> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.

I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.

I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.

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AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).

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bentt 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.

	▲	BubbleRings an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes indeed. What do we know about how this was created and how long it took? Before I look into it, I’m going to guess: One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months. Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!

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personjerry 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.

This is a strawman.

The original point was "the economics ... have changed"

I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.

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pavel_lishin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, it's easier - but I'm not sure what that has to do with ads or asking for things beyond attention.

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retsibsi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.

(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)

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personjerry 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.

To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.

Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).

	▲	bentt 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life. Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.

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nonameiguess 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The site was registered a month ago. If it ever actually gets and stays popular, see if it has no ads then. The economics of personal interest sites didn't change in the sense that they're any harder to make now compared to the mid-90s. The economics that changed is the Internet now has billions of users and attention being monetized can make you a lot richer now than then. It's very hard for people to see an opportunity to become a multi-millionaire by clicking a button but then not do it because they'd rather maintain a slightly better experience for their audience.

It's, of course, not even loading right now, which gets at the other problem with this "economics" framing. The biggest expense in running an actually popular website isn't creating and publishing the first version. It's paying for the infrastructure to serve a meaningful proportion of the entire world. This is clearly not a static site. It's presumably doing some computation on the server side to draw from all these hundreds of different probability distributions that works well enough for a few dozen simultaneous requests but not thousands. There might even be some kind of perverse anti-economics going on here where thought devoted upfront to efficiency and architecture might have made this far more scalable, but the "publish the first thing that passes a basic sanity check" vibe-slop ethos doesn't usually get you that.

	▲	BubbleRings an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Vibe slop? The structure of the site is quite solid, the UX decisions are spot on, the data looks good to me that knows little about this stuff, and it is entertaining and informative. This was not a one shot, a human out a lot of effort into this. Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!