Comment by emaro
10 hours ago
I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
10 hours ago
I kind of agree in the sense that stealing a good idea and executing it well is a skill. Copying someones site "pixel by pixel" seems disrispectful though and I don't know what there's to be proud of.
I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg
Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/
If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.
https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.
Given the CLAUDE.md, you slopped it, so yes, it was easy. Don't take this as combative but.. if anyone has a right to be proud, it's Anthropic, you just paid them to make this for you.
Gosh hacker news is so disappointing nowadays. You show a project, you say hey, this is hard, I’m proud of it, and someone comes along and tells you that ackshually it was easy because you used a few prompts.
You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either.
"You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothing to further the conversation, and it’s a criticism that can be leveled at literally any project that isn’t concealing the fact that they’ve used AI when everyone uses AI now except for artisan work.
Go on, I dare you to try to redo what I did. You won’t even know where to start, since I had to buy a book from the 2000s on Viaweb and implement templates based on the contents. Now kindly leave me alone.
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Why did you do this?
It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying.
Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
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In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.
No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons).
If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.
Ask yourself why you feel that way, though. If I pixel-by-pixel copy discrete ideas from 20 different sites to build my own, that seems different, legit. Zero new code by me, I just stitched it together.
As we reduce 20, somehow that legitimacy erodes and at 1 it's "disrespectful". Where along that line was it wrong?
The "problem" we perceive is not stealing, it's stealing from only 1 place.
The sorites paradox says that removing a grain of sand from a heap doesn't stop it from being a heap, and yet we can do that until we are left with a single grain of sand which is clearly not a heap.
Likewise, taking elements from many influences and combining them involves a lot of creative choices about which pieces to take from which influence while copying one thing exactly involves no creative choices and is just reusing someone else's effort. It's the difference between baking someone a cake or getting one from the store.
Clearly the act of combining various elements into a coherent whole is the added value here. Like musicians which take various samples and sounds and combine them into something novel and harmonic
I thought the same at first, but they are copying somebody's old and retired design, ie the other company doesn't use that design anymore.