The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it.
In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.
The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.
The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.
The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.
The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
My thoughts too, however, has that fad not passed?
I always found designs worked better without lorem ipsum, for example, if building a website for a T-shirt company, you might as well use their existing descriptions to see if the content actually fits the layout. Plus you can model real world things, I remember many a lorem ipsum design just falling apart because things like product names were longer than 'lorem ipsum'. Yes I get the idea of lorem ipsum but I always found we wasted time, insulted the client and just created problems for ourselves, just to accomodate a designer that only ever saw text as shapes on a page.
Clearly the car was the Top Gear KIA Cee'd and you must be The Stig.
We all start pet projects with the tools we know, to learn new tools along the way. Sometimes you have a nail and the hammer is the right tool for the job. However, why use just the hammer when you can just download the whole Snap On tool inventory for the same price, in both metric and weird American units?
From your write up, I felt that the frameworks were not helping. A HTML file served as a PWA would provide everything needed, without the need to go through the hoops of app stores and debugging with those fancy AI things. To open the page an NFC sticker in the car could work.
What I am saying is 'Keep It Simple'. Oh, and get a bicycle! Most of the world uses 'active travel' for most journeys, only in America is 'active travel' effectively banned by zoning laws and whatnot. Maybe v2 of the app could be all about car dependency, which should be regarded as a chronic disease, with some of the methods used by 'quit smoking' apps to keep users motivated to ride a bicycle or walk, rather than get in the tin coffin.
Hahaha. I hear you. Despite the complaining (I actually forgot to talk about the week long pain that was figuring out why tracing and telemetry would break the build), this project was a lot of fun. I went with flutter (and making a whole app) very much because I wanted something that was smoother than a PWA in actual use. I think that the feeling I was able to get the app to, was much more comfortable than what is possible to do with web apps. Perhaps next time tho I'll try something else.
I am currently looking for colour palettes and this website is of interest to me.
Small snag, some UTF8 things are going on with some colour names, I am sure you know and have cursed accordingly.
I like OKLCH colours and the ability to mix them in interesting ways using CSS things.
This means I don't do hex codes for colours in CSS. I can translate though, however, soon some people will demand OKLCH, so you might as well add it in, trying to get it natural with the picker.
I appreciate the masters but I wonder how this would work using other sources, for example, Sunday newspaper supplements from the last century, and their glossy adverts, which were to a higher standard than what we get today.
I am aware that Advertisement palettes mostly based on Alphonse Mucha work since I could not include more recent ad illustrations for copywrite reasons.
Mighty impressed! You have done well by sharing your project 'warts and all' on HN. Thanks for listening, just that UX matter of 'loading next palette and you are good to go!
For my current pet project there is an abundance of sensible palettes, with the pet project being a home baking app for my uncle, who keeps meticulous records of so many things. The idea is that there is a 'baker's log' with recipes that can be amended until perfection is achieved.
I digress, back to HARSH criticism!!!
Playfair, Serif, in small sizes, I am not a fan. I can see why, and it works for H1 and H2, but, for those of us with elderly eyes, please can we have a sans-serif such as Inter, which does work on smaller sizes? Maybe A/B test that one, with the screen zoom level captured. My hunch is that I am not alone in having elderly eyesight and that people will be more engaged if they have an easier time of reading.
Next bit of harsh criticism - HTML standards. There does seem to be a use case for 'figure' and 'figcaption'. These work like the 2003 era 'div' and nobody cares about HTML, but why bother with HTML if everything is just divs nested in spans and divs?
In truth, 'div' is the element of last resort and not needed since we have joyful content sectioning elements such as 'section', 'article', 'aside' and much else. We also have a layout engine in CSS, as in CSS grid, and, in my experience, the 'div' is not helping. Code is just better when it is not a sea of divs, each with a gazillion class tags.
We have arrived at a situation where people just use 'div' because that was how grandpa wrote HTML when the iPhone came along and table layouts suddenly had to be 'responsive', as in bloated. We built whole departments around writing code badly with 'div' elements, with whole teams of micromanagers. On pet projects there is no need for any of this, plus you can do things like scoped CSS so there is no Firefox support, but also no need to torment oneself with CSS compiler things that create bloat and 'add to only' stylesheets.
