Modern architecture ideology is hilarious from an outsider's perspective.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
I remember hearing on some podcast years ago that thanks to HGTV everyone started painting their houses white or beige, because they saw on reality TV shows that that made the house easier to sell. What you're describing sounds like a scaled up version of that.
That's very helpful, thanks! The KOreader UI is... Rough.
Love all the options, especially the ability to use folders on the device storage as the primary way to organize my books, but trying to figure out where a setting is and change it has been frustrating from the first day I installed it.
Will give the Zen UI plugin a go. Does it still support the on-device folders as the main way to navigate through your books?
> All the AI companies are retaining the messages we're sending to their agents to train the next models. I wouldn't be surprised if the agents will be able to do what I'm doing in a year or two.
Some things are very easy to solve via code (see https://xkcd.com/1425/), and others are extremely difficult.
For LLM based AI, it can be trained to write functionally correct code easily - there's tons of pre-existing code and documentation that can let AI learn patterns (LAMP stack, messaging queue, etc) and syntax.
Judgement is much more difficult. For some things "Should I go with a message queue for this problem?", there's a known set of solutions as to what works best in a specific situation, sure, LLMs can answer that easily.
But when it comes to turning human goals into code that does the job correctly and is maintainable and stable?
That's a heck of a lot different. Without human guidance and having tons of context gained by years of experience dealing with the very nuanced and situational judgement calls needed, LLMs are going to fail at doing a decent job.
LLMs (and junior people) don't know what they don't know. I think it will be really difficult to get a LLM to work well at a senior / staff level where it's more about coordination, working with human beings, handling situations based on legacy code, knowing what will and won't be fragile, etc.
But modern architecture being bland and non-decorative? You can lay the majority of the blame for that on building owners.
My partner works for a building engineering firm that is hired by architects and building owners, and we both are not fond of modern architectural trends and have discussed it at length.
In short, buildings have two scenarios - one, the person or company paying for the building plans on keeping it over the next decade plus, or two, the buyer plans on flipping the building as soon as possible.
In the first case, and extremely so in the second, buyers are entirely without taste and despise spending any money that they don't absolutely have to. The desire to min/max buildings has led to function over form to the point of nearly ignoring form.
"Cheap" is the top priority, followed closely by "inoffensive to the people we want to rent this to / flip this to". This results in cheap, low effort facades and an absolute minimum of permanent decorative elements.
Buildings are seen as short term (10 years or less) consumable items, and nothing endures long enough to make it seem worthwhile to buyers to put any money towards design excellence.
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