[HN Gopher] Copying is the way design works
___________________________________________________________________
Copying is the way design works
Author : innerzeal
Score : 660 points
Date : 2024-07-22 18:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (matthewstrom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (matthewstrom.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| This is a great quote:
|
| > In the middle of Apple's case against Microsoft, Xerox sued
| Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the
| desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and
| questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates
| later reflected on these cases: _"we both had this rich neighbor
| named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and
| found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it."_
| manav wrote:
| Copying from Xerox, some irony there.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Adds layers of irony to their "Redmond, start your
| photocopiers" dig
| https://www.padawan.info/en/images/photocopiers.html
| freetinker wrote:
| I miss this flavor of advertising. It all feels too anodyne
| these days.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned.
| Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed
| to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on
| their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to
| "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it
| was too little/late.
| razakel wrote:
| The same thing happened to Kodak - they were a tech company
| that thought they were a chemical company.
| kragen wrote:
| you're talking about xerox parc in the 70s
|
| xerox parc in the 70s invented the laser printer. the laser
| printer has been almost all of xerox's business since last
| millennium. their current revenues are 7 billion dollars a
| year, almost entirely from laser printers (mostly in
| disguise.) so i'm not sure it was 'too little, too late' or
| even 'failing to convert'
|
| (right now i think xerox is unprofitable, but that's an
| issue of profit margins and management, not an issue of not
| having revenue)
|
| this article https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc has this
| pullquote:
|
| > _From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox's investment in
| PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the
| profits from the laser printer._
|
| and that was in 01985
|
| you could posit an alternative history where xerox wasn't
| just making billions of dollars a year, for _generations_ ,
| out of laser printers, but also owned the entire market of
| laser printers, semiconductor foundries, guis with
| overlapping windows, ethernet, wysiwyg document editing,
| page description languages, and object-oriented
| programming, because all of those were indeed invented at
| parc
|
| the article does in fact implicitly posit that alternative
| history. but it isn't clear that it was ever a possible
| history. centrally planned economies are not good at
| innovation; decentralized ones are. the most significant
| invention on that list, the semiconductor foundry, isn't
| even technical; it's a business structure that
| decentralizes chip design
|
| very possibly they've made more money from their early
| stock in apple than they ever could have made by trying to
| exclude everyone else from the overlapping-window-gui
| market
| wiz21c wrote:
| > I broke into his house
|
| Not fun at all. Microsoft is like Disney, they steal from
| others and trounce others for stealing from them.
|
| Absurd people.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Sad to see this _extremely_ historically accurate and
| relevant comment downvoted.
|
| And on the forum which should most know it to be true!
| zogrodea wrote:
| I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of
| Microsoft trouncing others?
|
| I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so
| long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public
| domain).
|
| I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm
| programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem"
| because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although
| that's a different problem.
|
| I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS,
| though, which is most likely a failure of my
| memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.
| lupire wrote:
| Did you miss one of the largest antitrust cases in history,
| litigated for a decade?
| jpc0 wrote:
| > ... they steal from others and trounce others for
| stealing from them.
|
| Explain how the antitrust case or its conclusion proves
| the quote above?
|
| Mozilla/Netscape had a browser that could have competed
| with Microsoft, they didn't litigate them for stealing.
| The antitrust case was about it being effectively
| impossible to overthrow their monopoly because of the
| platform being locked down.
|
| The current crop of litigation against Apple reeks more
| of the Microsoft antitrust case than any Disney cases.
| turnsout wrote:
| This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and
| the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in
| exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today
| would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no
| theft.
|
| Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the
| screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong).
| The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought they saw
| realtime overlapping windows when they didn't. [0] So it's
| possible Xerox was inspired by Apple with the Star, not the
| other way around.
|
| Meanwhile, Bill Gates totally outs himself as someone who would
| steal shamelessly.
|
| [0]: https://folklore.org/On_Xerox%2C_Apple_and_Progress.html
| Hitton wrote:
| Meanwhile Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about
| stealing great ideas."
| lolinder wrote:
| Clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw
| albumen wrote:
| top comment: "The credit should be given to poet T S
| Eliot (1920): "Immature poets imitate; mature poets
| steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets
| make it into something better, or at least something
| different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of
| feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from
| which it is torn."
|
| and its reply: "So really it has nothing to do with
| stealing whatsoever"
| iczero wrote:
| > There was no theft.
|
| I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all
| their designs. Was that explicitly stated?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?
| iczero wrote:
| Was it only for the tour? Was it actually $1M, or did it
| later increase in value? Did Xerox value a strategic
| relationship? "A whole load of ideas" seems worth more
| than $1M to me, especially if you're Xerox back then.
| lupire wrote:
| They didn't. They got paid $1M!
| lolinder wrote:
| OP misrepresented what happened (intentionally or
| otherwise). They didn't give away $1M in stock, they
| granted Xerox the right to buy $1M in stock.
| tptacek wrote:
| Same difference. At some point you're just arguing about
| what the number was. I don't care about the broader
| argument, but the right to buy $1MM of private shares is,
| in fact, real consideration.
| lolinder wrote:
| Is it real consideration that anyone could consider to be
| worth "all the IP that you happen to be able to see while
| on this tour", or is it real consideration that Xerox
| thought was worth "an opportunity to see how we run the
| best tech lab of our generation"?
|
| Don't forget that Apple presumably got paid $1M dollars
| out of the deal _in addition_ to the tour. I 'm having a
| hard time seeing the argument that the right to pay Apple
| for some of their shares in 1979 was perceived as being
| worth _any_ of Xerox PARC 's IP, much less "as much as
| you can carry in your head".
|
| (None of which is to say that Apple was wrong to copy
| what they could, morally or legally. I just find the
| argument that these shares are evidence that it was an
| above-board trade that Xerox was on board with to be very
| weird.)
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't care; as far as I'm concerned, that argument is
| isomorphic to "would $1MM literal dollars be enough for
| what they saw, or should the number be higher". Maybe.
| But the right to buy shares is not really a meaningful
| distinction to the simple issuance of shares in this
| historical context. That's all I'm arguing.
| rsanek wrote:
| in retrospect? sure. at the time? radically different.
|
| just ask your average sv startup employee if they think
| options and RSUs are the same
| tptacek wrote:
| Options and RSUs are both universally acknowledged as
| consideration. That's all I'm arguing. Should it have
| been $1MM in stock, or $50MM, or $200k? Hell if I know.
| viridian wrote:
| What? It absolutely is.
|
| One has a face value of $1,000,000.00
|
| The other has a face value of $0.00
|
| If Apple offered me one of these right now it would
| completely change my life, and the other would be
| something I wouldn't even take them up on.
| turnsout wrote:
| It was 100% an above-board trade. Xerox at that point had
| poured an ocean of money into PARC and hadn't really seen
| any return on it. I don't think they would have seen it
| as an IP transfer, because it wasn't. Apple didn't rush
| out to implement Smalltalk. Instead they were inspired by
| the principles, misunderstood some stuff, and came up
| with something 100% better for the average consumer.
|
| Xerox wasn't stupid--they were trying to get some value
| out of this research lab that was, on paper, lighting
| money on fire.
| turnsout wrote:
| You're right of course--another way to put it is that
| Xerox got the chance to make a $1M investment in pre-IPO
| Apple.
| kragen wrote:
| in general you can copy all of someone's designs even
| without touring. exceptions are when they're covered by
| copyright or patent
| immibis wrote:
| Which they are by default.
| rsanek wrote:
| not by patent
| kragen wrote:
| no. copyright has a rather limited scope that excludes
| the aspects of design you most want to copy; patents must
| be applied for and received; and both expire
| turnsout wrote:
| If you read a bit about it, you'll understand that Apple
| did not copy the Alto--they did something that was actually
| way harder. They created a better version of what the Alto
| was attempting to do, and got it to run on lower-grade
| hardware they could sell for 1/10th the cost.
|
| But yes, Xerox knew exactly what they were doing when they
| invited Steve and his team in.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Steve Jobs himself told what he saw at Xerox:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aUJyJbJMw
| gen220 wrote:
| He's famous, so his view is the one that's most commonly
| regurgitated, but that doesn't make it the most correct
| one.
|
| Steve's point of view is one point of view, in a story that
| involved ~10 people. When you hear the story from each
| person's point of view and union them, the subtly-incorrect
| aspects of his perspective become pretty glaring.
| solarmist wrote:
| Has someone done that? Sounds like a interesting
| read/watch.
| lupire wrote:
| The price Apple charged for that stock was more than Apple's
| IPO price, AIUI. It wasn't a giveaway.
