4 ms·
We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes
- blinkbat 3mo ago[flagged]
- jasoncartwright 3mo ago[flagged]
- solid_fuel 3mo agoMaybe you think this is a witty comment, but ironically it illustrates exactly the problem with outsourcing your thinking to a machine. All they needed to do was raise the instance limit, which they immediately did when they saw the surge of traffic. No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. It's almost like human expertise is great. And you know, the whole "maybe ask AI thing" is exactly what everyone is making fun of. Any engineer worth their salt should be able to look at a system crashing under heavy load and come up with a few proper solutions to the problem that don't involve "ask ChatGPT", but people have completely replaced their thinking with this "I'll just ask the calculator" laziness. It's sad, pathetic to see really.
- adroitboss 3mo agoTo me this is such a weird take. I'd imagine you don't have a clear understanding of how 95% of the things you interact with on a daily basis is made. So many things from Shampoos, to Microwaves, to your car, to how your coffee is sourced and made. You are perfectly fine giving away your full control and understanding to another intelligence/s for these things. This could be a bad idea, and historically has been for some people. They were eating food that contained things that weren't healthy for them or they are allergic to some product. However, a majority of people still live this way as long as most of them get a good result from the process. Most people only care about giving an input and getting the same output.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoYou're on a technical forum for people who work in tech. Expecting some bare minimum of technical competency beyond "ask the great oracle" is not a weird take.
- jasoncartwright 3mo agoHacker News! Never change.
- subygan 3mo agohugged to death at 8 points and 20 minutes in frontpage. Please use AI (or anything) to fix your site.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hexasquid 3mo agoIt's the natural vinyl warmth
- dawnerd 3mo agoWell, they're using Render which you'd think they'd be able to handle HN traffic. Not a good look for Render as a service, especially when their first item under product is autoscaling.
- tg180 3mo agoEdge caching seems to be opt-in
- mass-driver 3mo agoSorry for the disruption! This is 100x our normal peak traffic, needed to raise the instance limit.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- simonreiff 3mo agoFYI just 502'd
- wizzwizz4 3mo ago<a>Info<span class="hide_on_mobile">rmation</span></a> Clever. Not sure what the <a> is for, though.
- cherrylimesoda 3mo ago[dead]
- gumby 3mo agoI fed your comment into ChatGPT and asked it to answer your question. It told me that <a> starts an html anchor. Which while absolutely correct does not at all address your question.
- Kailhus 3mo agoIt calls a click handler that pushes a new route that closes the sub info panel the click handler was trying to open in the first place obviously
- mschuster91 3mo agoto the people claiming "hugged to death", this website works for me while on a train in rural Germany (anyone who lives in Europe should be all too aware about phone network quality here). As for the content: fully agree. Human touch is a value in itself. Unfortunately, modern capitalism does not provide incentives to take care about value, because (by capitalism's metrics) value is inefficiency.
- rvz 3mo agoAll these "principled" people telling others that they "practice what they preach" then keep shooting themselves in the foot with their "production" site down and hugged to death on the front page. Just ask the AI to set up your site for better uptime if you don't know how to.
- bbg2401 3mo agoYou say this as if almost every AI generated landing page posted to HN isn't falling apart at the seams.
- prmoustache 3mo agoSorry but that is just rage posting. Please turn up your brain and have a look at github uptimes for instance. You would think that by now AI would have solved all their problems right?
- notenlish 3mo agoThe site was back up but now it's down again for some reason.
- greenavocado 3mo agoShould have one shotted an assembly rewrite for maximum serving efficiency
- hexasquid 3mo agoArtists: No cold-hearted machine can ever replicate the ingenuity, the innate creativity and passionate soul of the artiste. Later: The villain cat has the catchphrases 'Purrrfect' and 'You must be kitten me'. The snake character makes lotsss of sss noissesss.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoThis (and all the disgusting "hugged to death, you're dumb, use AI" comments that have replaced HN's normal venom-less "hugged to death" comments) makes me want to leave Hacker News.
- therobots927 3mo agoIt’s a mixed bag. You have insufferable mouth breathing morons who think AGI is here, and on the other hand you have rational - dare I say enlightened - individuals such as yourself.
- hexasquid 3mo agoIf it is that bad then I sincerely apologise.
- nozzlegear 3mo agoWhy wouldn't a snake character make lots of ssss noises? I've never met one in real life but I have to imagine the tongue is an impediment.
- javascriptfan69 3mo agoAnd yet people still prefer it over AI slop.
- hexasquid 3mo agoI shall call it artist slop.
