This is so true. The dirty secret of web design is that it is incredibly badly designed itself. HTML grew over attempted rivals like Flash because you could view source, copy and evolve things and unlike Flash it understood the principal feature of the web - linking and tracking.
So Flash was a crappy, proprietary web building tool that nevertheless allowed for much more interesting visual websites to be built (that didn't actually work structurally). Meanwhile, regular HTML sites were difficult to build anything visually slick, but...
... allowed things to be copied and iterated on. But then several structural mistakes such as putting design elements in a style sheet language that bore no relation to what the page looked like, rather than in a template one (you can't read css and see what a page looks like)...
...led to the disastrous situation today where web design has all of the downsides of things like Flash (actual code is buried in unnecessary complexity) and none of the upsides (it's too difficult to make visually innovative websites).
So although this point about Unreal Engine 5 is a joke, it highlights an important truth - website building is like being an artist who spends 90% of effort manufacturing pencils whereas games development has tools to make things that are light years ahead of web pages.
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Here is a recipe for how to build a place like this. Importantly, it has to be a recipe, not a design.
Establish a simple hierarchy like the human body: a head (here, the cathedral), and the rest. At building level either consciously use symmetry or consciously break it.
Have squarish spaces between buildings for people to interact. Put trees in them where possible.
Prioritise pedestrians over bicycles and bicycles and motor scooters over cars. Remove on street parking and remove bicycle lanes where spaces can be pedestrian first.
Fantastic thread. Why movies are full of recycling franchises like Marvel while innovation in indie fringes doesn't percolate up. I suspect reason for this is the following:
Mainstream is hyperconnected, over-dense network (groupthink, ossified) and is potentially disrupted only when overall network becomes a small world one (goldilocks area between connected and Balkanized) and stuff that appears in the creative niches can bubble up to mainstream.
Reason it isn't bubbling up to mainstream is that niches have also been hijacked with their own form of groupthink (Taleb's tyranny of the minority), meaning that alternative though or creativity is suppressed where the niches are in open forum or connect to the mainstream.
1. Crypto is a technical solution to pure Internet infrastructure, it can’t prevent laws against it. Financial services consist of a technical and regulatory component.
2. The adoption of Internet based currency tokens by central banks uses a crypto based technical solution to replace banking rails with the Internet. It doesn’t use the crypto aspect for regulation so is not decentralised.
3. DeFi extends crypto solutions to financial products and ownership more widely. Financial products are basically fungible contracts and ownership, transferable non fungible ones.
Coinbase is like Netscape. It's a well designed UI on top of a new network (Bitcoin/web) created using a new protocol (Bitcoin spec/HTTP). It's worth more than Netscape because it holds currency but maybe it should be valued based on financial services, not tech stock growth.
Like Netscape and unlike, say, Facebook, it doesn't own its own protocol. It's not a platform in the traditional sense.
Now you could argue that Coinbase is like Google which sits directly on the web and therefore doesn't own its own protocol, but Google monetizes its traffic not its deposits or their transactions.