| lolinder wrote:
| Your version makes it sound like Apple _gave_ Xerox $1M in
| stock in exchange for the visit. Most sources I can find don
| 't mention the stock at all, but the one that does [0] makes
| it pretty clear that the offer was to let Xerox buy stock
| from Apple pre-IPO in exchange for the tour, which is a very
| different story:
|
| > Jobs's company stood on the precipice of a public offering
| guaranteed to make him and any investors wealthy, and the
| tech guru's impending good fortune enticed the suits at Xerox
| to make him an offer he couldn't refuse: Let us buy shares in
| your company, and we'll give you a peek inside the greatest
| minds in your field.
|
| [0] https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-apple-steve-jobs-
| xer...
| turnsout wrote:
| You're right--bad phrasing on my part
| gen220 wrote:
| There was no explicit trade of stock for tour. The
| investment by Xerox in Apple happened before such a tour,
| for entirely separate reasons. There was another Apple exec
| who was managing pre-IPO external investor interest. There
| isn't a recorded reason for why Apple chose Xerox (among
| other investors), if I remember correctly.
|
| However, Steve did leverage the fact that Xerox was an
| investor to bully the on-site engineers into providing him
| with the "executive" demo, after receiving the run-of-the-
| mill public demo and learning that a higher-tier demo
| existed. It involved a phone call to east coast Xerox
| Corporate, who instructed the on-site engineers to provide
| the full demo. The PARC lab director was OOO that day, and
| later said in an interview that he would have stonewalled
| Job's request.
|
| Another fun fact, Xerox sold (the majority of?) their stake
| in Apple almost immediately for a quick turnaround profit
| post-IPO. Obviously there's no recorded reason for that
| trade, but my impression is that they didn't think Apple
| had what it takes to build a proper OS (they envied their
| ability to cheaply assemble hardware, but viewed their
| software suite/R&D as a big moat).
|
| Edit: also, Apple engineers were already mid-working on
| replicating PARC tech at the time of the (not-so-)
| "fateful" demo. It was behind schedule and not-demoable,
| and Steve was getting frustrated with these facts. They
| encouraged Steve to visit PARC to get a preview/demo of
| what they were building, to ground him to their works'
| value. There were already a handful of ex-PARC people at
| Apple for a while, at this point, and PARC's work stems
| from "The Mother of All Demos" given decades ago. The Alto
| was unique in its early implementation, but not in its
| ideas.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thank you for that. I was going to post something similar.
|
| What the Apple engineers did was take obvious inspiration
| from what they saw at PARC but then ended up going in a
| different direction when they actually had to both implement
| it and make it workable as an OS. The overlapping windows is
| the most oft-cited innovation they came up with but there
| were many other perhaps more subtle ones.
|
| The impression I have though is then that Gates basically
| copied Apple engineering, not PARC.
| opo wrote:
| This quote like many others are funny because people pretend
| that they can exactly remember things said decades earlier.
| Andy Hertzfeld later updated this entry on his website:
|
| "....Here is Mike Boich's recollection of the 'Xerox' story,
| which goes a little differently, and is likely to be more
| faithful than mine: The meeting was one of the quarterly
| meetings, where Steve, Mike Murray, Belleville, you and I all
| got together with the Microsoft crew, which at was usually
| Bill, Jeff Harbers, Jon Shirley, and sometimes Neil and/or
| Charles Simonyi. I don't recall whether Windows had been
| announced, or we were just concerned about it, but Steve was
| trying to convince Bill that having a "Chinese wall between the
| Windows implementers and the Mac implementors wasn't sufficient
| for us to work well together. He was trying to get them to
| forget about the OS business, since the applications business
| would be much bigger total dollars. He said, "It's not that I
| don't trust you, but my team doesn't trust you. It's kind of
| like if your brother was beating up on my brother, people
| wouldn't say it was just your brother against my brother, they
| would say the Gates are fighting with the Jobs." Bill responded
| that "No Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich
| neighbor named Xerox, and you went in to steal the TV, and
| found that somebody else had stolen it. So you say, "hey,
| that's not fair. I wanted to steal the TV"."
|
| https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts
| happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without
| being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me
| and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make
| a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close
| to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that
| space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create
| trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is
| not cherished enough.
|
| I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital
| world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option
| than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show
| there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there
| wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the
| first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have
| grown at this pace.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| The "artists need to make a living" narrative against piracy is
| pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more
| than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as
| that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the
| long term. It's only when managerial types get involved the
| need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of
| information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing
| that nothing of value is lost.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish
| shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like
| the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and
| no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market
| with them at my expense.
|
| It would have been natural, but also depressing.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I
| offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the
| sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay
| for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book).
| The readers felt entitled to free copies and free
| consultation on the subject of the book. It's really
| depressing how entitled people feel to other people's
| creative output or knowledge.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That is why I publish freely the audio versions (which
| only consist of about half of the stories within each
| book), but not the PDFs.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Did you just stop publishing altogether?
| surfingdino wrote:
| Yes. I do not need another book as a CV, which is
| currently the most viable business model for authors of
| non-fiction.
| meiraleal wrote:
| We are probably better off without your marketing content
| tho
| shagie wrote:
| > I like the fact that the paper books themselves are
| copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and
| flood the market with them at my expense.
|
| Amazon has a book piracy problem ( 219 points by tosh on
| July 8, 2022 | 120 comments )
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026663
| https://x.com/fchollet/status/1550930876183166976 (and via
| Threadreader -
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550930876183166976.html
| ) - also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210256 (
| 665 points by jmillikin on July 24, 2022 | 193 comments )
|
| Pirated books thrive on Amazon -- and authors say web giant
| ignores fraud -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 ( 87 points
| by vanilla-almond on April 30, 2023 | 79 comments )
| https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirated-books-thrive-on-
| amazon...
|
| Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publisher's computer
| books--again - https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/amazo...
|
| Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one
| else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it
| might not be at your _expense_ - it certainly isn 't
| something that is making you any money.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I don't self-publish on Amazon, though. I print my books
| in a local printing shop and sell them using my e-shop
| (Wordpress for blog, Woocommerce for e-shop).
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I also self publish books.
|
| Most of the audience is decent. But there are some bad
| actors out there.
|
| And lots of times the biggest book marketplace appears to
| (intentionally) close their eyes to this problem.
|
| Piracy of my books from the dark web is one thing. Amazon
| pushing it is another.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The "artists need to make a living" narrative against
| piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want
| [...]
|
| I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just
| radical in a different direction.
|
| Artists _would_ like to make a living, and the "deception"
| comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the
| powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on
| that goal.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists
| don't want to make a living. My point is that, too often,
| the "artists need to make a living too" narrative is used
| by the system that exploits artists.
| hluska wrote:
| Can you rephrase that without a double negative? I don't
| have a clue what you're trying to say and your
| explanation makes it worse.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be
| rephrased like:
|
| "Artists _do_ want to make a living, however there 's a
| nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough
| solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their
| content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always
| counterproductive, at least when it comes to the
| interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It's important to note _who_ is pushing the deception, here.
| Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and
| capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because
| their valuable economic resource is time. They make money
| when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying _has
| harms_ , but the primary effect is that artists have to
| expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get
| profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a
| strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying.
| That being said, money up-front is still a very common way
| for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living"
| is a half-truth.
|
| Paying per-copy _and agreeing not to copy for some fixed
| period_ is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling
| their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just
| trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can
| be published serially, then something like Patreon _might_
| work, but that 's impractical for a lot of larger projects.
| The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk:
| who is out the money if something turns out to _suck_ , or
| worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies
| with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I
| just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a
| thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work
| based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market
| dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are
| hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce,
| and artists that can only really make the business model work
| if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake.
|
| I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market",
| so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the
| publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not
| make their money from selling the service of creating art,
| they make money from selling art that has already been made,
| which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop
| paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their
| pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at
| the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new
| acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to
| deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10
| terrible ones.
|
| It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that
| got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over
| artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for
| the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music
| Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water
| straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue
| artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists
| make - just that the publishers control the flow of the
| songs.
|
| The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every
| other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will
| own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a
| boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming
| their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have
| nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care,
| because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact
| opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what
| will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters
| is what will make _them_ richer.
|
| [0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few
| years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and
| reissues riding the hype of digital music.
|
| [1] Metallica _also_ found themselves caught on the back
| foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were
| trading pre-release soundtracks they 'd made. Their reaction
| made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had
| gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't
| think this read was entirely fair.
