The issue with Whisper is that it messes up both names of both products and guests. What we aim to do is make new subs, but including all the product names and guest names as hints, so Whisper will get them right.
It's so refreshing to see a proper website these days, no js, no cookie banners, just hypertext. Your part about still enjoying programming really resonated with me. I still get so much joy out of programming after 20 years of doing it, it's still just as exciting to learn new things, and I am definitely not running out of new things to learn.
I would absolutely love to teach programming to non-programmers. I have also been offered a job at the technical school where I graduated. But remembering how uninterested the vast majority of my classmates were back then discouraged me from even trying. I guess what I'd want is a teach a room full of people excited to learn about programming.
This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.
Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.
I like that we are stagnating. One of the things that took us away from the early content-focused days of the web is when every business had to get their brochures online, and every designer had to make their mark with how creative they could be. It vastly threw off the signal to noise ratio of web sites, and it delayed good UX for at least a decade because everyone re-invented menus and buttons on every web site.
Don't get me wrong. I like creativity. I am an artist, even have a degree in Fine Arts. But there are times to innovate, and there are times to just make things work. Web UX needs to just work.
The vast majority of buildings do follow the same regional templates though.
The reason they’re not specifically concrete cubes is more to do with the relative unpopularity of brutalist design than it is to do with the artistic flair of architects.
In fact I’m sure most architects would love to stamp more of their creative personality into their work but they have to dial it back for cost and practicality reasons.
Here in my area of Belgium it's become very popular to build modern cube buildings. Flat roof, featureless. No longer brick but a flat white, grey or black outside.
i find it absolutely disgusting.
We're really just reinventing brutalism but without much of the commendable outcrops like the barbican or whatever.
The only reason The Barbican (London) works is because wealthy people moved in. In my opinion, it's still a very ugly estate but it is a well maintained estate. So people can still admire its design.
Whereas other examples were left to deteriorate because wealthy people moved elsewhere. And thus all people see is dilapidated, ugly concrete.
While we are on the topic of brutalism, one of my most disliked Sci-Fi tropes is concrete buildings used as "futuristic" buildings. I honestly think the only reason they do this is because concrete is featureless so it could be from any era. If they used Victorian-style architecture or Germanic Gothic buildings then all you'd see is historic-looking architecture which would pull you out of the moment. But I, personally, cannot "unsee" concrete buildings in Sci-Fi. Everytime I see that I just see lazy set design. Plus I'd hope in a few hundred years we'd have found a better building material than concrete.
I understand that it’s easy as analogy but I also could compare to shopping carts around the world. When it’s a tool the design converge to something similar for the job at hand. For corporate businesses a website is a tool. I won’t expect an artist or museum website to look like a corporate one
I am not so sure shopping carts are that great of a counter example. There are plastic ones like target, heavier duty ones, the weird ones at microcenter, lumberyard style, hand baskets, short ones, drag behinds, ones with kids car toys built in, tiny ones for kids to yeah along, ergonomic hand baskets, etc.
Then there are the innovations people had tried over the years like different styles of kid seats, calculators built into the handle, coupon scanners built in, security boots on the wheel, Aldi store coin lock connectors, motorized baskets, Ikea escalator locking wheels.
Thinking further, the designs change across the various countries I have visited over the years.
On top of this, I can visually picture all the different styles the groceries and department stores use near me to "brand" their carts and experience directly(Target's specific branded plastic carts and baskets). The very much see the shopping cart as part of their customer experience and have experimented with different setups. One could argue that the scope of utility for a shipping cart is miniscule compared to many websites. And yet, there is actually a lot of variety.
Given how there are people dedicated to so many seemingly insignificant corporate details(email signatures and other branding activities), it seems custom "website experience rules" would slot right into that line of thinking.
Yes but in itself it’s not meant to be artistic, what you describe is to me variants of the tool. Creative variant yes, but not for art purpose. Just like a website. Maybe somewhere in the world there might be an artistic version of a shopping cart but it’s not a tool anymore and it’s not found where it belongs, in a supermarket
I’m so happy I was not the only person to notice that.
A bit quirky is exactly how I would have described it and once I accepted scrolling one direction would move the page wherever the designer wanted, I was fine.
I guess we found all the kids at Ender’s battle school that couldn’t imagine the enemy’s gate as “down”.
I do wonder how HN specific this is? Every site that has a quirky design or attempts something new gets absolutely blasted by surly people. But then someone posts a funny GeoCities style bootstrap theme and everyone goes on about how they miss when sites had a quirky touch?
I really think it's just simply about scrolljacking and not anything deeper. The GeoCities style sites have normal scrolling and the F1 site has hijacked (and very bizarre) scrolling. If your site hijacks the scrollbar then you will get complaints on HN. Keep it in mind and see how many HN complaints you read that are actually just about scrolljacking. I think readers here love quirky websites as long as it doesn't mess with scrolling.
When I “blast” a website design, it's for practical reasons, not because I dislike the design. Since I mostly read HN on my phone, every website that is slow, laggy or unreadable on mobile just stands out negatively.
From the well aged book "Don't Make Me Think", people read the web differently than books. Almost always they are there to find information or get something accomplished, not for aesthetics or pleasure (though social media has likely skewed this since it's penning)
This is why consistent UX beats out cleaver design (churn)
Like if someone wants to do crazy stuff, that’s fine, do it as an art project, whatever.
But IMO the only people who benefit when businesses and institutions are required to turn their websites into works of art, are artists. Everyone else is worse off.
