That and developers often conflate knowing how to construct UIs with how to design UIs. When lynx was first built, the difference in speed probably wasn’t that noticeable and people didn’t have the same expectations for responsiveness, so it didn’t matter, though times quickly changed.
I don’t know about that project specifically, but based on my experience trying to do design work in developer-controlled projects, maintainers and core users often convince themselves that some terrible user-hostile counter-intuitive UI— focused on graphically representing the API to the back end rather than using abstractions to solve the problems users actually want to solve— is the proper UI approach and if it doesn’t fit your use case, the problem is either you or your use case.
I’m not sure how it could possibly make the problem worse if the problem is already endemic to modern websites in a form far more heavily used than that ever would be.
That’s sorta the case with frames and asynchronously loaded stuff anyway though right? I think they just consider the problem solved in practice through scripting and frames. Besides, HTML doesn’t have room for that— they need room for all the features nobody uses and cares about. XD I’ve been writing HTML to some extent for 30 years and I periodically come across shit— not even new shit— that I swear I’ve never even heard of.
That depends on the project. I’m a technical artist— sometimes my personal projects get pretty elaborate and pretty technical and don’t have the equivalent of an MVP that can be put together with a few handmade pages. Even something like a simple gallery of images that each have their own page (or the functional equivalent) is going to involve a ridiculous amount of manual work right off the bat. The only dumb way to approach it is not considering the right tool for the job.
What the grandparent comment was referring to was eschewing static site generators in favor of entirely handmade html and css. The person you’re responding to was arguing in favor of static site generators for the reasons they listed. I was advocating for a simpler breed of SSGs than we have now for simple tasks, and this project seems to fit that niche. Most SSGs these days are only trivial if you’ve got current web developer knowledge at your finger tips.
Fair enough. It is rather telling and should be extremely concerning to the insurance industry that in our extremely polarized political culture of late, this has been a the largest patch of common-ground many of us have stood on in a long time. Obviously not a total common ground issue, but I can’t think of anything bigger recently.
Nothing, if they’re simple enough to do that. Not all of them are. I’m a commercial artist and designer, so things like layout are important and need to be updatable on multiple pages because individual pieces often have their own pages. Updating 15 nav headers in a gallery on your site to save a couple of hours setting up something better suited to the task is just terrible architectural planning. At the same time, I don’t need an embedded rich text formatter and CDN support and azure integration and blah blah blah. Use the right tool for the job, and my job often calls for something ostensibly like this, which fits a neat niche.
I think the core ideas of the ACA with the public option was originally Gingrich, in response to Hillary Clinton’s much more aggressive proposal for single payer, right? And then before the federal ACA, “Romneycare” was implemented in Massachusetts (without a public option, but with preexisting condition protection and not allowing separate high risk pools) by Republican Governor Mitt Romney. I think the discourse ended up polarized because Obama presented it that it seemed really partisan but the person that killed the public option in a Herculean commitment to insurance company profiteering was none other than liberal centrist Senator Joe Lieberman. This is not a partisan issue. There are obviously going to be ideological pockets in the extremes but outside of that, for the most part, the only people that are stepping up to defend the insurance companies are in their goddamned pockets.
My interest in this is piqued. I’m really happy to see people doing things to simplify personal standalone website authorship making it expressive and flexible without a bulky content management system or jumping through hoops for some front-end toolchain. I know when I’m developing things I’m often as or more concerned with satisfying multiple use cases or functionality extensibility, but having a nice focused tool polished for one use case is nice. When I was deep in web dev and had my machine set up with a selection of go-to docker setups for different dev needs and the knowledge of how that all needed to be orchestrated was fresh in my mind, deploying most of the SSGs or whatever seemed trivial. Now in the odd event that I have a personal project or whatever that indicates more than just a few static handmade pages, the first thing I do after looking up what todays web world consider to be the “obvious” best tools and practices is see how many people are asking about counterintuitive config issues or other getting-started type problems. As cool as whatever application might look, I know I’ve got about two good hours in me of recall, research and troubleshooting before I just say “fuck it. Guess I didn’t want to do that project anyway.” The point of those tools is to save time and energy — you don’t have to get very far outside “the loop” for it to take more effort than it’s worth to get back in for a lot of them. Simple tools for simple tasks are great when you know you’ll never ever need built-in hooks to wrangle graphql queries and automatically invalidate CDN caches and generate 10 sizes of images optimized for every conceivable device or whatever.
Huh, really? I feel like I see Elixir folks sing the praises of beam pretty regularly. Specifically the OTP supervisor stuff for fault-resistant server deployments. I haven’t looked specifically for that though recently so maybe people are taking it for granted?
> I've done a colonoscopy without anesthesia before... it was a non-event. This is pretty common from what I understand elsewhere in the world. Americans are just super uncomfortable with their bodies so I guess we prefer being put under?
It depends on what they do while they’re in there. If they’re just taking pictures then it’s fine. If they find anything they usually cut it out immediately. I can tell you from experience that having a piece of inflamed colon cut of and cauterized while you’re conscious isn’t a “non-event” as cool as it might be to watch on the monitor.
They found cancer in my colon during a follow-up for a ruptured appendix, several years before the age for recommended colonoscopies. I recently had one and asked they go light on the anesthesia, so I was in and out. They removed a polyp while I was awake and it was pretty uncomfortable. The idea that you shouldn’t even have that much anesthesia is insane. These people are morally bankrupt and frankly I don’t care what it takes to stop them.
Gosh-- that might be as impolite as taking people's work without notifying or compensating them to directly compete against them in a global marketplace making chintzy simulacra. But gee whiz look at the tech!
This is great! I viscerally dislike the "we're going to do art for you so you don't have to... even if you want to..." side of AI, but learning to use the tools to get the satisfaction of making it yourself is not easy! After 2 decades of working with 2D art and code separately, learning 3D stuff (if you include things like the complex and counterintuitive data flow of simulations in Houdini and the like) was as or more difficult than learning to code. Beyond that, taking classes is f'ing expensive, and more of that money goes to educational institutions than the teachers themselves. Obviously, getting beyond the basics for things that require experienced critique are just going to need human understanding, but for the base technical stuff, this is fantastic.
Yeah I’m a tech artist— I definitely see the commercial appeal and as someone that traversed a pretty smooth gradient from dev to design over a couple of years, I’m very familiar with what the majority of developers think about designers.
But it’s really hard to overstate just how badly these takes misunderstand art as an entity. So much “as a super brain genius developer, I know that true art is [glib definition that excludes nearly all artists] so any true artist must think X about AI, so if you don’t think that, you’re not a true artist and I can feel good about ignoring any reasonable ethical business boundaries.”
The fact that this comment is gray says everything that you need to know about this entire comment thread. A tiny slice of people that know what they're talking about and a giant stack of people drunk on dunning-krueger-fueled overconfidence in their understanding of art, on philosophical, practical, and professional levels thinking they've got the authoritative word because it's just so dang loud in the echo chamber. The tendency for technical people to think they can outmaneuver subject matter experts on their own terf with a few a priori thought experiments has always annoyed the hell out of me, but I can confidently say there has never been a more frustrating time to be both a professional artist and software developer.
Exhibit A for technical people alienating artists: this comment section. Why in the world would an artist willingly interact with a group of people that said these sorts of dismissive, hostile, arrogant things about their practices and professions? It's ridiculous.
the very idea that art requiring a significant amount of deliberate action is a problem to be overcome and not part of what makes it fulfilling-- like artists have just been practicing to so they can produce more work more quickly-- betrays a foundational lack of understanding of why people do it.