As a designer none of these make me worried about my skill set, they all look pretty bad with the slightest amount of attention.
The real concern is how ugly a world the capitalists are willing accept to cut labor costs, and we know the answer, just look what capitalism did architecture. Dogshit buildings everywhere designed by contractors to avoid skilled labor. What an ugly time to be alive
You're seeing the results of amateurs adapting unspecialized tools. They're using minimal effort and still deriving head turning results.
A great analogy might be all the folks making Geocities websites back in '99. Look at how far we've come from that. Can you even fathom where we'll be in five years? (Or even just this fall, given the pace of research and new startups optimizing models/workflows?)
These tools are going to be specially purposed for every domain soon. VC is going to pour into every possible optimization niche, and talented teams will build specially purposed tools that put entire careers on easy mode.
This is good. We shouldn't want to write HTML any more than we should want to churn butter.
The job of designer will change to incorporate the new workflows. But everything else will also change. Websites of 2000-2020 will look as dated as magazine ads. New websites will be rich and interactive as never before.
This is the biggest boom and shakeup of our industry perhaps ever. Get excited by the opportunities. You're not going to have to work like a caveman designer anymore. You'll be a year 2080 designer before the decade ends.
> Websites of 2000-2020 will look as dated as magazine ads. New websites will be rich and interactive as never before.
Why? Do we need any of that aside from specialized tools (e.g. data intensive) for which it actually makes sense to use tried and proven tech?
Im sure new things are going to come out of AI, they’re already becoming obvious. But using AI to build things we already know how to do and just add more complexity is bound to not go anywhere useful in my opinion.
I'm truly amazed at this opinion which seems to be prevalent on this thread. The models are tools that already have the ability to accelerate your work now, and will massively improve over the next decade. Comparing it to things we already know how to do provides the ability to benchmark and see how much value it brings to the table. Being on the forefront, exploring, and hacking on side projects has always been the best way to understand new stuff.
"Using cars to drive down roads we already know how to traverse with horses and just add more complexity is bound to not go anywhere useful in my opinion."
To fit better with your analogy, how about using AI to invent a vehicle without using the tools and expertise of engineers that already have experience in building cars. And let AI figure how many doors it needs to have, how many wheels, how an engine works and all that because why not? Maybe it will come up with a batter idea, screw any experience and history we have building anything.
This page isn't something the AI built, the AI built specifically defined pieces of it and the author assembled those into the page using Webflow. I feel like their claim of "no-code" is a bit suspect. Embedding an AI generated block of code into a Webflow site has nothing to do with AI generating a website. If I add a block of AI generated code to a pull request that isn't "Using AI to write an entire PR".
AI still feels like self-driving cars to me. People saw some shadow of success there and said "by 2020 cars won't even have steering wheels" but who knows now if we will ever see them. I could be totally wrong, but my prediction is we see a ton of cool stuff but getting that last 5% down to where we can actually trust AI to run the show will not happen for a long time if ever.
I mean, that's been the trend line of every paradigm, hasn't it? Quality & craftsmanship being sacrificed to scale & automation.
I'd say the good part of AI coding is the democratization of programming. It'll be shittier than hand-crafted stuff but more broadly available and empowering more people to make their own stuff.
>Dogshit buildings everywhere designed by contractors to avoid skilled labor.
This seems to be the opinion of everyone on HN, but I never encounter this in real life (and do not agree with it myself). Where I live (mainly London, but I've spent a bit of time in some US cities as well) the buildings being built/applying for planning permission look pretty good. It's the ones built in the late 20th century that are hideous.
I doubt profit hungry capitalists are your main concern, but your average struggling startup or entrepreneur.
At a startup I worked for we spent about £10,000 just on our brand and website design. That was a big chunk of our budget and I'm genuinely not sure that would be needed anymore. I think I could probably prompt AI to design a site and logo roughly as good.
I think it’s cool watching giant companies fumble over and over strategically but see comments applauding cutting workers. Why would you trust their wisdom on this decision? So weird how this country admires the most dogshit performing executives
Maybe true but still a bad take. Reducing the surface area of a problem like this makes its much easier to iterate on energy efficiencies than having millions of cars to replace periodically all with variable lifespans
I don’t (currently) think water is wasted in any meaningful way by my swimming pool. When it evaporates it turns to water vapor. Then it comes back down as liquid water when it rains. There is an argument that we put extra work into this water to transport it and make it potable - but PHX’s water is positive sum. Water demand in the valley is accounted for during construction and sourcing it is part of the project cost. I’m also prepared to pay the cost of continued sourcing of water over time as the valley grows - including projects like desalination.
Arizona takes a very practical approach to water management which is part of why I chose to live here. We take a true positive sum approach that I believe in, humans can do this. We find water where it exists and transport it into a desert. We’ve built a human settlement in a space where very little life has chosen to live - distancing ourselves from the biosphere seems like a solid play.
Our approach to water is part of why we are able to give up so much from our pull on Lake Mead during this drought. Nevada is giving up 21k acre-feet, Mexico 80k af, and AZ is giving up a whopping 512k af. Nothing as far as I know for cutbacks from CA's draw.
If it doesn’t work out, I dont understand a worst case scenario less than “move closer to water”
I'm not an AZ resident but this seems the exact opposite of sustainable. It sounds like mining: yes, technically the metal or whatever is still somewhere out there in the world, but no longer usable or accessible to humans after it has been used the first time.