In Eindhoven, NL, there is a similar system without app. At night traffic lights are red by default, if sensors in the pavement detect an approaching car they turn green in time. If there are no other cars you never have to stop. Great system and has been there for a decade at least.
To be honest: not a fan. It creates a completely new image based on a photo, rather than fix it. The Einstein photo shows particularity well how pretty obvious facial features just get removed.
The results look nice, but they are definitely not a restoration, but a generated image.
I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule. There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as correct. Since I always verify what ChatGPT spits out, it wasn't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage in, garbage out.
Yeah, I also find very often llms say sth wrong just because they found it in the internet. The problem is that we know to not trust a random website, but LLMs make wrong info more believable. So the problem in some sense is not exactly the LLM, as they pick up on wrong stuff people or "people" have written, but they are really bad at figuring these errors out and particularly good at covering them or backing them up.
O3's web research seems to have gotten much, much better than their earlier attempts at using the web, which I didn't like. It seems to browse in a much more human way (trying multiple searches, noticing inconsistencies, following up with more refined searches, etc).
But I wonder how it would do in a case like yours where there is conflicting information and whether it picks up on variance in information it finds.
I just asked o3 how to fill out a form 8949 for a sale with an incorrect 1099-B basis not reported to the IRS. It said (with no caveats or hedging, and explicit acknowledgement that it understood the basis was not reported) that you should put the incorrect basis in column (e) with adjustments in (f) and (g), while the IRS instructions are clear (as much as IRS instructions can be...) that in this scenario you should put the correct basis directly in column (e).
I think this will be fixed by having LLM trained not on the whole internet but on well curated content. To me this feels like the internet in maybe 1993. You see the potential and it’s useful. But a lot of work and experimentation has to be done to work out use cases.
I think it’s weird to reject AI based on its current form.
Writing a complete API client for the Internet Archive in Typescript, with proper documentation, proper typing, unit tests and integration tests, so people can have a proper library for both front-end and back-end applications.
Just because your site uses cookies does not mean you need a consent banner to be GDPR compliant
Unless you're tracking people or sharing visitor data with third party services, you're likely not doing anything that requires consent. See here: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
And not more credence than TFA. GDPR has legally very little to do with cookie banners as other comments have already pointed out. I am pretty sure nobody has been ever improsened because of not asking consent for storing cookies. Even for hefty fines you first need a hefty turnover, so that site seems unaffected. And obviously a couple of 100 millions are not hefty for Meta, Google & Co. They make bigger profits by taking the risks of not being in compliance.
I agree with you, but I hope schools also take the opportunity to reflect on what they teach and how. I used to think I hated writing, but it turns out I just hated English class. (I got a STEM degree because I hated English class so much, so maybe I have my high school English teacher to thank for it.)
Torturing students with five paragraph essays, which is what “learning” looks like for most American kids, is not that great and isn’t actually teaching critical thinking which is most valuable. I don’t know any other form of writing that is like that.
Reading “themes” into books that your teacher is convinced are there. Looking for 3 quotes to support your thesis (which must come in the intro paragraph, but not before the “hook” which must be exciting and grab the reader’s attention!).
Most of us here took their education before AI. Students trying to avoid having to do work is a constant and as old as the notion of schools is. Changing/improving the tools just means teachers have to escalate the counter measures. For example by raising the ambition level in terms of quality and amount of work expected.
And teachers should use AIs too. Evaluating papers is not that hard for an LLM.
"Your a teacher. Given this assignment (paste /attach the file and the student's paper), does this paper meet the criteria. Identify flaws and grammatical errors. Compose a list of ten questions to grill the student on based on their own work and their understanding of the background material."
A prompt like that sounds like it would do the job. Of course, you'd expect students to use similar prompts to make sure they are prepared for discussing those questions with the teacher.
> Of course, you'd expect students to use similar prompts to make sure they are prepared for discussing those questions with the teacher.
what's the point of the teacher then? Courses could entirely be taught via LLM in this case!
A student's willingness to learn is orthogonal to the availability of cheating devices. If a student is willing, they will know when to leverage the LLM for tutoring, and when to practise without it.
A student who's unwilling cannot be stopped from cheating via LLM now-a-days. Is it worth expending resources to try prevent it? The only reason i can think of is to ensure the validity of school certifications, which is growing increasingly worthless anyway.
Coaching the student on their learning journey, kicking their ass when they are failing, providing independent testing/certification of their skills, answering questions they have, giving lectures, etc.
But you are right, you don't have to wait for a teacher to tell you stuff if you want to self educate yourself. The flip side is that a lot of people lack the discipline to teach themselves anything. Which is why going to school & universities is a good idea for many.
And I would expect good students that are naturally curious to be using LLM based tools a lot to satisfy their curiosity. And I would hope good teachers would encourage that instead of just trying to fit students into some straight jacket based on whatever the bare minimum standards say they should know, which of course is what a lot of teaching boils down to.
This has been observation about the internet. Growing up in a small town without access to advanced classes, having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less as a result of unlimited access to information would be depressing if it did not result in my own personal gain.
I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.
> having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less
when wikipedia was initially made, many schools/teachers explicitly denied wikipedia as a source for citing in essays. And obviously, plenty of kids just plagerized wikipedia articles for their essay topics (and was easily discovered at the time).
With the advent of LLM, this sort of pseudo-learning is going to be more and more common. The unsupervised tests (like online tests, or take home assignments) cannot prevent cheating. The end result is that students would pass, but without _actually_ learning the material at all.
I personally think that perhaps the issue is not with the students, but with the student's requirement for certification post-school. Those who are genuinely interested would be able to leverage LLM to the maximum for their benefit, not just to cheat a test.
