My home town was famous for the red cloth that the British Army used to wear. This same red cloth was the main 'trade cloth' for the East India company and native peoples, the world over, just wanted it. The East India company wasn't paying for stuff in silver, the red cloth was worth more than that.

As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.

Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.

Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.

Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.

LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.

We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?

As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?

Here is an example from the pre-LLM days:

https://uk.winsornewton.com/blogs/articles/winsor-blue

Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.

As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.

I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.

Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.

It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?

We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?

Nope.

Would any of it survive the test of time?

Nope.

An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that just is not nice. But, use an LLM and you can basically say 'that is a load of rubbish because you cheated'. Painful.

That aside, you do have something that could be really good. But you can't leave the reader underwhelmed or else they won't be back or signing up for more. Writing original content is hard. If I had to write an essay for school homework on my hometown's special red colour, it would take me all week to do research. Even then I would have barely scraped the surface. Writing a compelling essay would also require skill at writing, plus I would need someone else to proof-read, edit and fact check for me.

For the next colour I would be back to square one, and if this colour took me far from the history and culture of my home town, I might be way off the mark with assumptions made. Note that Winsor and Newton would not hire me, if writing that slow, unless I was a 'distinguished fellow' at some art place of note.

Storied Colors – A catalogue of named colors