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo?t=485
|
| [3] I don't think generative AI will replace real artists,
| but it doesn't matter so long as publishers believe it can.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > "Functionally and aesthetically, the chairs are identical."
|
| Listen dude, go ahead and buy the $145 Modway chair. It's so bad,
| it is $118 nowadays. It will literally fall apart under your ass.
| Read the reviews.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| > the chairs are identical
|
| Followed by pictures of two different-looking chairs. IMO the
| Modway looks notably worse.
| Suppafly wrote:
| They really aren't different at all though, they only look
| different because of the finish on the plywood.
| breck wrote:
| Go further.
|
| If you model ideas mathematically, you will see that societies
| plagued with IPDD (https://breckyunits.com/ipdd.html) will become
| extinct, because they prolong the lifespan of bad ideas, and
| those with intellectual freedom, where bad ideas rapidly evolve
| into good ideas, will rise to the top of the food chain. The
| equation is simple: ETA! (https://breckyunits.com/eta.html)
|
| Question whether we should even have a concept of "licenses"
| (hint: we shouldn't). Look up "freedom licenses", which "freed"
| African Americans used to have to carry around in the 1800's.
| Think about how future generations will look at us for having a
| concept of "licenses on ideas". Think about the natural
| progression of automatic licenses on ideas (copyright act of
| 1976), to breathing: there is no reason not to require "licenses"
| to breathe, given that you exhale carbon dioxide molecules just
| as you exhale "copyrighted" information.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I think you are conflating copyright with patents. Licenses and
| other forms of intellectual property protection exist so that
| those who control means of production and distribution pay
| those who have ideas, or produce creative output.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I agree they're different, and different still from
| trademarks, but the common thing is to conflate it all under
| "Intellectual Property", isn't it?
|
| I'm deeply suspicious of this conflation. I think it's done
| on purpose, in bad faith, for nefarious reasons.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post model
| the real world?
|
| I ask, because these intellectual property protections are
| intended to incentivize creation. If that incentive overwhelms
| these models of information sharing and testing frictions then
| the model is incomplete.
| breck wrote:
| > because these intellectual property protections are
| intended to incentivize creation
|
| Judge something not by what people say it does, but by what
| it actually does.
|
| > If that incentive overwhelms these models of information
| sharing and testing frictions then the model is incomplete.
|
| Agreed. But try as I might, I can't find any way
| theoretically or empirically to model copyrights and patents
| that show a positive impact on innovation.
|
| Nature's survival of the fittest already provides near
| infinite incentive to innovate.
|
| Now, I think patents and copyrights had a positive side-
| effect effect in the early days of the United States because
| it created a centralized library in the District of Columbia
| containing all of the latest information across the fledgling
| nation. But with the Internet, we don't even need that
| anymore. All the other parts of those laws are harmful and a
| drain on innovation.
|
| Look at what happened with Windows/Crowdstrike-ultimately
| another harm caused by closed source, under-evolved "IP
| protected" ideas. Ironically Microsoft calls Windows their
| "Intellectual Property" when collecting money, but when that
| IP harms people, suddenly it's not their property.
|
| > Is there any evidence that the equations in the blog post
| model the real world?
|
| Depends on where you live. If you live in America, evidence
| is all around you. :)
|
| But here is some hard data, thousands of programming
| languages ranked by languages most used to build other
| languages (which gives an objective measure of idea quality):
|
| https://pldb.io/lists/explorer.html#columns=rank~name~id~app.
| ..
|
| Utterly dominated by open source langs. Closed source, IP
| ones are headed for extinction.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Why on earth would IP keep bad ideas around? You're free to
| make a better idea and let it compete in the market, since by
| being better it'd definitionally be different.
| iczero wrote:
| Let's say someone patents, idk, Client-Side Decoration (CSD).
| People like it, surely, because people use it. Unfortunately,
| there is drastically reduced space to innovate because nobody
| else can use that idea anymore. Expecting the patent holder
| to innovate has proven to be a bad assumption in part because
| IPR means they have no competition in that space anyways. The
| idea stays bad because nobody else can make it better.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| So people like it but it's bad? How exactly are you
| defining bad?
| tempfile wrote:
| For the same reason any accumulation of capital allows bad
| ideas to hang around. You can operate at a temporary loss to
| weed out new competitors, you can intimidate newcomers with
| frivolous legal action, you can leverage network effects, you
| can lobby for regulation that makes it hard for competitors
| to start up...
| ljlolel wrote:
| I can make cheap, small-scale facsimiles, fangzhipin, to
| demonstrate some quality of the original. I can make exact
| replicas, pixel-perfect fuzhipin, to learn how the originals and
| their creators work. Or I can create shanzhai, unsolicited
| redesigns, commenting and riffing on the work of others. All
| these copies have an important role to play in the process of
| design.
|
| Whether you believe that it's worthwhile or worthless to copy,
| whether you think that copies are a valuable part of the design
| community or a scourge, you are using software, hardware,
| websites and apps that all owe their existence to copying.
|
| As long as there is design, there will be copying.
| fsckboy wrote:
| As long as there are new ideas, those without such ideas will
| copy them
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters
| had extensive training in the work of previous masters,
| frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop
| technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After
| developing that base skill and understanding, they had a
| better toolset to express their own originality.
| burnished wrote:
| I see that you've copied every word you used here, not very
| original of you
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| As long as there are ideas, there will be people who claim
| their "new ideas" have absolutely nothing in them derived
| from any previous ideas. Such people then scorn others who do
| not help them maintain the same fiction, and who instead dare
| to acknowledge that _everything_ builds on what came before.
| unraveller wrote:
| How dare you imply the origins of my inspiration are not
| mysterious. Now what am I going to tell the interviewer
| when they ask "where did you get the inspiration for that?"
| they always like my non-answers.
| surfingdino wrote:
| The author got lost in his argumentation. He starts with design,
| but goes off into the lands of open source, patents, and art.
| It's not a well-written or researched article. Design is not
| software development is not art.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you're a
| designer, or even if you're just interested in design, you
| probably feel the need to be original, too.
|
| I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that
| thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly
| original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want
| to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist
| instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is
| communicate the best solution to a problem, given the
| requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality
| is subordinate to that at best.
| burningChrome wrote:
| This.
|
| I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company
| that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their
| designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do
| that, it seemed easy.
|
| The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites,
| with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool
| navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea
| that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I
| thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and
| whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with
| whatever uber cool thing I showed them.
|
| Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't
| want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to
| find information about their work and contact them to hire
| them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web
| designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare
| stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy
| piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to
| solve and want you to solve them for them.
|
| I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to
| learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to
| their problems.
| ozim wrote:
| It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they
| have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to
| be edgy or whatever... most of people pay for having cookie
| cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good
| experience and they don't want to be surprised on EDM event -
| well there are big names that can do whatever they want of
| course but that is different expectation.
|
| The same with software devs that they think, it must be
| "framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there
| for 20 years" - well no if it is crud app most likely it will
| be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)
| caseyohara wrote:
| Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be
| true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy
| mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres -
| especially techno - the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to
| be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks
| they've never heard before.
|
| No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they
| want the DJ to show them music they've never heard before.
| Before the digital age, people would go out to see touring
| DJs specifically for their collection of rare records that
| no one else had and you couldn't hear anywhere else. This
| is still true today in the more underground scenes. It's
| the opposite of cookie cutter.
| carlmr wrote:
| It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to
| have really good taste and constantly listen to new
| tracks and think about where they can be used.
|
| Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they
| are. DJs most people think are less creative than they
| need to be.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The
| majority are hired to play bars and events that do not
| cater to particularly discerning audiences.
| phpnode wrote:
| Exactly. The DJs that are innovative, crate digging,
| slightly pretentious music nerds are almost exclusively
| hobbyists, with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them
| being able to eek out a meagre living from it. The
| majority of full time DJs cater to mainstream audiences
| who absolutely _do_ want to hear the same 50 - 100 tracks
| on rotation every time they go out. They want to dance
| and sing along to music that they 're familiar with, and
| if the DJ doesn't play what they know then they won't
| dance, they won't stay, and the DJ won't remain employed.
|
| It's actually very similar to web design - innovation has
| its place, but 99% of the time people want familiarity.
|
| Source: spent a decade as a professional DJ
| bluGill wrote:
| A typical DJ is allowed one weird song nobody has heard
| before. If it is a long show maybe one per hour. The rest
| better be songs the majority of people know and sign
| along with.
| phpnode wrote:
| Yes, ideally played when the dance floor has been full
| for a while to encourage people to go to the bar and buy
| another drink.
| runelk wrote:
| You might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the
| particular environments you've been in.
|
| Having taken part in various types of electronic
| music/art scenes since the early 2000's, I've met all
| kinds of people. Local hobbyist bedroom producers playing
| for free. Semi-professional artists juggling gigs&touring
| with one or more side jobs. Full-time DJ's playing
| everything from small underground parties to some of the
| biggest parties/festivals at the time. They all cater to
| their audience to varying degrees, mainstream or not.
|
| Granted, the scenes I've bumped into tend to be on the
| non-mainstream side. That's where you can actually go
| professional being that "innovative, crate digging music
| nerd" you refer to (removed "slightly pretentious"
| because that hasn't been my experience). It's tough, but
| it can be done, and it's a larger group of people than
| you seem to think.
