Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.
It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though.
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.
You can see all OSs using the same color on the details page. It's the "known uses" box below the preview. Click on "View all x palettes" to see the full list.
In many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different.
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986
(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320