- happytoexplain 3mo ago
- therobots927 3mo ago[flagged]
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo agoThese people should know that it's a type designer's website, not a software shop. The site works from here so I know;)
- bcrosby95 3mo agoA website flaming out and dying in the face of unusual traffic is a perfectly reasonable business decision. These "witty" comments are effectively self owns.
- metalman 3mo agoNo AI needed for the design and build of custom metal either, and with a similar long human effort that I am privilaged to be aware and part of that I am quite certain cant be handled useing any computational averaging. Funnily enough, I have had and am right now involved in a project that the customer tried to have AI design, but that the most basic calculations were wrong. It's worse, as even humans working with highly developed design and estimating software, cant deliver accurate shop plans for real world projects that involve irregular surfaces or curves, and changing slopes that must be measured on site. AI will help you enjoy your cubes and parallograms, and cover them with realistic textures.
- protocolture 3mo ago[flagged]
- happytoexplain 3mo agoWhat is the point of such a clear false equivalency, aside from snideness?
- protocolture 3mo agoWhat is the point of telling everyone you dont use AI aside from virtue signalling?
- colonelspace 3mo ago[flagged]
- tony_cannistra 3mo agoI believe we before we had "virtue signaling" we called it "sharing opinions"
- protocolture 3mo agoYeah this is promotion not opinion.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoThis genre of comment doesn't belong on HN. Please consider leaving this on other parts of the internet.
- protocolture 3mo agoSorry I meant to say "Hey OP this is amazing work, I have never seen better self promotion. Its fantastic to see people following the well worn path of submitting absolutely threadbare nonsense articles to Hacker News for blog clicks. Its an amazing strategy with a wide community and a great deal of support, including among hackernews moderators. I hope you continue to follow this strategy, and we as your readers will continue to tolerate the burden of extremely lowered signal to noise ratio. All the best."
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- TacticalCoder 3mo agoWhere are the voices of reason? My wife got an email from a new hire (now even a new hire yet: she's still on a trial basis), a 23 years old, where she explains that she doesn't want to use AI. That she doesn't like what AI does. On a funny sidenote: the email is obviously 99% llmish, which is hilarious. That's one extremity: crazy people who refuse to learn a new tool. Then on the other extremity you have the even much crazier ones: those who believe they've got an intelligent machine that is going to solve all their work problems during the day and then, at night, that is going to enlighten them by revealing them who god really is. Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver?
- rglover 3mo ago> Where the heck are the reasonable people who use AI for what it is: a tool that can be extremely helpful at times and extremely sucky at other times but that is still, on average, a time saver? They're unlikely to be vocal because they've already evaluated and decided the role AI will play in their work/life and just moved on/kept working. That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI (either by force or choice).
- phil21 3mo ago> That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of. Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases. Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future". I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.
- skullone 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Isaackoz 3mo agoI'll be honest, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a human-only created typeface and an AI assisted typeface.
- surgical_fire 3mo agoThat's a fair point, and in full self-criticism mode: I suspect I also would not be able to. What it tells me is not that their work has no value, only that I am not the target audience for their work.
- x0i 3mo ago[dead]
- tony_cannistra 3mo agoI'm the op on this one (not the author). Gotta say, I had higher hopes for the community here. Isn't it worthwhile to examine our patterns of thinking and work? Shouldn't alternative perspectives such as these spark conversation, rather than sly jibes? HN grew from curiosity and good-faith. Y'all are not showing up.
- darkmarmot 3mo agoI recently mentioned that my team and most of my dev friends don’t use AI for code on a gamdev forum (we do stuff like distributed consensus, compilers, etc.). I was quickly denounced as “an arrogant douche”.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ryanthedev 3mo agoI think the eye roll is the need to shout that you don’t use AI. It’s the new web dev, imo. This post wasn’t about sparking conversation. It’s about using AI makes me lose the human touch in what I do, blah blah, heard it all before. Sorry, not sorry.
- tony_cannistra 3mo agoTFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one. The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?" I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.
- Levitz 3mo agoBut that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that. LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"??? None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work. LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.
- mass-driver 3mo agoHey, I’m the author of this article. Just thought I’d share some context, since HN is a little outside the intended audience: - We’re a tiny design studio specialising in fonts, so our website was (maybe predictably) not set up to handle a big traffic spike. It should be stable now. - This article was written in response to some font industry discussions on the same topic. It’s a collection of thoughts rather than a manifesto, and there’s nuance which it doesn’t go into. I’m not a die-hard AI hater, just opposed to careless use of it within this narrow field. Appreciate the more reasonable comments!
