I both agree and disagree with this article (which is mostly an ad for the studio, but such is life). The premise that now taste is the differentiator is one I see shared a lot. I think it's easy to agree with the sentiment because it's sneakily optimistic - we all think we have good taste, so we're all going to make it out of this alright.
> What the Gen-AI-enabled world needs now is better taste. It’s easy—trivial, even—to stand up a site or a basic app. But so what? Are you looking at the user experience from end to end? Are you questioning your own premises? Have you considered a completely, fundamentally different approach?
I think it's not just better taste that gets people to consider user experience end-to-end, or to question their own premises, or to try different approaches. It's effort. It's going in, using your app, considering how it will be used, and tweaking it (manually or through AI) until it's reached a standard you set. This process will also refine your taste and improve it - your taste is not something you're born with that sets your apart.
This process of repeated incremental effort and improvement is one that ultimately imbues the resulting work in your own style and creativity - not just the fact that you are a 'creative person'. Effort is still the moat. I struggle to explain this point as well as I want - I wrote about it a little here, but it's still messy in my head:
It's not taste. 90s and 00s web design was often kitschy, loud, and tasteless.
But it was novel because it was a new medium with (fairly) low cost of entry, which meant a lot of people could play with it. And the experimentation and play, and some of the kitschy garishness, defined that culture.
2020s culture does optimisation, not play. There are no rewards for experimentation and originality, no matter how fun it is.
You need a certain amount of wealth and free time to experiment and play, and the people who have those disapprove of everything which isn't about self-promotion and money. The people who don't, can't.
So that kind of creativity only happens on social media accounts with a couple of hundred followers, on a good day. It's not a collective interest, and it's certainly not marketable.
Which means creativity isn't a moat at all. People want what they want, and currently that the appetite for surprises and wonder is not high.
FWIW the "studio" as such is the primarily just the author (I know him personally). He's very talented and has been freelancing. He's intensely creative (I won't plug all his cool side projects here). He's a very good friend and I actually created an HN account just now for the express purpose of responding to this comment. I wanted to assure anyone reading that this is very much not an ad, it is a genuine expression of an individual smart & talented person.
Thanks for defending your friend, I respect it! I didn't mean to entirely undermine the content - it's clear a lot of thought was put into it - though that doesn't change that it is a bit of content marketing. Nothing wrong with that, I just think I instinctually "downgrade" articles when there's a CTA "Book Consultation" at the top.
The article intentionally is giving an overly optimistic view of the modern day, when giving the argument that "kids these days" are better off, and it's quickly contrasted with a pessimistic view:
> children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure.... Our children are living in a time of crisis
Yes it's stated less technically proficient than your version, but the point remains that you can look at the current internet as a blessing or a curse, and is mostly just an intro to the rest of the article
I think this is the first time on HN when I've been one of those people who didn't adequately look at the linked article before commenting, and boy is my face red.
Apologies for the self-promotion, but I learned about the Pareto Front from this site a while back - and applied it to Mini PCs with https://minipcs.zip which plots Mini PCs based on Compute vs Price (and other metrics) - highlighting the pareto front to find the optimal unit.
Thanks for posting this! It's an awesome tool. Makes me want to buy more tiny PCs. My only feedback is many of the ebay listings it points to are sold out, but I assume there's a limit to the freshness you can get. Still though, I found pretty good rates of success just pasting the important parts of the name of the sold-out listing into search.
> there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps
I have to very strongly disagree with this sentiment. I have personally tested quite a few no-name "4K 60fps" cameras from Amazon and AliExpress. Many of them upscale from 1080 - which is fine I guess - but then in 60fps will use a crop sensor and upscale from like ~640. Even with the more recognizable SJCam and Akaso brands, unless you're paying ~$200 - you're going to get upscaling, bad color science, bad image distortion. When comparing against a GoPro 5 (first 4k 60 entry) or 8 (first with USB C) the difference is astounding.
Though perhaps this is the difference between good and great that you refer to - but for me, it's certainly worth getting a used GoPro vs any of these modern cheap alternatives.
Unfortunately current new GoPros don't improve on their existing line enough to justify paying current prices. I wish I could get a new 2018 quality GoPro knockoff for <$200
I'll have to try and dig out a couple of the ones I bought and re-verify this. Really though the 60fps doesn't matter for the majority of users. Even the 4K aspect is overkill for most common things.
ISTR GoPro moved away from Ambarella SoCs several years ago and rolled their own, but most of the other cameras are using Amba, Novatek, etc., and certainly offer great performance for a fraction of the cost of GoPro.
It’s less that 4k 60fps doesn’t matter, but that most mobile cheap cameras are so poor quality that you don’t see much of a difference. The sensors are so small that switching to 60fps leaves less time for the shutter speed so you end up with a noisy image.
I saw a review on YouTube of a lot of these alternatives, along with the established brands, and in bright sunlight and little movement some were ok but quality was all over.
However once it got a bit darker, or heavy movement, the big brands left the rest in the dust pretty much.
So yeah, do a bit of research and figure out your use-case.
Thanks for the feedback - horrible how? It works fine on my Android but someone else said similar that uses iPhone, just not sure exactly what the issues was
I'm on Google pixel 10 xl, everything could be nicer in general, the chart isn't very smooth when scrolling around etc
But the main problem is I can't seem to reliably click on a node, it works occasionally but if I find one I want to click on, it either takes ten taps or some I couldn't just open what so ever.
Ahhhhh I'm guessing that's a Device Pixel Ratio issue I completely forgot to consider (EG rendering 4x pixels than it should makes it slow, and the nodes smaller). I'll play around with it, thanks for the heads up
I intentionally have them excluded - I guess because my use case is mostly gaming, homelab, plex server type stuff. But people use them for OpenClaw and whatnot right? I'll add em back in
I have a desktop with a relatively powerful 5070 (I think) GPU for playing VR games. But my priorities for couch & controller games is not really around super high graphics performance.
Lately I find myself playing classic games on emulator, or generally games without huge graphics demands (been playing that climbing game PEAK a lot lately).
For me, getting a random no-name-brand Mini PC is such a fantastic deal these days. Throw bazzite or now real Steam OS on it, have access to your whole library - it's a linux machine you can configure to your hearts content. I love it. Probably the best deal on amazon right now is this machine, though there's others if you know how to search.
I've always worried about latency for that - but it's ironic since I regularly stream over dedicated WiFi to my Quest VR headset. I'll have to give it a try some time. If they have some asynchronous reprojection tech for streaming that would be ideal
Exactly - I just built myself a knockoff Steam Machine by putting Steam OS (might switch to Bazzite but so far real Steam OS is fine) on a $300 Mini PC and I'm super pleased with it. 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 7640HS runs all of my library just fine, though to be fair, I'm not much of a AAA super modern high-graphics gamer. Doing a lot of emulation these days.
I had little opinion on .zip but this convinced me to go figure out how to block .zip tld. Why would someone risk all those attack vectors when there is so much available on the many other tlds. I could see myself getting caught by many of them.
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