lizhang · 1 months ago

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

SamBam · 1 months ago

Huh, perfectly snappy on my Firefox on Android.

NuclearPM · 1 months ago

Janky?

eranation · 1 months ago

100%

scottyah · 1 months ago

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.

visha1v · 1 months ago

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

sgt · 29 days ago

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

arnley · 29 days ago

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

hyperhello · 1 months ago

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.

ghurtado · 1 months ago

Ironically appropriate

ghurtado · 1 months ago

Give me Navigator or give me death

arboles · 1 months ago

Can you link to a genuine example?

arm32 · 1 months ago

Craziest m'island

arm32 · 1 months ago

Instructions unclear, am will.i.am

Cthulhu_ · 29 days ago

I hate

this

style of

"poetry"

frantathefranta · 1 months ago

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

nozzlegear · 1 months ago

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.

quotemstr · 1 months ago

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".

otter-in-a-suit · 1 months ago

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.

abustamam · 1 months ago

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.

andy_ppp · 1 months ago

My god, it's perfect.

halapro · 1 months ago

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

jrflo · 1 months ago

The hard-coded Geico ad really ties it all together

SpyCoder77 · 1 months ago

> If you have any comments about our WEB page

Haha, this webpage on the inter network is amazing

alex_suzuki · 29 days ago

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

Cthulhu_ · 29 days ago

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.

marknutter · 29 days ago

I get the joke, and I do appreciate it. I shouldn't have been so flippant in my comment, I was more just pushing back on people who disparage others for using ai to create websites.

thewebguyd · 1 months ago

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.

wnevets · 1 months ago

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

all2 · 1 months ago

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.

jsdalton · 1 months ago

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.

dayjah · 1 months ago

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>

everforward · 29 days ago

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.

zevyoura · 1 months ago

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

aaronharding · 1 months ago

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

hdjrudni · 1 months ago

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

freehorse · 29 days ago

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.

sidewndr46 · 29 days ago

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.

_the_inflator · 29 days ago

See? It is about goals.

There is a reason why landing pages don't use distraction.

As a platform lead and product lead with millions of customers, be assured that you are not your customer. Never ever think of you as the focus of your website if you want to have success in business.

If you want to sell or marked and money as well as the slightest bit of seriousness is involved, you have to follow industry standards and never your own taste which is highly misleading.

Boring first is a good statement and principle to follow. Always track and A/B. There is a reason why all landing pages look the same kinda, and at least follow a certain structure.

Any deviation from it won't help you, even though you personally enjoy your personal website. You would be surprised what other visitors think about your website, how they perceive it, use it, and I mean literally everything: browser size, smartphone model, screen size, scrolling, click behavior, colors - everything.

I am so glad the psychology of online sales has matured. It is in everybody's interest to work in a trustworthy environment and using the right approach signals a company acknowledges and appreciate its customers.

I learned it the hard way, but got the lesson. I am totally different. I find many landing pages fishy, while they are the most successful there are, and like exploring on my own as well as fantastic animations.

On the other hand, I value the text only principles of everything serious from archivex and Pubmed. I am a developer fist, who loves animations sind decades. But this is bad for business. ;)

nwatson · 1 months ago

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

SpyCoder77 · 1 months ago

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

ceejayoz · 29 days ago

The IT people know no one's really buying just off the flashy website alone - because they don't! - and that it'll get management to okay it.

consumer451 · 1 months ago

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

aogaili · 28 days ago

And who are you my therapist? Just argue the point, this is not group therapy forum. Passive-aggressive people are the angriest/nastiest people around.

butz · 29 days ago

Thank you, animation looks really neat.

lizhang · 1 months ago

please share your few dozen components

phatskat · 29 days ago

At first I had a good chuckle of “this really encapsulates the tropes, even down to being React” and the more I scrolled through the components, it looks like a very serious library - lots of knobs to turn and consideration for various implementations!

jdw64 · 1 months ago

Well, yes.

Cthulhu_ · 29 days ago

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

andrewstuart · 1 months ago

Can you show them all on the front page?

myaccountonhn · 29 days ago

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