To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks.

So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought.

Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications.

------

Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video.

Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".

Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...

Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.

A superintelligent LLM/agent that wants its content to be read by humans (…which itself is suspicious - if not ominous) is not going to dress itself up as a slop-farm.

Also I’d like to remind all the AI boosters and LLM glazers in the audience here that if something is interesting enough to read, it will be interesting enough to write; if you outsource production to an agent then it tells me you don’t actually care about the output, and I won’t care to read it.

No repro with Nano Banana with an infographic prompt.

No, the problem of mass-produced, outright wrong, educational graphics flooding image-search results did not exist before 2023.

Careful now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY

They get to make cool 3D plot visualizations of functions so obscure to me that they’re named after someone who is still alive - and/or get to work on cryptography for the NSA - I think?

Nope.

To reduce it down to a single word, I'd say we do code-reviews to assess "taste".

-----

Code-review is one part of a larger process (the SDLC!), and while review does help with "finding bugs" it is not the singular reason why we do it; and other parts of the SDLC are concerned with finding bugs in the first place, namely the various Test and QA steps in the process; when your code is in the (peer) code-review step then there's an expectation that the author already identified and resolved actual bugs/defects (i.e. where actual-program-behaviour deviates from the spec[1]), so a PR for new functionality is expected to include unit and integration tests to demonstrate that.

Now Claude will gladly take a Jira ticket, write-up a plan/spec, write tests, implement the feature, verify the tests pass, address static-analysis issues, push branch, and submit the PR - and if-the-program-works then it's "correct" and so surely there's nothing really to review and so merging the changes should be a breeze... but I find myself rejecting these PRs all the time because these agents still "just don't get it"[2]. (But I'm sure they'll "get it" eventually; you can't stop progress). We can revisit this topic when we get there; but for now I'm going to reject an AI-authored PR that eschews it.

Good taste is important.

[1] I'm not going to pretend anyone actually writes any kind of spec (informal or otherwise) for the vast majority of software out there; but an unwritten-spec exists when you mentally combine a vague Jira ticket, platform-conventions and common-sense (and that's how Claude in an Agentic Loop works too, except it always has to write-out the Spec.md/Plan.md to disk first, whereas us humans keep things in our head).

[2] I cannot define "it".

Redux doesn't have anything to do with any kind of syntactic-sugar for Reac.

> the general guidelines are that you should only bother with Redux if your SPA is already considerably complex

If one already has an (non-React) SPA which is not already built following Redux then you're stuck with what you've got; it isn't really possible to take an existing SPA of any complexity and deciding to "make it use Redux" because it completely up-ends practically every aspect of SPA application-design, at least as far as how "traditional" (non-React) SPAs do things.

If you'll permit me to oversimplify: I tell people that React is a basically an opinionated Redux kernel wrapped around a JSX-based DOM+component/widget system (, which then means you now need a JS build system too); or conversely: Redux is like React, except without JSX components.

...or am I misunderstanding you?

The funny thing is that prior to 2015 "the ones nobody uses" were the academically-designed ivory tower FP languages; perpetually relegated to being a minority curiosity because FP is immensely difficult to wrap one's head around at first, especially if all you've-ever-known was imperative C or VB and (compromised) OOP in Java and C#.

I remember when Google's overqualified design-team for Angular decided that Angular2+ is too good for Promise-based fetch() - instead everyone should be forced to learn RxJS's way-of-doing-things - cue the agony, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

...I think being forced to live through that experience did 2 things:

1) It forced an entire generation of front-end web-devs (and VB6 refugees) to get familiar with FP-like concepts.

2) It also made those same front-end web-devs swear-off ever using a Google-maintained SPA framework in future.

...which set the stage for the mass-adoption of ReactJS:

1) It made effective use of FP concepts, which many devs were now accustomed-to after having survived Angular2.

2) It wasn't made by Google.

...yes, Redux (not React) deserves to be #1, but Redux isn't a complete, all-under-one-roof framework the way React is; but regardless of that: The Redux/React approach is just fundamentally a better design than what we had before: stateful-controls/widgets and two-way data-binding.

If you'd like to relive how UI devs suffered throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and most of the 2010s I invite you to try making a native Windows 11 desktop UI using WinUI3 using the MVVM (anti-) pattern: nothing but mutable objects of indeterminable state getting caught in infinite-loops or unbound recursion due to INotifyPropertyChanged - and Microsoft is still pretending that's the "right" way to build a UI.

Sorry am ranting on about something I have very little control over; it's just frustating.

ReactJS has been a very mixed-bag...

If you're wanting to learn then you won't have the expertise to craft a prompt that has the correct details or to spot when the model makes a mistake in its output.

If you're in a teaching position then you won't have anything to learn.

Edit: just to test myself I asked Nano Banana 2 to generate “an undergraduate infographic poster about how atoms work” - and the result was something right out of a middle-school science textbook and very Bohr…

Without a GPU ban, then the PRC will accelerate domestic AI/LLM R&D and deployment, while still funding indigenous AI chip development efforts.

------

From afar it makes America look so insecure and almost pathetic: China's R&D ecosystem is a huge mass with a lot of inertia - trade policy and embargos will be about as effective against it as the paper they're printed on.

Probably less than you'd think: lots of people recognise they need to leave their work behind at work and not get too emotionally invested in something they love, because at work they'll be exposed to the gut-wrenching business-decision sausage factory.

Because the US heavy rail system is a duopoly with no incentive to innovate.

Union Pacific haven’t been doing this precisely because they don’t have a culture of innovation…