@matigo Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience with a client. That comment about Christians you received seemed totally out of place and unbecoming of any business relationship.
I'm sure there are clients out there that act in a more ethical manner, and I really hope that you can find them before you have to trade in your favorite vehicle…
@matigo Yeah, I can see how you need to build consensus with the management so that everyone agrees what the site should look like on various devices and display sizes. I guess it's not all that hard anymore to actually transfer those specs into a responsive design.
Do you miss developing sites like this for clients? Are you still doing it at all?
@matigo Ah, indeed. I was looking at the Komaki site on my 16-inch display, and it looked okay… but you're right about the unfortunate iPad view. The font size is huge, like it was built for preschoolers or something. Is that pretty much a scaling issue that could be handled in the CSS, or do you think it would require more work?
@matigo Actually, as far as the Japan municipal websites go, I did a cursory search on several of them, but couldn't seem to find any that were quite that old. It seems that most of the cities I looked at have at least updated their sites since 2021, and they are all using the "city" subdomain, like https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp. The situation used to be much worse several years ago with municipal websites in Japan.
@matigo IE 5.0… gulp! Those were the days… when browser non-compliance with CSS standards and conditional formatting was pretty much the song of the day, and browser developers just loved to add those funny little ms- and moz- prefixes to their properties rather than go with the standard…
Hard to believe that it's been 30 years since JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich. What's harder for me to believe is that I came to live in Japan two years before JavaScript… and two years after HTML was invented.
@matigo Interesting what you said about evolution of skill and style. About things being "disposable before the ink dries", I think that ties into whether the beholder assigns value to those things. Everyone has different things that they value and cherish.
I'm not sure I agree that society values almost nothing. People value different things, and although those things may change as humanity progresses, people will always find something that they deem important in their lives, whether it be love, security, freedom, convenience or whatnot. People who value quality will tend to shy away from the bread-and-butter attempts of AI to offer creative solutions. For instance, there's an art discussion that I follow on X, and people typically present various images of the art they saw or made and elicit comments. Some of it is clearly AI; some of it is of questionable origin. The interesting thing is that there tends to be a certain number of people who question whether the work of art was generated by a human or by AI. They apparently have enough taste and good sense to distinguish the two, or to at least know when it is right to doubt. Admittedly, the number of people who bother to question it is far less than those who just applaud the art for what it seems to be, but I think this shows that there are still people out there who value work that was done by humans.
Granted, even with AI art, there generally has to be a starting point, like a text prompt driven by a human or a reference work that is to be used when constructing the derivative work. I recently met a video artist who said that she primarily uses AI to create her work, and so has to keep up like crazy with all the latest AI technologies and software to do so. My gut reaction was, "this can't be any good", but if it is human-initiated, human-produced and the outcome was shaped by a human, could it not be as valid as a video work that was made completely by humans? Maybe that's the kind of thing you were referring to when you said, "is there anything inherently wrong with AI? I don't think so." I would think, though, that this AI video artist would have a tough time differentiating her product, if it was primarily generated by AI tools and everybody is using those tools now. She will have to work hard on creative convincing content that transcends the tools, I would think.
@matigo That’s a pretty succinct way to put it. What about designs that only use AI partially? For instance, let’s say the client wants the image of an amphitheater, but it has to be vector art so that it can be recolored. This is something that AI can do within less than a minute, but maybe it needs to be retouched and modified by hand by the designer. Would you charge clients because you used AI to do part of the grunt work, or would you give them a discount because you didn’t have to do it all yourself?
@matigo Perhaps you mean that when money and financial interests enter the equation, ownership takes on a whole new character?