|
| I've also met some professional DJ's that fully cater to
| the audience in the way you describe. Many of them make
| statements like yours like e.g. "99% of the time",
| "almost exclusively hobbyists", "slightly pretentious",
| etc. I really don't get why, because it's just not true,
| and it comes across as a bit defensive or passive-
| aggressive to be honest.
|
| I mean, of course there is the mainstream audience of the
| type you describe. But even that audience changes its
| opinion about which 50-100 tracks they expect you to play
| on a regular basis. That change has to come from
| somewhere, otherwise they'd still demand disco tracks
| from the 70's. That somewhere is the stuff that hasn't
| gone mainstream yet, and while the percentage of people
| that can make a living of it is probably not very high,
| it's a lot higher than what you claim it to be.
|
| That vast overlap between underground/alternative scenes
| and the mainstream is super interesting, and I'm pretty
| sure that if you included that part into your statistics,
| you'd see a different picture.
|
| NB: I might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the
| particular environments I've been in ;)
| maeil wrote:
| I'm not sure how to phrase this in a way that complies with
| the spirit of HN (open to suggestions!) but that's a pretty
| American take on electronic music.
|
| It's not necessiraly wrong, but it holds just as much for
| any other genre of music and the choice of "EDM" to make
| the point is pretty typical.
| morbicer wrote:
| I am with you, let's get bashed as Euro-snobs.
|
| I listen to electronic music for 25+ years, different
| genres and I never grokked what exactly is EDM. To me
| it's a vague hodgepodge of mainstream pruduction spanning
| anything from Guetta to Skrillex.
|
| People around me who like electronic music refer to it as
| techno, house, dnb, psytrance, hardcore, what have you.
| There are crossovers and there are multi-genre festivals.
| But no one says "I am going to an EDM event tonight"
|
| There's expectation that you will hear some classic hits
| but people expect to hear something new as well.
|
| Edit: Wikipedia actually shines a light on the
| resurfacing of EDM "brand" in USA https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Electronic_dance_music#Termino...
| britzkopf wrote:
| That actually points to the problem I have with it. I
| don't think many jazz lovers would balk at reference to a
| performance as a "jazz performance" without a
| specification of which one of its subvariants (which by
| the way are far less numerous than EDM - compare here
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_genres, https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electronic_music_genre...
| ). But in my experience, electronic music fans quite
| often feel compelled to endlessly nitpick over which
| subgenre some (almost always) 4/4, uptempo, 4 minute
| track belongs to.
| britzkopf wrote:
| Whoa there. I've not done the polling but I suspect most
| EDM consumers think of themselves as music lovers the same
| way other people like jazz etc. I tend more to agree with
| your assessment that the vast majority of it is not in the
| same category as "real" music but I don't think attendees
| of a rave would go along with that.
| DigiEggz wrote:
| Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you
| designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.
| burningChrome wrote:
| When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed
| an architecture site for a local architect using the
| effect.
|
| It was very similar to this site where you had jarring
| transitions, background changes and images moving at
| different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/
|
| The end result was very similar to site above and we all
| got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients
| saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy
| separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we
| realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous.
| The leads from their contact form dried up to almost
| nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home
| page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic.
| We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on
| the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very
| easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of
| the motion and animation that constantly took your focus
| off of what you, as a user, were trying to do.
|
| We had up for four months before having to pull it and put
| up their old site, then re-design _another_ simple, more
| refined site that would work better for their users. It was
| a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to
| create something cool that nobody could use.
|
| We also designed a site for a local event to support a
| women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of
| how women are shuffled through a system that does little to
| protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers.
|
| It used the same techniques in this, where you had both
| horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to
| show a timeline and story with illustrations and
| infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en
|
| This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other
| non-profits approach us to do something similar for them
| and we did a few more using the same template we had, but
| switching some elements to make it original for each
| client. This worked out much better because if people were
| able to digest the story and the points you were trying to
| make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to
| find specific content and the contact page.
|
| Hope that helps!
| carlmr wrote:
| >When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I
| designed an architecture site for a local architect using
| the effect.
|
| A friend of mine designed such a site with his web design
| company. I instantly thought, amazing but horrendous.
|
| On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?
| Everything is moving on their website.
| DrScientist wrote:
| > On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?
| Everything is moving on their website.
|
| Everything apart from the navigation bar at the top -
| which is well organised and static ( over-time ).
|
| ie in terms of the functional 'find-stuff' part of the
| site - it's all there in the top few pixels(1), and the
| sub menus. The rest is entertainment.
|
| (1) There is also a footer at the bottom of the scroll -
| with a whole host of simple links - if you get that far
| and haven't found what you are looking for.
| melagonster wrote:
| I don't know anyone bought iPhone from their website, so
| this is not so important.
| ben_w wrote:
| > On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?
| Everything is moving on their website.
|
| IMO that's Apple being a high-fashion trend-setter rather
| than good UI/UX design.
|
| The current choices of videos they auto-play actually
| give me motion sickness, which I don't normally get from
| video content.
| krisoft wrote:
| > On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?
|
| It is very possible that they are successfull despite
| their web design choices.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?
| Everything is moving on their website.
|
| Think of it more like a scroll controlled trailer and
| that the metric they might be working on it the longer a
| customer spends on the site the more likely they are to
| convert.
|
| Reason I think it's this is their sites are mega long and
| information packed with everything moving these days.
| lancesells wrote:
| They use their product landing pages as a commercial but
| you can see they make that top nav easy to get to buying
| it or tech specs.
|
| Personally, I dislike scrolljacking but the other
| animated elements that come up in the viewport are pretty
| well-done. It's all ultra-sanitized and corporate but
| there's a lot of effort and finesse put into it.
|
| Phone comparison landing pages:
|
| https://www.apple.com/iphone-15-pro/
|
| https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip6/
|
| https://store.google.com/category/phones?pli=1&hl=en-US
| pimlottc wrote:
| The iPhone 15 Pro page is a good example, as soon as you
| click "Buy" or any other link on the top nav, the pages
| become much more conventional while still retaining a
| consistent and functional style. The dynamic scroll
| hacking stuff is only on the main marketing pages.
| chefandy wrote:
| > The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites,
| with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool
| navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea
| that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I
| thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and
| whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with
| whatever uber cool thing I showed them.
|
| hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer
| or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI
| design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on
| exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core
| guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical
| research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if
| it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-
| focused on helping the user achieve what they need.
|
| Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design
| background? The people I've seen approach web design with the
| intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own
| sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical
| know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity
| designers, or maybe print designers that never had to
| consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with,
| and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were
| charged with maintaining the organization's website so they
| figured it would be an easy switch.
| bluGill wrote:
| UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI
| I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to
| have input.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s.
|
| But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves
| a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid
| well. Most weren't actually good at it.
| chefandy wrote:
| That's weird because the dozens of UI designers and also
| UX designers and researchers (UI design and UX Design are
| not the same thing) I know are employed doing exactly
| what they were trained to do. If you think UX was at an
| apex in the 90s, you haven't actually looked.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are more today than the 90s for sure. However there
| are a lot more UIs around, and the big players don't give
| the UI and UX design people near as much control as they
| did then and so bad UI dominates. today's flat UI fad
| would not be allowed in the 90s.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences
| pretending to be absolute statements.
|
| Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and
| "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on
| clarity or efficiency of communication. It's only recent
| years where that has become such singular focus, and in
| turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app
| experiences have lost their charm.
|
| Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in
| the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design
| backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-
| the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your
| eye.
|
| The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one
| adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range
| of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you
| were successful or not. But "user interface/experience"
| does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is
| designed for delight and delight alone.
|
| The person you are replying to got into the industry with
| the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting
| out. The people who approach it with your attitude have
| mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a
| happy middle.
| chefandy wrote:
| > So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences
| pretending to be absolute statements.
|
| Well I've got a pretty recent design degree and have a
| lot of exposure to what people are thinking and how
| people are practicing in this field. If you've got some
| empirical evidence that challenges that, I'm happy to
| consider it.
|
| > Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed
| and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-
| focused on clarity or efficiency of communication.
|
| Yes, I've been in the field for decades. For most of the
| internet's history, web design was done by "web people"
| and not designers. Additionally, lots of it has been done
| by visual designers and not interaction designers-- that
| yields very different results.
|
| > It's only recent years where that has become such
| singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that
| UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.
|
| So where's your non-anecdotal support for this absolute
| statement?
|
| > Many of the currently popular marketing site designers
| in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design
| backgrounds, and they are popular because they design
| over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that
| catch your eye.
