I would bet that Canva's bet is that companies will always want a "last mile" of manual control, even if only for the Queen's Duck effect. If Canva is the default, zero friction path for that, great for them.
The alternative is to not hop on the AI bandwagon, or run an "also ran" AI story, and both those scenarios (I expect) game out worse given the current zeitgeist.
> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
The real world analog is this...
The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get.
On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.
It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against extremely bad experiences.
A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff.
Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee.
Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients.
The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.
Marriotts are sadly not the same between countries, and that's probably a good thing.
The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much, much lower than everywhere else in the world. Full-service Hiltons in the US don't even have executive lounges anymore.
> The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much, much lower than everywhere else in the world.
this is true for fast food as well. mcdonalds in poland and spain were MUCH better than the slop in america. I had taco bell here in srilanka recently. it was DELICIOUS and tasted like real food. same goes for popeyes and pizza hut here. pizza hut in america on the other hand tastes regrettable and left me feeling like shit.
mcDonalds in Poland used to be the luxury brand. This is the part Americans don't get.
It used to be the new, western chain that you only saw in American movies, and then you could experience it for yourself. When I was a kid (middle / solid working class family), we'd semi-regularly do mcDonalds trips as a treat. The experience of going to mcDonalds because you were too poor to do anything else was unthinkable to us.
Other brands that are staples of the American experience were also like this. CocaCola definitely comes to mind here; most of our tapwater is drinkable, and bottled water is much cheaper than coke, so that was the default option for most people, along with coffee and tea of course.
Somebody did the calculations on Polish Twitter recently, and apparently taking a 4-person family to Pizza Hut in the early 2000s used to cost more than our average daily wage.
I'm guessing if they see McDonalds coffee as "okay and drinkable", this might be a different problem than the way the hotel makes the coffee. Or maybe the McDonalds we have here in Spain is just much more terrible than in the US, but I'll take random bar/pub coffee or even machine coffee over what they serve at McDonalds.
McCafé in Germany is drinkable. The coffee in the restaurant after dinner was superb. They just had a typical crappy coffee machine with shitty coffee in the morning restaurant.
This will do as much to solve your problem as talking to Google on why a search result was bad. Even if they agreed they won't change their coffee machine while you're there and they won't rehire more skilled staff etc etc.
I second that. There is a mile difference between the sorry excuse of a burger that’s called Big Tasty and McCrispy in the Netherlands versus the already way better proportioned and fresher one you get in Germany, up to the better ones in Italy.
Besides the bun, it is noticeable in every part. The amounts and quality of the sauce, vegetables, and meat. And finally how the burger is presented.
So if this difference can occur within 1000km of each other in the same continent, I fully accept that it is even more varied in the whole world.
Maybe your sample size is too small? I've lived close to the NL/D border for a while and the McD quality was indistinguishable on both sides of the border. The variation between restaurants in the same country and also between different days/times in the same restaurant was much greater than between countries.
Thatis, if you happen to go to a random McD in some country and the big mac was great that day and you go to a different restaurant in a different country on a different day and the big mac was bad, then that difference has likely least to do with them being in different countries. It's not like they actually use different recipes.
Okay, granted maybe it is. In NL it is mostly in cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Lelystad), in Germany with smaller places, and in Italy only in touristic places like Siena and Genoa. So maybe it is just a problem with McDonalds in Dutch cities.
I’d say the only place I’ve experienced McDonald’s to be ‘extremely’ different is in India due to the obvious prevalence of vegetarianism and outlawing of beef.
In other countries the do have a lot of additional meals which are specific to their local taste (rice/fried chicken/different sauces) but the core burgers like a Big Mac, mcChicken and sides such as fries are there.
Considering that people expect literally the same thing, I can understand how even small regional differences can seem extreme. Like not finding any beef on the menu in India, or any bacon in the Middle East.
The American McDonald’s is a magnitude worse than the European (all of them), Australian or New Zealander. The menu is different in every country. However, it’s getting more uniform. Cheeseburger is the same basically everywhere outside of America, but not there. As somebody who got used to the European McDonald’s and tried it in about 30 countries all around the world, American McDonald’s is inedible. So there are differences. I completely understand the American sentiment of it, because it’s really, really terrible there.
Especially americans? The popularity and demand for homogenous american products and services (and other similarly homogenous things from other countries) overseas shows that it's not just "especially americans". What point would that even make? If anything the amount of people and customers of such things worldwide could easily outnumber just the people who live in one country, even as big. Desiring a level of service is not really a "uniquely american" thing. Perhaps there's also some impression that there's some "international homogeneity" that blurs things and makes it seem like it's coming from one place (even though it's a mix), but seemingly "cultural and local" things in other countries can be no less homogenous. Going from one japanese ryokan to another you're gonna experience the same level of homogeneity.