- tony_cannistra 3mo agoThanks for writing it, I enjoyed the perspective. I found it by way of Michael Sacasas' post: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/feeding-on-illusions https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/feeding-on-illusi...
- My_Name 3mo agoFor font design, and art beyond what could be called boilerplate art, real art, not just something to quickly throw on a website so you have something there, AI is not a good tool. I think AI will take over many jobs, firstly in the arrangement of characters and words into stock text, or coding. But art, not just pictures, is something that will take longer and may never happen. Design is very similar. Good art makes you feel something, and you need the human experience to feel that before you can make that and make other people feel that.
- BerislavLopac 3mo agoAI is going to replace artists in exact the same way rhythm machines replaced drummers.
- My_Name 3mo agoIf the rhythm machines were making the beats, your analogy would be sound. Unfortunately, they do not. AI has already started earning good money in music. The Velvet Sundown, for example was getting a million listens a month on Spotify. People still make clothes by hand but try finding one at your local shopping centre.
- glouwbug 3mo agoWhen you write without AI you cultivate your team’s understanding which cultivates communication and teamwork and immediate understanding during downtime and emergencies. Build your team, not the product
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- combray 3mo agoWhat sort of human hands make computer fonts? Are you there coding in the ones and zeros on some sort of breadboard, wiring up the data using an oscilloscope and rare earth magnets? There seems to be this idea that using AI is the same thing as walking away and not touching it. Like that you would just say to the computer, do the thing and then not look at it, read it or edit it in any way. What's the world where you're describing where you wouldn't select and edit and refine? You know, with software as an example, how that works with AI is that you spend all day opting it and refining it and you do it over and over and over and you're guiding it and you're shaping it. So it's not like the computer does it. You're still there. I mean, you're making a typeface. You're not chiseling something into stone. You're making a program of sorts that will make shapes. And I don't know why there would be any world where you would just walk away from your first prompt and call it done.
- mass-driver 3mo agoTo answer your first question: almost all good fonts start with sketches on paper. Every tool has a kind of grain, a sort of ‘shape language’ it pushes you towards making, and the bézier curves fonts use internally are surprisingly opinionated. The first few months of any new typeface involve switching between physical and digital drawings frequently, trying to make sure no single tool has too much influence over the shape. AI might be just another tool, but its grain is super unpredictable. Refining AI-generated sketches is more complicated, and ultimately the skills it requires can only be developed through firsthand practice of analogue techniques. I literally studied stonecarving (along with calligraphy, brush lettering, etc.) in order to be able to make better digital fonts.
- combray 3mo agoMy point, and maybe it's overly simplistic, is that at some point you are using the computer to make computer fonts. At some point the ideas go into the computer and you are using computer tools to build the font. They start in the shower or from the finger feel of carving stones whatever, but before and after AI computer fonts are built with computer software tools. Carving rocks, sure, human hands. The idea that AI is different, in kind, than any of the many other tools that you use is silly to me -- at no point is it desirable for you to throw out your brain. As you say, every tool has a different sort of "grain", which is neither good nor bad but does in fact influence the final product. Where you lose me is why would you implicitly throw out your process? What about this tool gives the idea that you should not keep the parts of the process that is valuable, on paper etc? AI probably would do better fiddling with the beziers or whatever, what would be the reason that it's ipso facto a bad idea? Who is saying that? I'm not sure basically what the other side of your argument was supposed to be.
- arjie 3mo agoGrandiose enough for internal documentation and self-motivation but otherwise uninteresting. It's Yet Another Meaning And History Post of the variety you've seen posted a few dozen times. Has the flavour of someone still discussing tabs and spaces. In an odd irony, it's mostly like the content it disparages.
- joshcsimmons 3mo agoIs this a flex now? As always, I don't really care what tools a creative uses to manifest their idea in the world, I care how good the product is. AI, just like the coding language you choose is a TOOL. Tools can be wielded expertly or crudely. At the end of the day your customer doesn't care who you are they care about your product.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoThis doesn't really make sense except as a reflexive reaction to the article title. "It's just a tool" is much less meaningful at this point than something like what the author has written. Everything we use or reference or leverage is a tool - that doesn't mean anything.
- fatata123 3mo ago[dead]
- cliglot 3mo ago[flagged]
- gumby 3mo agoPretty sure the alif/alif had upward prongs because it was the head of the ox (so the triangle is the snout or head with two prongs above. Phoenician alif has the upward prongs. It may have come from Egyptian which would have been a definite ox head. The Greek/Latin A is the symbol inverted — those are not legs.