Beautiful, boring, and without soul | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful, boring, and without soul

doc.cc

57 pointsalfirous13 comments

Author and readers might enjoy this piece by Christopher Alexander - A City is not a tree: https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html

A City Is Not a Tree (1965) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916408 - Dec 2019 (17 comments)

A City Is Not a Tree (1965) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090 - July 2015 (7 comments)

The subtle irony of this long article on organic beauty that slowly turns into a discussion of… consumer product design.

And not in an interesting or especially soulful way. Claiming that many things are soulless is probably correct, but naming the quality that cannot be named without even admitting that it's all AESTHETICS is kind of sloppy.

Started to think of the california redwoods around the bay area. big basin burned, but henry cowell has some magnificent redwoods to wander around underneath. You WILL get the feeling from the robert harrison quote.

The sad sad part is that all the mountains were clear-cut to rebuild san francisco after the 1906 earthuake. countless redwoods thousands of years old.

I guess the only parallel to consumer product design is how my view of "smart" devices has tempered over the years, and it is very infrequently I find wonder among the subscriptions and data mining.

Great article. This is especially true for every new product slapping on an input field for LLM chat in the same way.

I couldn't get more than a few paragraphs into the article. This is possibly the most egregious example of unusably low information density I've ever seen.

> What could be more important in life than how you make people feel?

Food, water, shelter, survival, comfort, security.

Is this a joke?

You can group your first three (food, water, shelter) under your fourth (survival). Then your next two examples are cases of how people feel.

On top of that you can find plenty of clear evidence for situations where humans choose feelings over survival, whether that’s giving up one’s own survival for the sake of people or a cause, or giving up on survival because emotional needs aren’t met.

It’s not as clear cut of a hierarchy as you seem to think it is.

Also air, kidneys, the strong nuclear force, the list goes on!

Sometimes, meaning (which is heavily connected to the way people feel) is all that makes people survive. Ask Viktor Frankl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com