|
| Sorry, no. Most people who put marketing sites together
| come from advertising, which is almost exclusively filled
| with visual designers. There's nearly no reason for a
| marketing website to employ the services of either a UI
| designer or a UX designer. There are a lot of people-- as
| you can see in this comment section-- that call
| themselves UX designers that don't even realize how wrong
| they are. Just like there are lots of people who cargo-
| cult PHP snippets from tutorials that call themselves
| software developers, or even software engineers. Again,
| if you have any non-anecdotal evidence that says
| otherwise, I'm happy to look at it.
|
| > The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one
| adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range
| of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether
| you were successful or not. But "user
| interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an
| efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and
| delight alone.
|
| The fact that you say UI/UX is telling. While a UX
| designer may concern themselves with UI design, they are
| not even close to the same field. UX is about product
| design, overall. UI design is a communication discipline
| in the vein of HCI in which the goal is to communicate
| the functionality of a program to a user. While there are
| lots of colloquial misuses of these terms in companies
| that don't really focus on these things, any organization
| that has codified design practices and structured design
| roles that actually needs to define what these people
| actually do all day uses them correctly.
|
| > The person you are replying to got into the industry
| with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had
| starting out. The people who approach it with your
| attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet
| somewhere in a happy middle.
|
| I'm an art school trained designer having switched
| careers from web development. Most engineer types I've
| encountered call anyone that touches the front-end
| without coding a UI/UX designer, and think the purpose of
| design is aesthetic. I've had dozens of discussions on
| HN, specifically, with developers that think exactly
| that. Within the big UX organizations I've worked with
| and fellow UI designers, what I've said is the rule
| rather than the exception. Go and look at UX portfolios
| for people with professional experience in the field--
| they're full of case studies, not visual design, and
| CERTAINLY not flashy visual design.
| f1shy wrote:
| In UI you want to be _anything_ but original. It should be as
| "the same" as possible.
| m12k wrote:
| Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to
| work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market
| leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the
| other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours.
| So to the extent that originality means diverging from those
| expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing
| your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the
| expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on
| paradigms that others have established as the norm means
| meeting users where they are.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once
| counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one
| before.
|
| Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce
| ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were
| unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to _physical_
| concepts users did understand ( "oh, I have a physical
| card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes
| sense!").
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Wow that's cool. I remember my dad was addicted to
| solitaire lol
| carlmr wrote:
| He was playing the tutorial all along.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > was once...
|
| ...and is rapidly becoming so again, hence modern UIs
| treating it as a second-class citizen.
| hnick wrote:
| Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people
| are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.
| xinayder wrote:
| While it makes sense, it really isn't the case if the market
| leaders have shitty design principles.
|
| Apple stopped bundling an iPhone charger on recent models.
| Samsung did the same, but realized the backlash was enormous,
| and offered the charger for free (instead of being an
| additional purchase) if you bought a recent model.
|
| Same with headphone jack, although it was received much more
| negatively and I'm pretty sure Samsung didn't give a damn
| about most of its users complaining they now had to buy new
| headphones (they mitigated this a bit by offering a USB-C
| headphone on their flagship devices for a while) to listen to
| music in their devices.
|
| It's an outdated line of thought to think you need your
| designs to feel familiar to the user, even if the competitors
| have dark or annoying design patterns, rather than
| convenient. The average user is no longer a tech illiterate
| person. We should stop assuming common things like opting out
| of marketing/AI data training should be left for advanced
| users only and make it available for everyone, with ease.
| krisoft wrote:
| I don't think you are quite talking about the same kind of
| design here.
|
| You are talking about very high level choices. (Do we
| bundle a charger with every new phone? does the phone have
| a jack?) Those are not really good examples where
| familiarity is important.
|
| The argument about the importance of familiarity is in the
| UX paradigm of the phone. Think about the task of pairing a
| phone with a wifi network. You usually do that by unlocking
| the phone, finding the settings (which is most likely under
| an icon resembling a gear, or a spanner, even though
| neither of those things had anything to do with setting up
| wifi). Then inside the settings you have a long list of
| things you can set, you can move between them by dragging
| the screen up and down. You find the menu item for wifi
| (probably has a wifi logo, or radio waves icon) you click
| that. Then you see something where you can turn the wifi
| radio on or off, and you see a list of SSID's you can join.
| You click the one you want to join, and it asks you for the
| password associated with the network. Usually you can tap
| the password field and an on-screen keyboard appears where
| you can type the password in.
|
| This is by and far the way to connect to a wifi on any
| modern smart phones. This is the "familiar".
|
| To better illustrate what "lack of familiarity" would mean
| imagine a phone where instead of finding the wifi settings
| in a "settings" menu you can connect to a new wifi in the
| maps app. Why? Wifi networks are location dependent, so why
| not? These designers decided that wifi networks appear as
| small colourful dots on the map. Then imagine if after
| tapping your selection from the list of SSID's you would
| need to push a button on the side of the phone to "accept"
| it. Otherwise it won't connect. Then imagine that instead
| of showing you an on-screen keyboard to type in the
| password you need to morse-code tap the password in by
| tapping the back of the phone. The phone would indicate
| this to you by showing an icon of a drum kit.
|
| This is what "lack of familiarity" would look like. Clearly
| this imaginary phone would be very hard to use, and the
| users would reward the manufacturer's creative thinking
| with a lot of returns and complaints.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Another example of this: when I bought my current phone
| it took me well over a week to figure out how to put it
| on silent, because the option to do it is no longer on
| the control panel you sweep down from the top of the
| screen.
|
| No, now I have to actually adjust the volume to make the
| volume indicator / slider pop up, and then the mute
| button is visible.
|
| If the volume slider was accesible through the regular
| on-screen interface, I might have looked for a mute
| button alongside it. But pressing the volume up / down
| buttons didn't occur to me, because those buttons are for
| nudging the volume one step in either direction, not for
| making hidden UI elements appear.
| gyomu wrote:
| Design is about navigating ambiguity, and finding which fine
| lines to walk when resolving tensions inherent to opposing
| constraints in any sufficiently complex problem space. There is
| rarely a single best solution to such problems.
|
| Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many
| (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the
| iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other
| standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii
| with a standard gamepad?
|
| Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual
| aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers
| know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their
| work.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Maybe even if you copy and reuse virtually everything the
| composition can be original if you are not just applying the
| latest trends blindly because it's shiny and new. I come from
| IT architecture and for me this is the best transposition of
| originality for the concept of "there is no silver bullet". Do
| you think this also counts as originality?
| psychoslave wrote:
| Even an artist as to meet something that can resonate within
| its public to be called thus, otherwise the person might be
| creative but lake the social dimension which is a preponderant
| trait of any artistic practice. Much like the difference
| between creating a language of your own for exclusive usage in
| your diary and creating a language enshrined in some literature
| work like Tolkien did.
| raincole wrote:
| > If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to
| be an artist instead of a designer.
|
| Copying is the way art works as well (at least for those who
| are not doing super-edgy-fine-art).
|
| Typical journey of a digital painter:
|
| 1. Refuse to copy. Refuse to even look at references.
|
| 2. Hoard references. Over reference.
|
| 3. Copy in the right way.
| tetha wrote:
| Music isn't very different either. A common recommendation is
| to first learn to play songs you like, and then to start
| diverging a bit and to adjust the things you don't like and
| merge the ideas you like later on.
| atoav wrote:
| As a former professional designer (and current improvisational
| musician( myself I would even come at it from the other
| direction: There is no true originality to begin with.
| Everything you do borrows from somewhere else, except maybe the
| things you do by accident.
|
| But there is still a difference between a designer who
| blatantly slaps an existing aesthetic onto your project and a
| designer who tries to come up with a suitable look from first
| principles.
|
| Design isn't styling, it is the visual organization of
| information _with_ styling. So unless your information is the
| same the outcome will differ anyways.
| guappa wrote:
| There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items
| got decided before they all got hired.
|
| What they do is to move them around every few months, change
| the colours, design our application with a mobile layout,
| despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers...
| nox101 wrote:
| they need to be punched in the face!
|
| Designers that change up the UI just to have something to do
| drive me nuts! And, now it's life threatening because cars
| now get updates every ~12 months where some designers have
| decided how to use the car changes. So, things you got used
| to suddenly change and you have to figure them out WHILE
| YOU'RE DRIVING!
|
| I hope someone manages to sue over these changes when someone
| inevitably dies, so they'll be some pressure not to make
| them.
| carlmr wrote:
| I still think cars need to be controlled through hardware
| knobs. At least all the normal car functions.
|
| GPS and AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay interaction should be the
| one exception, but even here you need a volume knob at
| least, so that if the volume is suddenly too high you can
| react with muscle memory.
|
| Because surprisingly high volume can distract you enough to
| crash.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Missing the mark in terms of aligning with user needs
| strogonoff wrote:
| The interesting thing about design is that once you combine the
| good parts from preexisting approaches (not least because those
| are patterns familiar to users already), relevant first
| principles (visual hierarchy, legibility), forward thinking
| (sustainable architecture with flexibility in the right
| places), and the context of your specific circumstances and
| goals, you most likely will end up with something sufficiently
| original without making an extra effort in that direction--and,
| rather than being an artist's whim, it would be true beauty
| arising from function.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I think true beauty in design arises from its function. It's
| a beauty that serves a purpose, solves problems, and meets
| needs
| bingemaker wrote:
| In my experience, designers mistake web design with print
| design. Too often, the focus is on the UI rather than on the
| UX.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| A common challenge in the design industry
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| At a company I used to work at, the head of design told me that
| artists work to establish their vision, and designers work to
| establish the audience's vision - something like that. Made a
| lot of sense to me!