But hey, none of this matters if everything works, which it does!
I also think you need some type of funnel to get people to the website in such a way that they come back. This might not matter to you, but, imagine you find this site, do you bookmark it, share a link with oneself, or what? There needs to be some type of hook, and bookmarks don't cut it these days. People want to Google Search for what they know.
One hook might be an upload feature, so you can upload many things. I like de Stihl artists from a century ago and some of them used paint that is still sold today. I also like old posters for British Raleigh bicycles and train posters from the period. The train posters were by commercial artists that made adverts, not art. Yet you still have some brilliant colours going on in their work.
Yes there are services for taking any image and making a palette from it, however, they haven't got the art. They can't do a 'goes with' feature, to show art that is in the user's colour scheme, from what they upload.
I am impressed by the colour naming, this is actually quite hard to write by oneself since you need to find something in a 3D search space. It seems to me that you have the hard stuff mostly solved but tinkering with the UI for stickiness is there to be done, ad nauseum.
Please don't take my HARSH criticisms unfairly, HN is the place for people to niggle, because some people like to cut the heads off others to feel taller, however, I am a genuine punter, and I have a bit more work to do before I get into the colour scheme, so I kind of need to be able to read things easily, remember where your website is and give it a proper go.
What might be useful is a palette export option in :root { CSS variables }, for example:
The vars could be named colours, where possible, so '--warm-caramel' and so on.
I still get the autoload of the next palette, mayb what you need instead is a good bit of doom scrolling, a.k.a. infinite scroll. That might be more engaging. I say this because my recipe app also needs infinite scroll for browsing purposes, so the user (my uncle) does not have to drill down to the recipes.
I quit driving in the last century so buying petrol is not something I do. I have a bicycle for most journeys and the train for elsewhere.
Hence my perspective is different. To have everyone priced off the roads is going to make the cycling so much faster and pleasant.
I have considered getting an electric car in the past, but, one look at the traffic, and I decided against going that slow. So I thought about getting an electric bicycle, only to come to the same conclusion, a normal bicycle is all I want or need.
There is a similar story with food. No fertiliser? No problem! I only eat plants, with no processed food or dead animals. Soon the 'grow crops to fatten animals so fat people can eat them' idea will be too costly.
Of course, the world isn't going to stop eating animal corpses at every occasion or ween the adults off milk, so we will see what happens. Nonetheless, plants only is a good starting point.
I don't see electric cars as a solution except for boomers, particularly in the UK context, where the goal is to have 50% of urban journeys taken with active travel by 2030. Active travel means walking or cycling, and I am all for it.
If you are obese, car dependent and eating burgers, the situation is not good. However, if free from car dependency and able to cook from scratch with plants, then the situation is somewhat different, previously unpopular lifestyle choices make sense.
I also don't see what right I have to West Asian oil, it is not a birthright to have access to all the fuel one can afford. My view is that it is best left in the ground.
During the pandemic we had F1 teams attempting to solve all the world's problems with their superior tech and methods, but nothing really came of it. This story has overtones of 'here we go again'.
Truth be told, Ferrari don't have normal customers. All of them have to be extremely rich. Even then, they get treated as if they are 'tractor company owners' and not worthy. The F1 team has hundreds of people for running two cars, with those cars needing to drive no more than two hours at a time, with no need for the cars to last more than one season, at a cost of many millions.
Compare with the hospitality sector, where customers come from all walks of life, from all over the world. Money has to be made rather than just spent. Rarely is anyone kept waiting (in a decent hotel) and the customer has to come first, at all cost. There are handovers and checklists, which are no big deal.
From my experience of various hospital stays, where waiting is glacial, I honestly believe that just a little bit of 'customer first' attitude would be helpful. Just a few staff that have experience from the real world of hospitality would make a difference, and I just don't see the F1 people having the basic skills, even if they can do high-octane pitstops in seconds.
> From my experience of various hospital stays, where waiting is glacial, I honestly believe that just a little bit of 'customer first' attitude would be helpful.
Hospital staff don't eat their own dog food, they get priority.
...and I stopped. I didn't get to the $5000 grinder stage, but the annual costs of coffee were alarming. I went for black tea instead, served in insulated mugs and flasks. Originally the plan was to just have coffee as a treat when meeting friends in coffee serving establishments, however, that doesn't happen. I buy coffee for whomever I am with and keep my flask below the table, still spending, but not consuming.
