The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.
That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.
This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.
If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.
It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(
Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?
Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.
I actually think “explore Claude’s understanding of colors” is an interesting concept. A lot of fascinating cultural information gets compressed into LLMs.
Except on that page there's immediately a claim that isn't backed up by any of the citations, eg:
"The hunting-safety effect has been substantial. The non-fatal hunting accident rate in the United States fell substantially over the decades following blaze-orange adoption, with state hunter-safety data consistently identifying the orange mandate as a major contributor to that decline."
None of the sources have any national hunting accident data - there's a single link to data from New York, and nothing that would support the claim that state data "consistently" identifies anything...
"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D
i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo
Sounds like gatekeeping to me. They have an interesting idea and story and probably aren't web devs. But you write it off because the design (the least important point of telling the story) doesn't match your sweaty purity test. If anything, these vibe coded projects are the new plain HTML or Angelfire sites that a lot of people here seem to pine for. No one is getting off of your lawn anytime soon. Whining about it is just fucking annoying.
The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...
When I learned of this it hit me at the time that the web is made of real people, built by real people.
And, as usual, some of those people are more equal that others.
Their VanDyke Brown looks more like a Burnt Sienna to my eyes, but that might just be my screen.
You may also enjoy the Chromatopia book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554590-chromatopia
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color
Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GtF_zpJc_w
Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?
Does the background colour have a history too?
There's no rebeccapurple.
We'll get it by Friday.
> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.
That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.
This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.
If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.
It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(
Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?
Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.
I actually think “explore Claude’s understanding of colors” is an interesting concept. A lot of fascinating cultural information gets compressed into LLMs.
They may have used LLMs to design the site but IMHO the content is fine and well-sourced. Example: https://storiedcolors.com/color/blaze-orange/
Even if LLMs were used to help, someone must have spent a lot of time on making it read well. At least that's how it feels like.
Except on that page there's immediately a claim that isn't backed up by any of the citations, eg:
"The hunting-safety effect has been substantial. The non-fatal hunting accident rate in the United States fell substantially over the decades following blaze-orange adoption, with state hunter-safety data consistently identifying the orange mandate as a major contributor to that decline."
None of the sources have any national hunting accident data - there's a single link to data from New York, and nothing that would support the claim that state data "consistently" identifies anything...
"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D
This webpage is nonsense.
First example I saw was already wrong. COBALT BLUE is not known since 1830 but its ANCIENT.
This webpage is some low effort english centric world and wrong and probably just AI slop.
Terrible AI prose
i do like the concept, though the blatantly claude-tinged "italicized word" visual language undermines the author's credibility w.r.t graphic design history imo
Who cares. As if every website needs to be meticulously hand crafted. You mad at people that use css templates too?
> Who cares?
I care. So do they.
Sounds like gatekeeping to me. They have an interesting idea and story and probably aren't web devs. But you write it off because the design (the least important point of telling the story) doesn't match your sweaty purity test. If anything, these vibe coded projects are the new plain HTML or Angelfire sites that a lot of people here seem to pine for. No one is getting off of your lawn anytime soon. Whining about it is just fucking annoying.
Agree except I think it actually fits the content of the page. Seems like a natural fit.