[echelon]

God damn, we are living in the future.

I love this so much.

Designs like this would never have seen the light of day in the cellphone incrementalism / corporate memphis era of tech. Now people can be weird and awesome again.

This is 1980's cyberpunk / late-90's Matrix / early-00's sci-fi UI. Great ideas that died to frutiger aero (which isn't a bad design aesthetic) and flat design (which is).

This is fun and it's got great colors and I love it.

It's so refreshing to see this.

AI rules. This is the best timeline.

[andersonpico]

What do you mean designs like this? This is 2016-cyberpunk-neon-era inspired by video game interfaces, these are not uncommon at all. Google something like "discord cyberpunk theme" or "cyberpunk rice site:reddit.com/r/unixporn" and you'll find endless examples. This isn't suprising at all obviously.

[brailsafe]

I'd say the only thing it's a newish aesthetic for is web UI that isn't implemented in Flash, but even then there's been periodic resurgences. Command and Conquer, Starcraft 2, I'm sure there are tons of examples I'm unaware of.

The only recent novel addition—I'd speculate—is the specific influence of Cyberpunk the game with its shiny surfaces and pink highlights, but even then it's hardly new.

[ricardobeat]

Uncommon in commercial products - they all use the same flat, bland design language.

[GPerson]

I feel that AI has deeply diminished my ability to be weird and awesome, because my weird and awesome takes time and the results I can share with others are outshined by the machine.

[jjcm]

IMO what makes things awesome is human hours invested.

The ramen shop website above is pretty, but it's a veneer. It's not weird and awesome, it's just a representation of a site. I spent about... 7 minutes of my life making it. It's a tech demo, nothing more.

If someone actually poured their heart and soul into a vision for a cyberpunk themed ramen cart, and happened to use this because they didn't have the capabilities or funds to do a proper design, suddenly it becomes less of a veneer, and more just a component in the wider vision of that individual. Their human hours poured into the wider thing that's the business becomes what matters.

Ideally what AI does is it amplifies the hours we do pour into things that are weird and awesome, it doesn't replace them.

[ultimafan]

Strongly agree, I feel like my passion for development as a whole has waned away as AI has gotten more prevalent.

We do things to achieve some end result but it's the journey there that is the most cathartic to me. The "skilled crafts" element of development where careful deliberation and hours of tinkering to get any kind of appreciable output you can admire has been replaced with a one stop dopamine button that skips the whole process that I could find myself getting lost in.

I've taken up carpentry/metal working as a result. Maybe someday we'll have live in robots that do the same for those hobbies that AI did for programmers but I can't see it happening any time soon.

[hangrybear666]

Yeah I feel the same. That's why I've canceled my claude subscription and code everything by hand again, because building skill and mastery in a craft is fun and rewarding. Having a machine do it for me is neither. Fortunately coding is my hobby so there is zero pressure to optimize it.

At my workplace management is pushing AI, so I am using it in order to establish sensible and thoughtful applications of it and in order to know when to call out colleagues for pushing mindless automation out of complacency or blind obedience.

[kami23]

You should have seen some of the Flash sites people made in the mid 90s early aughts. They all seemed to be straight up screenshots of the desired website and then buttons stapled on random portions.

They were an accessibility nightmare, but you use what you got. I tried so hard as a kid to understand flash, but had to settle on MS Frontpage to publish my first RPG page.

What's old is new again.

[jjcm]

Designs are here if you want to play with em: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/68c5bb3d-467e-4841-b49d-c008e72...

This was just from a prompt "A cyberpunk themed ramen food cart website. Should feature menu, locations, and an ability to put in an order for pickup. Simple and clean website with angular cyberpunk microglyphs, pink/teal colors."

[wilkystyle]

This comment resonated with me so much, and it seems to be a minority view (at least on this website).

I have found myself empowered by AI to tackle all sorts of things that would have too high of a barrier to entry for me to want to spend my limited time on as a busy father who is also working at a small startup.

And when I say that, I do NOT mean that I can crank out a bunch of slop and label it as something I produced even though I don't understand the code. I mean that I can do things like go back to college math that I never appreciated at the time and honestly felt too scared of. I mean having an on-demand math tutor that ask clarifying questions to as I struggle through the problem sets.

I have found that it actually accelerates learning how to code in various problem domains because I can tell it to answer my questions at a conceptual level and be a sounding board, but to never actually write code for me. It can review the code I write and gently nudge me without giving away the answers, so that I still struggle through the learning process and actually gain the knowledge.

