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Comment by dietrichepp | Hacker News Reader

This article is best juxtaposed with articles about image synthesis:

* Wave Function Collapse image generator https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

* Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw: https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io

* Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396

Put another way, when I look at the McMansions at 10 on the scale, it looks to me like the kind of output you get when you just feed a bunch of pictures of houses into a neural network without feeding in any of the cultural or aesthetic context. Things like the large garages and roofs look like the efforts of constraint solvers working with inputs that are out of bounds.

In a sense, that is exactly what happened.

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this is a really good comment. i was going to refer to the 10s as literal 'dream houses', in that they remind me of the places i'd wander through in my dreams, especially when i was younger: nonsensical, sometimes phantasmagorical amalgams of the homes of friends, hotels, historical buildings, and any number of other places i was dragged as a kid.

I agree, I think that is literally the case.

The part of the human brain that deals with 'unified logic' or whatever you want to call it, is visibly absent because it is not there. It was never employed to make those decisions, I think we should be asking broader questions about why not because I believe it to be a societal issue and not a recreational one.

This aside it is worth noting that in days of old they had 'style handbooks' (because they built idiot things in the old days too) to guide them in keeping overall symmetry. I don't think that solves for everything but it would have prevented the worst atrocities.

Just like an anti-patterns or patterns book really.

So these houses are the architectural equivalent of The Homer.

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer

Coming from an art background, I tend to think of those as Cubist in nature, like a Picasso painting. You see just one roof, but from many different perspectives, making it look like many roofs.

You've reminded me that "Old Stormwind" in World of Warcraft had the opposite of that: in order to give a sense of scale from ground level, the 3D model for a building would have different roofs visible from street level pretending to be one roof. It had to be redone when players could fly.

I like the Picasso reference. The line between art and "a bunch of crap put together" is sometime difficult to pin down. And it takes a Picasso to navigate that boundary without stepping over.

Cascading gables are totally Cubist in nature. It's a gable partly obscured by a smaller version of itself! And a gable is itself sort of a simplified outline of a house plastered onto an actual house.

Oh boy I love this comment, great metaphor and I think it speaks to how natural our machine systems are.

There are categories of people with more money than sense who are no better than a neural network. They want to tick the boxes of prestige, but are ignorant of or don't care about the end product.

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