Good homogenous experience is the hallmark of good design. There are no surprises with good design. It just works the way you expect it to work. Good design should not generally challenge your expectations.
Would you like your hammer to have a new and innovative design, or do you want it to look exactly like any other hammer? The majority of UIs exist for the user to perform a task as effectively as possible, and they benefit from being familiar.
¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.
More accurate to say that he was forced out. We (Mac nerds) were shocked when he came back. My father told me that I was super excited talking about his return, though I don't remember that. I do remember having a Mac Addict magazine with SJ portrayed as a priest on his return. Internet Archive ftw.[0]
More important than “same”, you don’t want any weird shit going on.
I travel 300 days a year work for and stay in hotel apartments, and I still miss the Hyatt I stayed in Manchester in 2021… last place I stayed that had gotten everything right.
Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and during that zoom call I notice that participants have all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses etc.
Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.
> all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses
I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
You generally won't get to know someone well enough to appreciate their unique aspects unless you see them in person at least sometimes, unless that person has the habit of letting their freak flag fly in all circumstances, which has its own downsides.
> I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
Then don‘t. My boss didn’t require me to put a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn’t turn on my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which I consider fun in fact).
And overfitting benchmarks can easily be gamed. Yet here we are with the top HN comment on the HN Mythos thread outlining it's benchmarking performance gains.
> That's why we don't recommend purchasing a new machine. Existing machine is no cost for you to run this.
You misunderstood. If the ROI is there, there is enough capital in existence for you to accelerate your profit. So why even deal with the complexity of renting people's hardware when you can do it yourself?
It really isn't at all like poker and really is a lot like the predetermined flow I'm just describing. Prediction markets regard the actions of politicians, sportspeople or businesspeople as indications of their wider goals for the country/team/business, not bluffs to try to influence their betting action. If a company says they're planning to IPO this year, everybody reasonably assumes that means the board want to make the IPO happen, not that they've already decided against it but reckon they can make a decent amount of spare cash anonymously betting against it happening on Polymarket
It’s not really a game when one player gets to decide the outcome. In poker, the guy who went all in can’t peek at your cards and swap out his hand at the last second.
Matt Levine has a good take on this. His informal, distilled definition is essentially:
- There is a time gap where insiders know something material and the public does not.
- Someone with access to that material nonpublic information, who is not supposed to use it for personal gain, trades on it anyway.
- That conduct is treated by courts as a deceptive scheme against the less‑informed trading counterparty and against the information’s rightful “owner.”
In other words - you profit at another person's expense (e.g. stealing) because you have information and the other person doesn't.
Two scenarios:
(1) a US Naval Officer knows about a strike 24 hours before it happens and places a bet against someone who doesn't have knowledge about the strike.
(2) Neither a US Naval Officer knows about a strike 24 hours before it happens and someone who doesn't have knowledge about the strike do nothing.
Scenario 1 is (or should be) illegal because the officer is using the information for personal gain, when the information was explicitly given to them for national defense reasons (thus violating the rightful owner clause).
> The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It’s moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution.
My posit is this: engineering never was the bottleneck, or at least hasn't been for 10 years now. Frameworks and best practices are pretty well known at this point. AI is simply exposing this reality to engineers' faces.
Proof point - most publicly traded SaaS first businesses S&M equals their R&D spend, if not dwarfs it. You're going to see this even more lopsided going forward.
This is reductionist and myopic. I've personally been through building forms online and it's hell to try to find consensus on perhaps the most common forms used online.
Let's take a credit card form:
- Do I let the user copy and paste values in?
- Do I let them use IE6?
- Do I need to test for the user using an esotoric browser (Brave) with an esoteric password manager (KeePassXC)?
- Do I make it accessible for someone's OpenClaw bot to use it?
- Do I make it inaccessible to a nefarious actor who uses OpenClaw to use it?
All you need to do is use standard HTML form elements. None of those questions are even relevant, just excuses to increase complexity and make things harder for everyone.
Today I accidentally transposed the first two digits on my CC number.
The form programmer had done some super stupid validation that didn't allow me to edit it directly. Every change moves the cursor to the end of the input. More than 16 characters could not be typed.
Any person who codes that PoS should have their software license revoked and never be allowed in the industry again. Far better to use a plain text input than all the effort used to make users lives hell.
Why would you ever disable paste? It can only make it more likely that the user will make a mistake (and hate you for making the form harder to fill out).
I have an AutoHotkey that just takes whatever is in my clipboard and sends it through as individual virtual keystrokes, specifically for defeating paste-disabled form fields.
Yeah most of these "issues" are surely caused by programmers trying to be too smart. The dumbest possible solution which messes around with the input at little as possible is almost always the best solution. Which implies the browser-provided elements are the best because they have probably been designed and validated more than you can do.
If I use an app and it fucks around with the cursor: instant hatred. It's just so annoying. And if you can't get basic human interaction done well in 2026, what else is messed up in your app?
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