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| It gives a profound distinction between the roles of artists
| and designers
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Your distinction between designers and artists is particularly
| compelling. While artists have the freedom to prioritize
| personal expression and originality, designers usually balance
| creativity with functionality. Agree.
| joveian wrote:
| My sense (and I think this matches what you are saying) is that
| the best design is to make habits smoother and doing that often
| involves difficult engineering. We like to think about reasons
| and meaning and purpose and such but humans are primarily a
| collection of habits with rare changes in intent and a lot of
| correcting for stuff that doesn't go smoothly. The best design
| often becomes almost invisible because it just works, but it
| takes a lot of design effort and engineering for that to be
| possible. If you write down the differences between a great
| design and an ok design they can often sound entirely trivial
| but aren't if you think from the perspective of habits.
|
| I recently found this really excellently designed grain bin
| from Masuda Kiribako:
|
| https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902
|
| It looks nice but is fairly simple; if you haven't spent a
| bunch of time looking at available alternatives it might not
| look like anything special. Keeping grain away from insects and
| humidity and oxygen (and sometimes rodents, though I'm not sure
| how well this one would do in that case) while still being able
| to access it easily is not trivial. Plastic buckets work well
| and are cheap but don't look as nice and most lids are annoying
| (I suspect the lid on this one might possibly be a bit annoying
| as well but likely not as bad). Glass jars are nice to use but
| fragile and best for smaller amounts. Wood is particularly
| challenging due to the dimensional instability and they use a
| particular type of wood with something like eight years of
| preparation to make durable boxes. (I suspect the magnet on the
| scoop is pure marketing though, you can't even use it when
| refilling if you hook the lid on the edge which is the one time
| it would be really handy).
|
| I think low latency is one of the things that makes software
| and websites feel really nice to use and is often overlooked.
| markk wrote:
| Designers should feel the "need to be original", in the sense
| that every project is different, and can be looked at with
| fresh eyes.
|
| Perhaps a project is 50% similar to existing project A, 45%
| similar to existing project B, and 5% novel. Finding this
| correct balance of copies of A and B, and finding a good
| solution to the novel part - this process feels "original" in
| many ways.
| nashashmi wrote:
| For some reason, I swapped the word designer with artist.
| Designers are artists first in my head. They adapt off the
| shelf solutions second.
| indiv0 wrote:
| Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- "Everything is
| a Remix" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas
| albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level --
| the article could be called a remix of the video.
|
| The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking
| patents/IP law as anti-creative.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
| amelius wrote:
| Yes and that Disney copied old fairy tales and made them their
| own.
| scoot wrote:
| There's a fine line though. Led Zeplin didn't remix, they flat
| out ripped off other artists lyrics and melody. Changing the
| musical genre doesn't wash IMHO.
| js2 wrote:
| For a visual form of the same argument, but more about music and
| film, see everything is a remix:
|
| https://www.everythingisaremix.info/
|
| It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned any
| discussion:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=everything+is+a+remix
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's easier to discuss a text, to quote from it, to comment on
| it -- to remix it, you might say.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > It's been submitted to HN many times but has never spawned
| any discussion:
|
| It could be because, at least for me personally, I found the
| first 15 minutes to be a little too boring. Perhaps people just
| gave up before then.
| pembrook wrote:
| Copying isn't just how design works, it's how everything works.
| Humans are imitation machines.
|
| We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating
| stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas
| outside of base impulses.
|
| Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to
| any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all
| the breakthroughs are BS media narratives. Most if not all steps
| forward in any field have hundreds of people clawing at similar
| ideas concurrently.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| This is why not much changed for 10s of thousands of years
| until writing was invented, and accelerated when a valid method
| of iteration (science) was instituted.
| kivle wrote:
| It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs
| don't have experience though. They have training data, and a
| probabilistic output.
|
| Designing things have two goals:
|
| - Make old things seem new
|
| - Make new things seem old and familiar
|
| Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we
| have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made
| in a vacuum and without input.
|
| Edit: To expand: An LLM would never have come up with touch
| input. It would have regurgitated the existing ideas of using a
| pen or a mouse to point at things on a screen. To come up with
| touch input was a huge feat of human engineering that was a
| combination of design (making touching a obvious for any human,
| old or young) and engineering (making that interaction actually
| work).
| visarga wrote:
| > LLMs don't have experience though.
|
| They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the
| meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many
| billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in
| a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world
| outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they
| get exposed to things outside their training distribution,
| they search solution space and discover things. Like
| AlphaZero, I think search and real world interaction are the
| key ingredients. For AZ the world was a game board with an
| opponent, but rich enough to discover novel strategies.
| kivle wrote:
| This sounds like an ad. What is "assisted 100s of millions
| of people in many billions of tasks"? Any real world data?
| If it's generating new random clip art for presentations,
| sure. If it's making new flavor text based on generic
| input, sure.
|
| If my question is "what is the circumference of earth", and
| I run a model with a temperature of 100, will it give me a
| good result? Will it always give me a good result with a
| temperature of 0? I don't think so. It's a huge
| probabilistic model. It is not an oracle. It can be useful
| for fuzzy tasks for sure, but not for being smart. You
| might think it's clever because it's generated code for
| you, but that's probably because you asked it to make
| something 500 people already made and published on GitHub.
|
| Edit: Just to clarify. Don't want to step on peoples toes.
| I just feel like we're at the top of a new
| dotcom/crypto/nft hype boom. Seen it soooooooo many times
| before since the beginning of the 2000s. Don't go blind on
| technology. Research what it actually is. An LLM is a "next
| word weighted dice toss machine".
| kivle wrote:
| And to expand on myself. "Experience" means something
| very specific for humans. It means you have done
| something for a long time, and you have failed at it. And
| you have learned from experience. By definition, LLMs
| don't have any experience at all. They are trained and
| become a fresh "brain", and then they make the same
| mistakes, over and over and over, until they either get a
| new prompt that might correct themselves or are trained
| from scratch all over again.
| visarga wrote:
| What I meant is
|
| 1. LLM generates an idea and
|
| 2. the user responds positively or negatively or
|
| 3. the user tries the idea and comes back to continue the
| iteration, communicating the outcomes.
|
| For example the LLM generates some code and I run it, and
| if it fails I copy paste the error.
|
| That is the (state, action, reward) tuple which defines
| an experience.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Sounds like the LLM facilitated a human to gain
| experience, by making mistakes for the human and then
| correcting those mistakes also likely in an incorrect
| way. LLMs are effectively very very bad teachers.
|
| The LLM given the same inputs tomorrow is likely to
| return similar responses. If a human did that they would
| likely be concidered to have some sort of medical
| condition...
| Kiro wrote:
| > You might think it's clever because it's generated code
| for you, but that's probably because you asked it to make
| something 500 people already made and published on
| GitHub.
|
| An LLM has no problem coming up with novel solutions
| within my own esoteric physics framework that only exist
| on my computer, using my patterns and taking all the
| nuances into account. It's definitely not just spitting
| out something it has seen before.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Uhhh, physics?
| Kiro wrote:
| Yes, that can be used in a game engine for example.
| jpc0 wrote:
| I think the point being made is that there is very little
| room for creativity there... There are tons of examples
| of physics engines written in multitudes of languages
| with a full range of quality of implemention.
|
| Now if the LLM had known to look for and found dark
| matter or gravitational waves all while sitting there on
| your computer comparing micro changes between CPU cycles,
| maybe you would have a point. To my knowledge most
| physics engines do the even emulate Newtonian physics
| nevermind more modern variants
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm not talking about the physics calculations. I'm
| talking about it navigating, adapting and coding using my
| own patterns, coding style and structure within a context
| that is completely custom. It understands the framework
| I've built, what functions to use when and writes code
| looking and working as if it was my own.
| jpc0 wrote:
| > It understands the framework I've built, what functions
| to use when and writes code looking and working as if it
| was my own.
|
| Yes, that's what LLMs do. They build statistical models
| based on their context and training data. They then give
| the most likely statistical output.
|
| There's nothing creative about it, it's all statistics
| based on the inputs and they can at best extrapolate but
| they cannot fundamentally move outside of their inputs.
|
| Humans uniquely can.
