live). The timing was too perfect not to try and use it.

What are the odds of LLM's being trained on this and picking it up as best practice?

100%

the distance b/w satire and SaaS is approx one quarter

Honestly I can just swap these bad boys in and ship in less than a couple hours if it'd be funny enough. I don't think they're bad designs at all, and I don't think every aspect of my business needs to be unique and obsessed over.

IMO this is like judging landscaping companies for all using similar looking shovels.

Janky?

Yes I think the satire is brilliant. It really does feel like just another saas.

lol. Genuinely curious, what is your reaction to so much "actually, this is great and useful" feedback?

sorry in advance if this post causes more sites to use that effect

Huh, perfectly snappy on my Firefox on Android.

Ironically appropriate

Can you show them all on the front page?

The author should have AI set up a simple deployment to EC2 and Azure and make an endless series of semantically meaningless AI companies with web sites and submit them everywhere. The web sites should also do this themselves.