And finally, for the first time in like 10 years of feeling overwhelmed and daunted by the prospect of learning game development (I have no background in that), I have found Codex to be an incredible boon for learning with the Godot engine. It helps me understand the terminology so that I know what to search for and what documentation to read. It helps me map my computer science knowledge from other domains into the game world, and to understand why things are structured the way they are. And because Godot saves all of the scenes and geometry and lighting and shaders to the file system as text files, Codex can inspect the results of the work I'm doing in the IDE and help me track down things I'm stuck on, and explain what the issue is. For example, why my pre-baked global illumination lightmap is breaking my ambient lighting configuration.

I know it has never been easier to cheat and skip the hard work that results in actually learning something, but for me, personally, I cannot believe the incredible value that $20 a month has provided me. I have never been more excited and eager to dive into tackling hard things I had previously been afraid of or simply too overwhelmed to attempt.

It has never been easier to quickly prototype and get a feel for some idea you have in your head to see if it even has legs. Simply seeing a quick prototype of an idea is often all of the excitement and fuel I need to then take it and make it a real project.

[hangrybear666]

Your approach seems sensible. Especially the part about discussing concepts to gain understanding instead of having output generated for you to avoid having to think. Unfortunately, most people are interested in shortcuts and thinking less and will ultimately deteriorate in their abilities the more they abuse these tools to skip the learning process.

[theappsecguy]

We are going through yet another generational wealth transfer and people are being squeezed to the absolute brim with layoffs and daunting lack of career prospects.

But sure, lets cheer that funky website designs are back on the menu…

[kypro]

I'll add to this...

The "funky" websites of the past were mostly a result of tech immaturity and a lack of profit motive.

Businesses have been able to easily install templates like this for at least a decade. They don't because stuff like this looks cool but isn't very functional.

AI isn't going to make your local restaurant have a funky website, it's just going to make everyone who use to work directly and indirectly for that company unemployable. And even the local restaurant will close down because they can't compete with the multi-national competitor that has automated their kitchen with AI.

[andersonpico]

I agree with most of your comment with one exception: It will never be economically viable to replace kitchen staff with AI.

[kypro]

> It will never be economically viable to replace kitchen staff with AI

Can you expand? Specifically what is it about humans that AI and robotics could not replace?

[tonyarkles]

I think they're saying the answer is: Price.

Over here in AgTech land, we focus hard on fully-loaded dollars/acre. For kitchen staff, the metric's probably going to be dollars/hamburger, and a human can sure make a lot of hamburgers for $12/hour.

You might be able to make some kind of (AI + robotics) thing that can replace that human, but at $12/hr that human costs $1,920/month + tax. If you can make a AI+robotics unit for $24k that works perfectly for a year, you break even; if you have a single $1000 service call because it's acting up, you've lost the budget.

[andersonpico]

that's exactly what I was getting at

[signatoremo]

Why don’t you start a movement to fight for equality, and I’ll join you? Why are you still here and not taking actions?

In the mean time, I’ll unashamedly continue to cheer for creativity and innovation. Note: I don’t even like this website design.

[Mtinie]

Assuming no change from the baseline, I’d rather have one positive thing versus nothing positive.

[shimman]

"We're taking away your healthcare, sending your children to die in forever wars, poisoning the environment, all while ruining your job prospects but at least you can make pixel perfect implementations of figma screens."

[Mtinie]

“We're taking away your healthcare, sending your children to die in forever wars, poisoning the environment, all while ruining your job prospects”

The baseline. This does not mean it is acceptable and it is absolutely worth rebuking through action to make things better. Those things are anything positive, however small and incremental, or large and transformative.

[shimman]

Yeah like taking people off of medicare and then using the funds to give it to LLM companies, that's just good neoliberalism baby!

[nextaccountic]

The culprit here is capitalism. The system was designed for this. Any technology will be used to squeeze the working class

AI has the merit of showing SWE folks exactly where in the class divide they belong. If you are selling your workforce, and you can't maintain your lifestyle if you stop working, you are in the working class

[aaa_aaa]

No we are not living in future. Design is ugly, and immediate put off because it smells AI.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Reading your comment I had to think of that tweet about someone taking a part of a Monet painting and claimed it was AI generated, and people immediately started calling it horrible and soulless and smelling like AI.

[bonoboTP]

Obviously. Artistic value is not in the object, but in the relationships to other humans. The point is not Monet but the people you discuss Monet with. Monet is a tribal rallying point you can synchronize around. AI is not as good for this, because it's cheap. It's not scarce enough. And doesn't offer a human story you can bond around.

