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Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.

Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...


I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since.

What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.


And while they are at it, I hope they give us our scrollbars back. They seem to shrink by one pixel every year...

Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.

Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to suck the life and human-ness out of everything.

I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.


I think good minimalism is when you express more with less. In my living room, the appliances are grey but wall artworks are colorful - you immediately look the paintings, not at the drawers. The artworks themselves aren't colorful, each one has a specific color scheme, so that when you take a step back, a pattern emerges, and there are gentle but clear color zones that serve different purposes. In another area I have space that's exclusively grey and white, and then there's one corner that's unicorn puke. Minimalism creates lower lows so that the highs punch even higher. The house is modern-minimalist and you can easily find angles to take photos literally from Ikea catalogue, but at the same time it's very radical from artistic point of view and nobody who's seen my house has said that it looks bland.

The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no show.


I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.

I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.

I know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment

Maybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.

Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider; "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it does.

And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability

I think it's more of a grey/beige fatigue.

Does it support other languages?

Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/

Recently purchased a Pocket8086 and I can say – these sorts of things are _very_ fun.

I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do this. There are so many things now that simply don’t have good non-mobile alternatives, like the maps and authenticators you mention. “Uninstall the apps and turn off data” seems like the most attainable option in this thread.

Do a real project with goals and expectations. Learn exactly what you need to get the task done. Do not buy a ROS book. Do not spend huge amounts of time exploring the ecosystem. Just focus on making it “do the thing”. The experience will come when the goals are met. Source: I built the entire initial software stack for the FarmBot project (minus the gcode handling firmware, thanks Tim) and had zero hardware experience when I started. I can compile embedded Linux kernels from scratch and whatnot now.

Haven’t done robotics, but this approach is also much more feasible now with AI, which I appreciate.

That is not a good idea. To deal with LLMs one need to have knowledge about the topic of the query, case contrary one will not be able to detect the errors of their output-prompts. The test is easy, if after one or three queries one do not detect the errors, one is done, the person is reading the output-prompts in passive mode.

The self-learn path require also to cultivate a intuition that comes from searching and reading technical doc that a LLM will not give you, among other things.

Anyway, I observe how the warning of the other user about this got downvoted and critiqued. I expect the same, and leave this thread with peace of mind subscribing to such warning, as a message to the OP.


OP wants to brush up on their skills, not have AI do it for them.

>OP wants to brush up on their skills, not have AI do it for them.

the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

if an AI tells you "solder A to B" you're going to learn some technique whether you want to or not. Extrapolated entirely into a robotics project.. there's a lot to gain just through sheer osmosis of instruction.


the barrier to entry for a lot of playing around is getting a working scaffold to be able to run all your testing from

id expect it could pick you out a breadboard, a micro, some actuators and sensors, along with get a code deploy and run harness going for you, so you can focus on doing the robotics, rather than anything else.


Some people learn by doing, or learn by example, and the faster they can get into doing an example, the faster they will learn.

I am one of those people, and I can't count how many textbooks I own, of which I've read the first few chapters, and lost interest because I wasn't doing anything, only reading.

When I can instead start doing something, as GP emphasized, I can learn the applicable concepts as they're applied, which works well for me. AI helps me do that, because it is like a textbook that follows along with me, rather than asking me to follow it. Also I ask a lot of questions.


Thats where appreticeships come in handy, you can watch and learn by example.

Very true, and doing it this way lets me learn at midnight for no extra cost while I go from zero to one and keep my day job that lets me pursue such passions.

They're very varied, so not a clear path to a job there, and I'm not sure I would want to make a job out of all of them.


I don't think using ChatGPT as a wikihow is going to blunt their skills. As long as what the LLM says is actually correct.

I did a search for a nations GDP to compare that to. That’s Chile, I think.

Do initiatives like these hurt native desert species?


There is an interesting effect where deserts help rain forests and oceans grow new life. Winds carry desert sands and dust that are rich in iron and phosphorus into the oceans and act as fertilizer. Even lifeless deserts are important to the global ecosystems.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=desert+sands+fertilize+oceans


The Sahara feeds the Amazon.

I’ve never heard this mentioned but it seems like an environmentalist could support increasing total life on a piece of land vs preserving specific sparse species.

I’d rather see a region of land be a thriving rainforest with millions of species vs protecting some specific tree.


have you ever been to a real desert? lots of plants and animals live there

A desert already is a collapsed biome relative to when it was not a desert. As such, it has a huge debt to repay to what was lost due to the desertification. If the desertification is not reversed, it will go only deeper into debt, killing what little life is left there via a continued rise in temperature. As such, what is being done to restore the biome is most appropriate.


Surely deforestation hurt native species as well. Is there any reason to not try to reverse some of that damage? Do you think they are going to make things worse overall?


Yes. But nobody cares about a few unimportant bugs and mice.


Consumers have shown a willingness to pay for other types of premium content via NetFlix and similar. Have any of these outlets considered launching a news agency within their platform? Eg: “Hulu Nightly News”.


If they think of their readers as "consumers", they will double-dip. It's often said that if you aren't paying, you are the product - but unfortunately just because you're paying, doesn't mean you aren't still the product.

It seems to me that rich people (and some other powerful groups) are paying far more to own media companies (X, WaPo, etc.) than can be justified by those companies' revenue. It's not hard to imagine what they get in return.


I do enjoy listening to DW's podcasts. It's more succinct and informative, and less news'tertainement, ads, emotional manipulation and filler.


Yet another case of lawmakers proliferating the “you should not have root access” meme. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern political landscape and a backdoor to much less well intentioned actions (intentional and unintended).


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