Your first link...I miss portals so much. Rip ig.

> I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style.

Why?

For one, it is awful on mobile.

We can have bare, simple sites while still making them accessible.

Why is it awful? Most barebones websites are naturally responsive..

Talking about the url provided in the OP, one click on Firefox for mobile and it should be obvious. Text wider than then the screen, yellow text on white background. line spacing that's too tight, a background image that obscures text...

I don't usually see this because it seems to require intentional design to work on mobile. The original post has an example that doesn't lay out well on mobile, or just a very tall and thin desktop window.

I, for one, found reading the text under the News section quite difficult to read. The combination of the font color and the spacing/kerning made it all appear like a character soup to me. It's possible this is something that has variable impact across populations though.

Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".

This reminds me. Google Reader had comments enabled from your friends on posts you shared. This was the best form of social media I have ever experienced.

"Alternative Terms" was the giveaway.

for me it was the “No further pages. No hidden clauses.” Reeks of LLM

Why? For what?

it's a prompt synopsis

> He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out

Whose fault is that?

So just don’t trust people or organizations? Like sure it’s the author’s fault in a sense but should they have just not trusted in the first place?

This reminds me of the Hacktoberfest situation where maintainers were getting flooded with low-quality PRs. This could be that, but on steroids and constantly, not just one month.

If they said yes, would you blindly trust them? They told you to "do your own research" effectively and you punted. That would arguably be a more reassuring path for you I assume.

Truthfully, because they dodged the question I am now a bit suspicious of everything they say. It just seems a bit deceitful. I explicitly called out the dodging not because I wanted to hear from them after they'd dodged it, but because I want to make it clear to GP that their answer is not sufficient, and highlight to others that they maybe shouldn't trust GP.

If they had answered my first question in the affirmative (something like "I am a researcher at X institute on this topic"), ya, I think I would have trusted them.

I don’t type fast on my phone, so you’re getting responses as I can give them. I think I’ve answered your questions sufficiently to draw your own conclusions at this point. Feel free to ignore me. Physics doesn’t care.

It makes me sad that there are so many of these heavily-upvoted posts now that are hand-wavey about AI and is itself AI-generated. It benefits everyone involved except people like me who are trying to cut through the noise.

This is fascinating. I'll have to try those agentic tasks in the house.

Everything now has to be fully vetted before trying it as opposed to making something weird and quirky. Sad! I miss those days.