For all the thousands of coffee cups had, I can't think of any contenders for the 'greatest one'. Hence, despite the rituals and expense, it was all forgettable. Yet I was so insistent on getting my fix.
After some time away, I can see coffee for what it is. There are too many children in the south doing things with coffee beans for grown adults in the north. Shouldn't they be in school? Tea isn't quite the same, picking leaves is different, even though I haven't done it myself, there are worse jobs to have.
The paraphernalia aspect is also something I now reject. Fancy coffee machines and even the Aeropress just says 'it's time to stop'.
Similarly, the elevation of the job of 'coffee maker' to the grand role of 'barista' irks me. We place the 'barista' up there with the greatest composers, rocket surgeons and rock gods. Sure, a 'barista' might be your greatest ever hero if all you do is drink coffee and the only work in your country is in customer service, but I don't see the 'barista' job as worthy of a pedestal, particularly in countries where the pay comes primarily from tips.
Then there is everything else, the take-out cup, the animal excretions, the added sugar. My comfort drink of old, a frothy latte in a plastic lined paper cup, is not what my body really needed. You have got the stimulant from the caffeine, and you don't need stimulants if you get all your nutrients. The mix of milk and sugar would be considered wrong by a true coffee drinker, regardless, you have got diabetes in a cup right there, with saturated fats and 'free' sugars. You are just asking for arteries to be blocked and for dementia to happen.
Whether aware of it or not, there is status with beverages. We all want to eat from the king's table, not the animal's stable. I can't say I impressed anyone with coffee, whether making it or drinking it. One lesson learned, make coffee for people and it just becomes expected. Being a keen coffee drinker doesn't make you cool. I am not saying that drinking just black tea makes one cool, but, for people that are coffee dependent, with other beverages consumed, the idea of drinking just tea, with no additives, is crazy talk.
Each to their own, but I am seeing so many upsides to 'tea only' that I see no reason to change, apart from tannin on teeth, which can be a problem if also consuming lots of colourful spices. The money aspect is an invisible upside, it is not like I get a lump sum for all that money saved, even though it is thousands a year. The lack of waste is definitely really good, since I don't have glass jars, single use cups, plastic milk cartons and more coffee-related trash to dispose off. Tea is actually valuable in the second life for composting reasons.
Anyway, having been away from coffee for quite a few years, I still appreciate the smell, but I am not tempted. To me the obsession with coffee is amusing, much like seeing what some cats will do with catnip, it just seems a bit unnecessary. My taste buds have adapted, I moved on.
There's forced labour and child labour in tea growing, it's mostly grown in countries that have different definitions for human rights. And unless you're buying specialty tea, those farmers are paid pennies while doing hard work.
I don't think there's any ethical consumption of industrial scale agriculture that cannot be mechanized, because we don't want to pay the real costs.
Maybe we need a dumbed down version 3 of SVG where the browser knows it is not to do anything that requires fetching a URL, to make the image as harmless as a JPG.
This version 3 could have the version number changed to 2 in order to do cool SVG things, so full-fat SVG as version 2 is now. But you could just flip to 2 to a 3 on upload, so any embedded URLs are harmless.
This could be useful for the creator too, as it is helpful to have layers of source images in bitmap format to work with, and you can easily export such things accidentally.
Many decades ago it was anti aliasing with MS clear type that made small text possible. Yet, before that, for regular TV, this had been worked out, so lots of text could be shown on things like business TV, in glorious analogue PAL or never twice same colour for Americans.
Small text is an interesting problem, but we have moved on from pixels as useful units.
I am okay with these big American corporations getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded, only to exist as a brand in a private-equity backed holding company.
This is because other companies come along to fill the niche occupied by the established brands. Since they can't cheapen the products any more than the behemoths can, they need to innovate and evolve.
As for the backpack product, I wish the likes of Eastpak and whatnot would just die, since they have not innovated in a very long time.
I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.
If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.
The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.
These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.
Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".
So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.
Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".
Consumers are lazy and greedy.
The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.
That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.
I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).
It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.
Very high quality materials and zippers.
It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.
They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).
Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]
In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.
The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.
The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.
The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.
The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
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