| visarga wrote:
| > What is "assisted 100s of millions of people in many
| billions of tasks"?
|
| Let's assume 180M users for ChatGPT, each user using the
| model just 5 times in a month. You got the 1B tasks. If
| one task uses up 1000 tokens - you have the trillion
| interactive tokens. It's all based on public data and
| guesstimation.
| rbits wrote:
| I don't know if I buy that an AI wouldn't have been able to
| come up with touchscreen. It knows people touch screens with
| pens, and it knows people point and touch things that aren't
| screens. It could put those ideas together, that's how people
| came up with
| kivle wrote:
| It's not an AI. It's a word probability model. Trained on
| tons of text. It's not smart at all. The only reason why it
| might have "figured that out" is because it was actually
| present in scifi texts in the 60s. The other reason would
| be that you increased the temperature to something like
| 100, and then you think you see something genius in some
| hallucinations, among other unreadable text.
| Affric wrote:
| It goes deeper than that. We are copies of our parents made out
| of self replicating molecules... copying is fundamental to
| pretty much everything interesting that has ever happened.
| Lammy wrote:
| This is also why Peter Thiel et al are so obsessed with Rene
| Girard.
|
| > Philosopher Rene Girard, scholar Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and
| Thiel co-founded IMITATIO in 2007 to support the "development
| and discussion of Rene Girard's 'mimetic theory' of human
| behavior and culture." Mimetic theory, the concept that humans
| are fundamentally imitative, has had a profound effect on
| Thiel, who calls Girard "the one writer who has influenced me
| the most."
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14025760/peter-thiel-het...
| infoseek12 wrote:
| An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying
| (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Re: The copied terracottas
|
| Originality is overrated in art, painting restoration usually
| entails repainting large sections of the original. The image and
| the ideas far transcends the "original" which is usually reserved
| for bragging rights for uber rich collectors. The best art is the
| art you get to enjoy everyday.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You sorta want to use affordance, when Apple creates a new type
| of UI, it's usually because the introduced new tech. Like recent
| Samsung copy cat AirPods, they cannot invent a new UI because
| they are not the innovators, so they need to borrow affordances
| from Apple.
|
| On why they copy the shape and size, that is the part where you
| can be more artistic, and it seems they have no taste.
|
| (Affordance meaning using what people already is familiar with so
| they don't have to relearn an interface)
| esalman wrote:
| A lot of the UI features and associated tech that apple
| introduced in iPhone and iPad last few years lagged Android by
| a few iterations. What gives?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah like the customizable home screen and widgets. They
| ain't perfect, but I think they really wanted it done right
| for Mobile. The widget itself isn't new in Apple's ecosystem
| as Macs always had it.
| esalman wrote:
| You can actually find lists of 100 or more things if you
| look it up, that were made available in Android first, and
| some have not even made to Apple yet, like 4k or 120hz
| display etc.
| Suppafly wrote:
| That's sorta the history of Apple in a nutshell. For every
| actual innovation, there is a ton of commoditizing things
| that exist and repackaging them for locked-in Apple consumers
| that were previously unaware of them.
| eddyzh wrote:
| Insightful perspective.
|
| Maybe interesting to point out from what year it is. It looks
| like 2020.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Yep, the opengraph published_time is (taken from the source
| code of the page):
|
| Wed Oct 28 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
|
| Article has been submitted twice, but never gained any traction
| (no comments, very few votes):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093794
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24925039
| eduction wrote:
| Steve Jobs didn't just waltz into Xerox PARC and steal a glimpse
| at the Alto. That visit was heavily lawyered and PARC got Apple
| shares as compensation. To summarize this as "stealing" is just
| incorrect. Lazy work.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Except Apple recruited GUI engineers from PARC to work on the
| Lisa and Macintosh itself. I don't think you can steal any
| better than that.
| rogerclark wrote:
| Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen,
| however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than
| Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.
|
| Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is.
| Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design
| works, copying only gets you so far.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was
| better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly
| side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push
| the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology
| which I believe is what the article is pointing out.
| rogerclark wrote:
| "Disappointed, but not defeated, they resolved to build a
| better version of Mario."
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Resolved = tried, wished
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Millennial here - I played this as a teenager on our ancient-
| for-the-time family PC.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Disagree. Commander Keen 4-6 are better than Mario, imo.
| thestepafter wrote:
| To add to this Commander Keen was released on a very limited
| platform. More people were gaming on Nintendo systems than
| personal computers. If Commander Keen was released on
| Nintendo things may have gone differently.
| trentnix wrote:
| Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), Commander
| Keen should be compared to Mario 3 (which still came out over
| a year earlier than the first Keen), not Mario. And 4-6 are
| most appropriately compared to Super Mario World, which was
| released the same year.
|
| Keen was/is great, but Mario 3 and Mario World are on the
| shortlist for best game ever.
| zogrodea wrote:
| Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about
| how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the
| famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us
| being shocked.
|
| "Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is
| altogether 'original', that is to say, purely his own work and
| not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must
| be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing
| them.
|
| It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they
| find that Shakespeare's plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy
| hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of
| plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch,
| or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into
| his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of
| Beethoven's C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of
| Mozart's G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the
| habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude
| Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have
| thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."
|
| I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it
| hard to take a single side.
| jjcm wrote:
| One of the mistakes I made as a young designer was pushing back
| against trends and fads. My opinion at the time was that trends
| that weren't thought out from a position of UX principles were an
| anti-pattern to follow. As I matured more as a designer, I now
| think nearly the opposite - not following trends is an anti-
| pattern, since that's what your users will be used to.
|
| Pull down to refresh is a great example of this. Not visible or
| discoverable at all, but was all the hype when Tweetie first
| released it. On paper it's an anti-pattern, but now it's so
| ingrained as a trend and pattern that it became expected, and is
| now muscle memory for many users.
|
| The same goes with flat buttons - I used to be quite opposed to
| them since there was no visual elevation off the page designating
| it as a button. Now if you create a button with a bevel, users
| will think it's an ad, not part of the page itself.
|
| Copying leads to harmony in the wider ecosystem, and it creates a
| defined agreement on what things are are how they work. It's an
| important part of the user experience.
| lupire wrote:
| That just your own bad taste.
|
| Pull to refresh is useful and _optional_.
|
| Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| I can only hope this was a joke/light hearted but anyway
|
| > That just your own bad taste.
|
| Please be civil
|
| [link to hn guidelines here]
| jjcm wrote:
| > Flat buttons save precious space on tiny mobile devices.
|
| You're probably mistaking a flat button for a link /
| undecorated button. Apple's HIG refers to these as plain
| buttons for iOS[1]. I'm referring to flat vs bevelled[2],
| which take up the same space.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-
| guideline...
|
| [2] https://image.non.io/428397dc-93ae-4158-8b71-323bd11182a0
| .we...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There's been recent discussions on TV news about 'dupe' specific
| sites for fashion and home goods. The big fear is that the
| popularity of dupes will harm the original designers. However,
| the idea of fashion copyright is only a modern concept. In
| woodworking if you saw a chair you liked, you may pay for a plan,
| but then make it yourself as many times as you wanted. A cobbler
| would look at a shoe and know how to make it for their customer.
| A tailor can change a collar or stitch to match what anyone
| wants.There was no demand that every worker have a unique design
| - everyone understood it was made to order. When it becomes
| possible to scale a design to worldwide sales, then the claims of
| uniqueness seem to us to become more important - but should they?
| vizzier wrote:
| Counterpoint to that though, guilds existed as a different form
| of control for many hundreds or thousands of years. Instead of
| controlling what people can make, just control who can make it.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| Tom Ford commented on the issue of counterfeit and "knock off"
| products in the fashion industry, he said after some research
| (I assume by him/his company) they found that the people buying
| the cheap counterfeit products weren't their customers anyway,
| and so they weren't losing anything.
| lupire wrote:
| That's not the problem in fashion. The problem is if their
| non-customers tarnish the brand and drive customers away.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| What industry do you think Tom Ford was talking about?
| analog31 wrote:
| "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -- Igor Stravinsky
|
| (Probably stolen)
| trentnix wrote:
| Copying from one source is plagiarism. Copying from multiple
| sources is research.
| nxobject wrote:
| "Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of
| the copy you will find yourself." - Yohji Yamamoto.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Back at uni a teacher used to say everything (in design, at
| least) has already been made - so yes, "creativity" was an act to
| put things that already exist and nobody thought about putting
| together before.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > In a 2005 forum post, John Carmack explained his thoughts on
| patents. While patents are framed as protecting inventors, he
| wrote, that's seldom how they're used. Smart programmers working
| on hard problems tend to come up with the same solutions.
|
| I find this happens in UI/UX design too. When you're trying to
| come with the best interface for a problem, there's only so many
| directions that make sense once you've explored the design space
| and understood all the constraints.
