Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors

Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors(storiedcolors.com)

62 points by susiecambria 2 hours ago | 10 comments

For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color

susiecambria 37 minutes ago | |

Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)

hiccuphippo 59 minutes ago |

There's no rebeccapurple.

mmooss 1 hour ago |

> Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.

That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?

If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.

lekevicius 1 hour ago | |

> Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.

This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.

egeozcan 7 minutes ago | | |

They may have used LLMs to design the site but IMHO the content is fine and well-sourced. Example: https://storiedcolors.com/color/blaze-orange/

Even if LLMs were used to help, someone must have spent a lot of time on making it read well. At least that's how it feels like.

zetalyrae 1 hour ago | | |

If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.

It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(

1f60c 20 minutes ago | | |

"One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." is so Claude it hurts. :'D