[shimman]

Okay but in this case the design aesthetic is already extremely similar to cyberpunk 2077 video game UIs. Maybe that was the OP's test, but to claim it's unique when it is not feels misleading. Derivative works are fine, but you need to ADD something as well. Taking this then adding another 12-20 hours of some animejs + css polish would make it stand out but as it is now it's just a copy.

[aaa_aaa]

Well this is no Monet for sure.

[newsy-combi]

Humans are capable of producing slop too. Maybe the cutout does look like AI. Given Monet's blurry style and repetitive content (he made 250 water lily paintings), this is not surprising. When you strip the cutout of its context, it can look more like AI too because the lighting and composition will look arbitraty compared to the whole picture.

Btw, if websites would only include the frontend dev's own hand painted images, we would also revolt at the sight of human slop. It's not just AI.

The whole point is that good artists are capable of producing non-slop, and to this day they're the only group of which this is reliably true.

[tackta]

It is because it is an image on a screen.

Water Lilies are enormous paintings. They are breathtaking in person because of their scale. Monet wouldn't be Monet if he had only produced images on a screen.

Art is good or it is shit, based on personal taste. Just like food, no one can tell me what food tastes good or tastes bad.

AI Art seems to produce strong emotions in people who don't go to art galleries. I love modern art, I am a huge art snob but if you want to see slop, go to any modern art gallery. Personally, I would say for my taste, at least 70% of all art at any gallery is basically shit.

Like food also, the presentation matters. To believe there is no possible way to print out a 6 foot tall by 10 foot long AI generated image that would look awesome hanging in a gallery is stupid.

[newsy-combi]

Agreed except with

> To believe there is no possible way to print out a 6 foot tall by 10 foot long AI generated image that would look awesome hanging in a gallery is stupid.

Maybe if you have a really impressive pipeline where the AI does sketches, 3D models (assuming a 3D theme), keeps track of the lighting, brainstorms and reasons about ideas, keeps track of the world building (like for a cyberpunk painting),...

Otherwise AI will just do AI things. You zoom in and see there are no strokes, no ideas behind the shapes, the shapes don't even connect well or wobble in weird ways, weird distortions that wouldn't happen if a human put down strokes to communicate the idea of an object. You zoom out and the composition is weirdly centered, almost like a logo, there is too much shading dedicated to make the objects pop, everything is weirdly inoffensive, smooth, and too consistent, not enough material/texture distinction on a per object basis.

Not sure how else to explain it - you're the art snob anyway. Mostly focusing on 3D with my criticisms, but that's most of the AI art people use. Maybe it can do abstract better. Impressionism is somewhere inbetween, again, the Monet thing makes some sense to me. Then again, you could write a kick-ass procedural art generator running on a single core CPU, which would also be capable of couch or even gallery worthy outputs. So I don't want to argue the point too hard. Gallery art and product website images/thumbnails are too different in category - arguments for/against one don't translate to the other.

[djeastm]

We could say the same for the first factory-made clothes. Not as nice as the hand-tailored ones, looking a bit "off" when people wear them compared to custom-made, but orders of magnitude cheaper and more convenient.

[waffleiron]

Almost all clothing is handmade

https://www.litanynyc.com/post/all-clothing-is-hand-made

[sccvcxv]

these analogies on the surface always look clever and cute

but its plain wrong bro.

[HaZeust]

Then tell it that, and it'll give you the output you desire.

[razster]

I feel you. I dig this and enjoyed those types of aesthetics. Back in the day this was my bread and butter, designing UI design for games and apps. I just realized AI (Specifically Pi+Ornith) can help with my ideas... So excited.

I'm hella interested in finding out what website builder/diagram app was used. I dig the dark theme/grid.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

It reminds me of the limitations of early CGA and EGA, which isn't a positive.

It's just remimagined LARPing of ppl who were born late into Postcyberpunk.

The same shit like (pseudoretro?) 'Synthwave', äckshuälly.

[sccvcxv]

Youre delusional fella.

The reality is the web is going to turn into a walled garden.

[ai_fry_ur_brain]

Because they're incredibly ugly

[echelon]

It's gorgeous and the world doesn't have enough of it.

[wilkystyle]

I was gonna say, you can dislike it because of the design, but understand that that's a subjective opinion that has nothing to do with whether AI is awesome. I actually like these designs, personally.

[mainmailman]

Unrelated question, what’s your favorite flavor of Kool Aid?