Using water is sustainable - life has been doing it since the beginning - it's where you pull that water from that really matters. Water has a natural cycle where the earth recycles it. Sustainability is making sure your draw from earth's reservoirs are in balance with the rate the earth is replenishing them.
If you pump water out of your groundwater table faster than the water cycle replenishes it - that isn't sustainable. If you draw from lakes faster than the water shed and streams replenish them - that isn't sustainable.
The Salt River Project in Arizona carefully monitors the water shed, reservoir levels, and ground water levels to sustainably provide water to the valley. Arizona seeks out new sources of water that will provide sustainable water moving forward. When we build - we take water demand into consideration and source water upfront. Yes we have pools and water parks, but we plan for those and work to make them sustainable. We don't just let almond farmers tap our ground water and drain our water tables like some neighboring states. It helps that the only solution for us is a sustainable solution; the only way to survive here in the desert is to have a sustainable water supply.
To GP's point, many of these measurements are showing that humans are unsustainably pulling from these reservoirs. The levels are dropping, lakes are running dry, and rivers aren't making it to the ocean. But, when I look at the numbers, I can't say it's Arizona causing that. Arizona seems to be doing it's diligence in sustainably using water. I can't say the same for our neighboring states.
"Arizona seeks out new sources of water that will provide sustainable water moving forward."
We need breathing room!
Arizona is a desert, and there are ... googles ... 7 million people living there that should not be. There are 300 golf courses! There should be ZERO open air heavily-manicured grass golf courses in a landlocked desert.
When people joke that if you want to settle mars, let's settle Antarctica, it's closer and easier to do... well, the REAL settling-mars project is Arizona.
I've also heard that Las Vegas, another middle of the desert atrocity, is also 100% water efficient.
I've also been told about things like "clean coal", "fracking doesn't turn farmers water on fire", "pesticides are safe", "global warming isn't real", and a host of other big fat lies that you'll only discover are wrong in the future when it is too late.
So either you are being mendacious, or you are happily eating the big lie served up to you on a platter.
> that you'll only discover are wrong in the future when it is too late
Too late for what? If what you’re saying is true - we won’t be able to reliably move water to the desert over the next 1000 years. Then Arizona won’t have enough water and those people will have to move closer to a water source. But is Arizona reducing the amount of available water on Earth? I feel like you’re referring to a long-term ecological crisis that this is causing, but I’m failing to see it.
Depends how well they cover it (temporarily with a cover or permanently with a gable/roof or completely indoor pool). Transpiration from lawn grass will evaporate a similar amount of water as an outdoor uncovered pool. At least they don't have to worry about heating it in AZ. Ideally their air conditioner would dump heat into the pool for any heating (no idea if pool heaters are a thing in AZ).
No cover due to its odd shape. During summer months I use evaporative cooling to keep the pool cool enough to swim. To do this, we intentionally run the water feature to increase the evaporation rate - evaporating water takes the higher energy water molecules and ejects them from the pool reducing the temp.
We also use a pool heater about 3 months out of the year. Never considered the A/C condenser as a heater. Initial thought is that the time of year you need to heat the pool is the time of year you aren’t running your A/C.
Can you elaborate more? Most of the 'specificity' I see missing just lives inside SwiftUI and IB now. The platform/OS manages so much layout automatically these days I think the 'design' work is moving up the abstracting ladder as well, or are you talking about something totally different?
these articles are funny to me "gee why can't we save this animal?" we all know, its because the ruling class decided the biome will be managed by the free market, and thats exactly what's happening. The free market has decided much of nature shouldn't exist, like reefs & forest etc...I don't really know what anyone expects?
I get sad when I think of the amazing things my children will never see but wow, its cool to see the stock market doing good or whatever new startups are making more dumb useless bullshit nfts or whatever
>"the ruling class decided the biome will be managed by the free market... The free market has decided much of nature shouldn't exist, like reefs & forest etc."
I am not sure where you get the idea that the 'ruling class' delegated this decision, or that the free market decided anything at all. Historically, the 'ruling classes' don't tend to share power, and have made plenty of consequential environmental decisions with no market feedback (see Mao's Four Pests campaign). The free market on the other hand is just a mechanism for pricing and exchange, it doesn't decide anything; individual market actors make decisions, and spontaneous order results.
I'm even more confused about how you got from the biome to the stock market and NFTs; perhaps you could enlighten me? NFTs seem to be a bubble, but they're not as wasteful as proof of work tokens.
You seem to be conveniently leaving out that we all enjoy having air conditioning and modern forms of transportation, to name a few positive things. But yes, society is here trading coral reefs for NFT art, right?
If you read closely (imo), it’s the desperate class(es) on both supply and purchasing side that drove the poaching cycle. Generally speaking, ruling class are secure enough in their status they don’t need the “short term sale over the long term benefits” or the “look I’m special/unique too because I bought a really big bee that you don’t have.”
I didn't see much about the buyers of the bee in the article, but I imagine that someone buying a really big bee for thousands of dollars is unlikely to be in the 'desperate' classes. For a start they have access to thousands of dollars!
The biome is not being managed by the free market. Slices of biodiversity are not being bought, sold or invested in. The biosphere is outside the system and untracked by its incentives.
The real concern is how ugly a world the capitalists are willing accept to cut labor costs, and we know the answer, just look what capitalism did architecture. Dogshit buildings everywhere designed by contractors to avoid skilled labor. What an ugly time to be alive