|
| With desktop and mobile interfaces for example, all operating
| systems and devices have converged on a lot of similar patterns
| and visuals. I don't think this is because people are unoriginal,
| but given the constraints, there's only so many decent options to
| pick from so many designers will inevitably converge on the same
| solution.
|
| > I'm a designer. As a designer, I feel the need to be original.
|
| I'll often come up with a solution on my own after immersing
| myself in a problem for a while, then after looking at existing
| work more later, find it's already been done. I'll then sometimes
| even consider changing my solution so it doesn't look like I
| copied, but usually there's no obvious other direction you can go
| in that is close to as good.
| Osiris wrote:
| There is no such thing as completely original. No matter what,
| all of your ideas are influenced by your life experience and what
| you've seen.
| xiaoape wrote:
| Reminded me a short article:
| https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000324
|
| > We're not designers, or programmers, or information architects,
| or copywriters, or customer experience consultants, or whatever
| else people want to call themselves these days... Bottom line:
| We're risk managers.
| rramadass wrote:
| Even more strongly; _Copying is the way we Learn._
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Data folks would do well to find some good visualizations (from
| the Economist or New York Times) and recreate them.
|
| They will learn a lot from doing so.
| lemax wrote:
| As a designer, one eventually thinks not about what they liked in
| other people's work but why it worked. You can derive a design
| out a compendium of some things that you've seen that you like,
| but ultimately, to be successful you need to know why what you're
| copying made sense for its purpose. Perhaps you need to even
| encounter the same problem; it takes a bit of maturity to copy
| effectively.
| 1GZ0 wrote:
| Good artists copy, great artists steal
|
| - Pablo Picasso
| atoav wrote:
| As a former designer with a broad background (graphics,
| typography, print, web, product design) whenever I read something
| like this I get the feeling people generally have a misguided
| idea of what design is.
|
| Many (bad) designers confuse what I would call _styling_ with
| design. Design is a lot about functionality and how information
| is organized visually. These two core design points can only be
| copied _if_ the underlying project is exactly the same in terms
| of underlying information. But even for two blogs about different
| topics the question which information needs to be presented how
| would be different -- even if both blogs were using the browser
| 's default CSS. This is the core of design.
|
| Styling is finding colors, shapes proportions etc. All of this of
| course overlaps with the functional question and the question of
| organization of information -- bigger buttons get more attention
| and all that -- but ultimately you can slap more or less any
| style on any content. Whether it makes sense is a different
| question.
| andruby wrote:
| I like your description, and it resonates with how I see
| things.
|
| A lot of people think of aesthetics when they hear "design".
| But design is about how things work. Everything we use was at
| some point designed by someone.
|
| In our SaaS company we changed the role of Designers to Product
| Designers to help people understand it a little better.
| atoav wrote:
| I mean in the end aesthetics are intricately intertwined with
| how things are perceived and thus how they work.
|
| There is only so much information a person can process at
| once, there are certain expectations where they would find
| things those can be met or sub erted, colors, font choice,
| all important for how information gets processed on the
| functional level.
|
| So in the end design cannot exist with some degree of
| aesthetical choice, and the better designers are the better
| they are at choosing aesthetics that serve the functional
| choices (if that is the goal of their designs).
|
| If you make it completely utilitarian it might become boring,
| and the function of a design in a SaaS company could also be
| to sell the product..
| myworkinisgood wrote:
| Side note: This is why I feel Stallman is more of a visionary and
| would have much more lasting impact than Jobs had (character
| flaws of both people not withstanding). Jobs stole and kept
| market dominance to keep the loot for himself. In medieval time,
| Jobs would be a raider. Stallman empowered the people and let
| them have fruits of their own labor.
| andruby wrote:
| The analogy doesn't work well. Sure Steve Jobs and Apple
| shareholders got rich, but everyone that bought a Mac, or
| iPhone, or iPad was able to benefit from the innovations they
| brought.
|
| As far as I know, a raider doesn't share or enable others.
| sva_ wrote:
| (2020)
| xtiansimon wrote:
| A manifesto, how retro.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >A manifesto, how retro.
|
| Somewhat unrelated, but it's a shame that manifestos have such
| a bad rap, most often associated with terrorists and such.
| There is something sorta nice about sitting down and clearly
| declaring your thoughts on a subject. It makes sense that
| people pushed to the edge want to let us know why they are
| behaving they way they are, but it's a shame that normal people
| aren't encouraged to reflect upon their thoughts and write them
| down. Being able to think about a topic and put on paper that
| these are my thoughts and feelings about $x brings a certain
| amount of clarity to your thinking and can help other people
| understand your thinking in a way that has a lot of power.
| Consider historical documents like the Declaration of
| Independence, the points are laid out in a way that even if you
| disagree with them, there is no denying what they are
| declaring.
| okonomiyaki3000 wrote:
| I've always said: Good artists borrow, great artists steal. You
| can quote me on that.
| raptorpark wrote:
| Self taught artist, and I learned by copying my favorite comic
| books and painters.
|
| Went to art school and a significant part of my art history class
| dealt in remembering the name of art "movements" which is a
| veiled way of saying a period when everyone was copying each
| other. Then of course you learn about the influential artists who
| heavily borrowed from xyz. Another funny one is "revival" which
| just means "straight up copy"
|
| This is why I have limited sympathy for the uproar about AI art.
| It's just cutting through the boring part.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think it is how every artist learns. Later an artist's
| "style" then comes to be the bits and pieces they preferred
| from various artists they copied as they were learning -- a
| kind of Stone Soup style.
| adolph wrote:
| > But at $145 (the equivalent of $12.78 in 1947) it's more
| affordable than the LCW was when it was first manufactured and
| sold.
|
| The article isn't explicitly dated (afaict). Using an inflation
| calculator leads me to believe it was written in 2019 [0]. The
| same calculator indicates a material deviation from the quoted
| number: "$145 in 2024 equals $10.16 in 1947."
|
| Amazingly, the chair is listed on Amazon now at $118.53 [1] (at
| least for my login/cookies/tracking; price includes shipping
| estimated at 6 days), the equivalent of $8.31 in 1947, a 60% off
| sale.
|
| The cost probably has some externality tradeoffs however. Was the
| wood clear cut by children from thousand year old forests? Was
| the chair manufactured by prisoners using chemicals known by the
| state of California to cause cancer?
|
| 0.
| https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&ye...
|
| 1. https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-
| Century...
| jmdots wrote:
| This all great but for small time programmers trying to get a
| company off the ground, acting defensively is justifiable. It's
| not always a question of a guy like Carmack having a good time
| cloning the big corp thing. Sometimes, and even many times lately
| it's big corp obliterating inventive small business by releasing
| their own copy, or they simply use their monopolistic power to
| drive them into an inequitable sale.
|
| If you're small time and have a great idea, you're better off
| going stealth and this is its own mitigation against destructive
| copying.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The irony of copyright is that it _demands_ copied design.
|
| Want an online menu for your restaurant? Well, you can't just go
| copying someone else's design; so you must create your own from
| scratch. Will yours look and behave practically identically to
| the other? Yes. Will both websites be overall worse quality than
| if everyone just collaborated on a standard design? Yes. Would it
| save the world an incredible amount of redundant work to just
| allow people to copy each others' work? Yes. Who wins in this
| arrangement? Only those who have already won.
|
| Keep looking at this pattern, and you will enter a deep cavernous
| rabbit-hole. At the bottom, you will find yourself at the very
| core of design itself: the goals, philosophies, and systemic
| failures of every design we use today can be traced back to this
| point: _collaboration must be avoided at all costs._
| Compatibility is the cardinal sin, and it must be punished.
|
| So we go on, building silos upon silos. When will we ever learn?
|
| ---
|
| There is a lot of talk lately for change. They say, "AI will be
| the end of copyright. It's too important to hold back the
| potential of AI over a petty argument for intellectual property."
| I don't believe for a minute that LLMs will ever reach the lofty
| goal of "General Intelligence". I don't believe for a minute that
| megacorps like OpenAI, Google, and Meta _deserve_ a free pass to
| siphon data for profit. So why is it that these words ring true?
| AI has nothing to do with it: it 's _design itself_ that has
| incredible potential, and we should absolutely stop holding it
| back. Intellectual Property is nothing more than a demand against
| progress.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| This is relevant for me today since we are designing a new house.
| To go with an architect is looking like between $50k - $100k for
| basic building schematics and not the build plans. This seems
| like a lot to me. The route I'm going down now is finding houses
| I like on Zillow and hiring a Designer on Fivrr to basically copy
| them and create a 3D model in Revit that can eventually become
| building plans. So far the Fivrr Designer costs $100 per Zillow
| house to model into pretty good Revit plans that I could take to
| a Draftsman in my area to turn into building plans. It feels a
| little like cheating, but I've been seeing good results so far.
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