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Comment by flowercalled | Hacker News Reader

I can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.

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Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.

But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.

Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.

I like the website, great work!

The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:

> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.

Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?

That's actually a pretty cool idea, noted. Thanks!

Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.

It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though.

Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.

Why do you even need the text? Just show the color, year and the name of the OS.

In many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different.

I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.

But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.

Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.

You can see all OSs using the same color on the details page. It's the "known uses" box below the preview. Click on "View all x palettes" to see the full list.

Is that what you meant?

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