alabut · HackerTrans

hace 18 díasdiscuss

Oh no, they're going to knock down Soma? Such an iconic all-ages venue.

hace 25 díasdiscuss

Oh yeah, we’re already there. In fact it’s a pre-ai thing too, where I saw a cyclist YouTuber explain how making thumbnails look too professional is an anti-signal. People often crave authenticity over production value.

alabut

hace 25 díasdiscuss

I get the impression a lot of people use ai to clean up writing when English isn’t their first language, which unfortunately means they can’t see the robotic generic tone it creates. E.g. the references to user groups in Buenos Aires.

One way they could maybe counteract it is approach it like code golf - can you use an LLM to make it much, much shorter? Because being overly verbose dilutes the handful of points you’re trying to make.

alabut

hace 29 díasdiscuss

Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.

Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.

alabut

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Simon Willison made a similar parallel recently:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic...

  “The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on.

  If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote.

  I’m going to look at their documentation and I’m going to use it to resize some images. And then I’m going to start shipping my own features. And if I start running into problems where the image resizer thing appears to have bugs or the performance isn’t good, that’s when I might dig into their Git repositories and see what’s going on. But for the most part I treat that as a semi-black box that I don’t look at until I need to.”

alabut

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Well that's a first - a nice clean landing page explaining a pivot that still retains a personal touch in both design and writing. Makes me want to try out their new thing.

alabut

hace 2 mesesdiscuss

Don't know why this is getting downvoted. AI as air cover for layoffs seems very plausible for at least some companies, especially the ones that were already predisposed to doing layoffs pre-ai.

alabut

hace 3 mesesdiscuss

Sure, notifications are inherently disruptive by nature and there’s an admin tax to turning them off. But unless you’re installing new apps every day, it’s a one-time fix and not an ongoing distraction.

That’s the realistic gray area in between the extremes of the argument. I enjoy the analog experience of my 20 year old Nikon the way you like your Casio, but they’re also both luxury items precisely because neither one is inherently important to daily life. They’re fun toys, not real tools.

alabut

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

At least they’re making some kind of minimal disclosure. So many of these fluff pieces have the same format PG complained about two decades ago:

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

alabut

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

Ha! CSS is at the very bottom.

It's not exactly a fair test for stylesheets since so many styles look similar but aren't actually boilerplate setup, but it does capture the Groundhog's Day feeling of frontend work.

alabut

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

Promoting the good parts is very worthwhile and there’s a thriving scene. A bunch of interesting people talk over zoom and IRL regularly because of events.indieweb.org and we just had our 3rd annual weekend camp here in San Diego a few weeks ago.

I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.

alabut

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.

Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.

alabut

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that mattered, then micro.blog and other “Indieweb in a box” services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least as big as Mastodon.

The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.

Which is fine. Small is beautiful.

alabut

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

I’ve been an Astro user for the last two years and I can’t recommend it. RSS support isn’t native, doesn’t support anything other than plain markdown, and all of the extra magic of MDX and their custom .Astro templates is wasted without feed syndication.

My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.