Hacker News

points by frou_dh 3 days ago | 0 comments

I think some developers are kinda dense or something, and don't understand that shoving AI content in people's faces is simply rude.

In recent versions of iTerm2 for example, when using the plain old menubar and hovering over some items, panels appear showing awful sloppy AI images. WTF? https://files.catbox.moe/5ivkhw.png - That makes me question everything... Was the developer always tasteless? Or did they get a taste bypass?

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

Yes, they were always tasteless. One job of a platform SDK is to enable creating tasteful things that mesh nicely with the platform idioms, and make it hard to create tasteless things.

With AI, creating the tasteless thing became easy.

If you give people the ability to select a font, they will select Comic Sans.

[–] mrob 3 days ago

Giving developers the ability to impose Comic Sans on the users is bad. Giving users the ability to make their own tasteless choices is good. It's my computer and I'll make it ugly if I want to. Windows 3.1 included the famous "Hot Dog Stand" theme. The loss of this freedom only encourages user-hostile practices.

[–] wyclif 3 days ago

Seeing this makes it hard to believe that I actually used iTerm2 for a few years back when I was still on macOS.

[–] rf15 3 days ago

... in pink on yellow too, if you add a color picker.

[–] alex_suzuki 3 days ago

WTH…? I use iTerm2 and wasn’t aware of this. What an incredibly bad call.

[–] superdisk 3 days ago

I think iTerm 2 jumped the shark when the author started implementing a homemade web browser into it.

That AI image is pretty baffling though. Setting aside the pointlessness of displaying an image in the context menu, it even looks like it was made with ancient stable diffusion from 2024 or something, modern image generators are "better" than that. I wonder when it was put in.

[–] vunderba 3 days ago

Oof, that image is rough. Image models just don’t know when to stop shoving shit into an image (instead of less is more, MORE IS MORE), which makes it even worse because that’s where AI image generators tend to break down aka the devil is in the details.

Then they proceed to summon a million infernal imps.

[–] account42 3 days ago

Oh god they have invented useless hero images for tooltips. The images being slop is just the cherry on top.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

Haha what the fuck.

I've never considered updating iTerm. Apparently that lazieness was the right call?

Jesus. What the hell. What does that sudden AI image even offer? I guess it would make some sense in a "docs page" context (even though there it would too be slop), but as a tooltip of a menu option?

Gotta say though.. that is so unhinged, one has to respect the human ingenuity behind it. No LLM can come up with an idea so batshit insane. They're too mid for that.

[–] tjpnz 3 days ago

Oh jeez, that's atrocious. I'm starting to reconsider some of the things I used to say about Corporate Memphis.

[–] ninkendo 3 days ago

No, it is always right to criticize Corporate Memphis. Keep up the fight.

[–] frou_dh 3 days ago

I dunno, tjpnz might be on to something. Would a nice smooth blue leg stepping towards the camera with super exaggerated perspective really be so bad right about now?