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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2024

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  • The ongoing trend of “flat UI” is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don’t mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had “flat design” due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.

    The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like “all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic” (luckily this one is on its way out) or “war on physical buttons” aka “touchscreens everywhere”… it’s simply a design trend.








  • Projects having a self-appointed “BDFL” has become kind of a red flag for me in general. I know the term is used somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still I find it really offputting. Ruins the vibes.

    Has happened just recently that I found an interesting project, was excited about it and even thought about becoming a contributor eventually… until I saw that its founder calls themselves “BDFL”, and then I just noped out.


  • Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

    Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop… blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs… noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these “AI” generators can’t leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don’t know for sure, and maybe I’m doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff…

    Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with “art things made by actual humans”, but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

    This sucks so much. I don’t want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know… How can trust be restored?