I think that these things I've seen that are tells of a slop UI are when people without discernment (not as an insult!) don't do a pass over a UI. I'm working on a dumb little app to help me sequence photos for a book[0], and I'm building it with Claude (Opus 5.5, medium effort). The first pass was really sloppy, but I was surprised at how far I could get with some directed iterating.
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
Ever tested it on mobile? There’s some cut off text in the top right nav, the “start by adding photos” text isn’t vertically centered in its container, and the page size/settings container is also cutting off content on the sides.
The other difference was that Bootstrap met WCAG standards and had a very strong baseline of accessibility. These LLM slop outputs meet no such standards and seem to laugh in the face of accessibility.
Yeah, that's very true. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Claude's `design` skill, which does an accessibility pass that I've found pretty decent as someone with only minor experience in the area — contrast, tab/focus ordering, things of that nature. The catch is that you have to actually have to want to check these things, just like you have to want to not ship slop.
Anything that you use to show stuff on your tv is gonna have this problem. Apple is a little higher on the trust spectrum than, say, Roku. You’re paying Apple in part for the convenience of not doing a homebrew setup, and in part for the trust.
Not anything - you can use XBMC or Jellyfin and have a certain degree of control over your frontend.
Apple's big problem is that whatever they say, goes. If they decide to partner with Hulu for advertisements, you have no escape hatch to install a respectful UX.
I think that’s about pull tabs (the old kind where you removed a small disc from the top of a can) vs pop tabs (the kind where you punch a hole into it and nothing detaches).
Who would have owned the centralization? I always thought that one of the lovely parts of the WWW was that anyone could have a part of it in theory, even if it was easier to let someone else host your website for you.
I'm not saying "web" would be better if it was more centralized. WWW is optimal in the sense that it sits directly on top internet protocols, i.e. it just defines how to use TCP/IP to retrieve a document.
I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way.
We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.
The fact that a package manager which keeps separate versions of each package for each dependency that it has became the accepted default that everyone in the frontend community uses as a foundation for their projects speaks to a lack of care or understanding within that community for technical matters.
Frontend has lower barrier of entry and more appeal for beginners, so its bell curve might have its left edge is thicker. It impacts the avg of problems and culture of dealing with them
More appeal I agree because it's easier to see useful results and iterate quicker. Lower barrier of entry I disagree with strongly; if the barrier to entry were so low I don't know why I've worked with so many otherwise-talented backend devs that can't wrap their heads around the frontend to save their lives. Frontend forces you to deal with real-world customer problems sooner rather than later; performance is more important, it has to work on more than one environment, you have a frame budget. It's like saying game development has a low barrier to entry; you might be able to get started quickly but you will run into constraints unless you learn fast. On the backend you can just pay another dollar for a VPS twice the size.
I had wild food poisoning and had a similar experience (took me out for weeks, didn’t drink coffee). I assume the body must have some sort of gating mechanism for pain; I have absolutely had caffeine withdrawal before, but not that time. I’ve since cut back and switched to tea, which I believe has helped with my anxiety.
I’m in the same spot after 4-5 weeks of norovirus. Couldn’t touch the stuff. Before, was at probably three to five cups a day. Biggest difference was waking up and feeling awake instead of in need of coffee… but I do miss it, too. Trying to decide what the new steady state is going to be. I’ve been doing one cup a day then switching to decaf while traveling, but that’s harder at home.
I was genuinely really surprised at how easy it was to fit tea in instead. I have a cup of decaf once in a while, or a cup of normal coffee once in a while, but I kinda just wake up now. I think it's also helped not drinking caffeine as soon as I get up, to be honest.
This isn't a new problem; every generation of websites has tells of the lowest-barrier-of-entry tools of the trade. You could tell a Twitter Bootstrap UI from a mile away similarly.
The only difference I think is that AI will go ahead and add stuff that you didn't think of, like little badges and gradients and whatever. I think it's a different skill to say "no, this is distracting and unnecessary." The app I mentioned above has a few of these — extra stats about page counts and image counts and such.
[0]: https://photobook-sequencer.netlify.app/ (very much a work in progress, feedback welcome)
reply