The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
I've worked on several projects where people looked at the site, which was simple and straight to the point, and people would straight up tell me they didn't take it seriously because it didn't have these performative UI things on it.
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
I use a Substack site for the conference that I run. The popup and subscribe buttons everywhere used to annoy me...but they work. Went from 0 to almost 1,000 subscribers on an otherwise low traffic site and it's by far the best way to reach people.
There are 2 kinds of people- people who understand tech and people who use tech, in the ratio 1:9 (or even lower?). For the 90%+ people who like using fancy tech and feel smart/intelligent, the bling on your landing page is necessary.
“TokenStream – Server-sent events (SSE) were added to the HTML5 spec in 2008 but never used until 2025.”
I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.
I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.
There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.
I get the whole trope thing and maybe I'm just an old man but I still am kinda impressed when Claude sh*ts out this type of UI 100 times faster than I ever could. It might also be that I never could have made UI even of this quality before AI. (˶ˆᗜˆ˵)
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 93.7 ms ] threadWhen in Rome!
It's like when a Youtuber's audience complains about how they're constantly asking you to subscribe. The reason it happens is because the statistics say it works.
https://carolina.codes
I remember chunked transfer encoding shipped in 1997. It's been possible since then to readily and easily stream bytes of text or chunks of html the way everyone sees LLMs do today.
I used this to write a web based telnet client in 1997, and later a text moo / chat for the web. In both cases used a frameset so your line to send was at bottom of screen, the incoming lines were server-sent as things happened server side, and scrolled the client as new lines came in.
There were other things you could abuse before that, but less reliable.
But yeah, talk about things nobody used....