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I've been "sanding" my personal website (https://dustinbrett.com) for nearly 4 years now, and it feels like it could go on forever. Luckily I enjoy working on it.


Ok, be honest: how many hours put into this were during 9-5, and on the boss’ dime?

I hope all of them. :-)


I really appreciate this. Most of the time when I see a "desktop OS on webpage" it feels half-assed and honestly overplayed. This on the other hand is super tight and polished!


This is so fun to explore. You've done some great work on this! It's inspiring. A lot of fun to think about how you've implemented everything.


this is very smooth and scratches an itch I didn't know I had -- to use a windowed OS on my phone


Looks really cool. One thing that I found missing is that I can't use mouse4/mouse5 in explorer. "Sanding" really could go on forever.


This is really fun. A usability note, at least on Safari on iOS, you have to put the protocol for a web page to load. If you just put www.cnn.com without the https, it never loads.


This is so fun. I love it. Well done!


very nice. though you cannot have > 1 nesting of dustinbrett.com afaict


On my iphone I can! Tested to 3 levels deep.


Warning: Prepare for a jumpscare with authors face. Fun page


I wish Windows was that snappy! Incredible work, kudos!


Meanwhile we get a loading splash screen when opening a calculator.


Nice man!


Looks incredible. Snappier than real Windows tbh


This is cool and very polished, but my advice (which may not resonate with you) is that you should channel this attitude into some user-facing app instead of letting it basically go to waste on a personal website most people won't see or won't use for more than a second or two.


It may surprise you, but some people like to program computers for reason other than money.

Makes no sense right? Weirdos, all of them!


I think it's perfect. Art should be completely useless and yet spark joy - this one does both!


I definitely didn't necessarily mean an app that had a way to make money. I mean exposing the work to more people who would get fun or utility out of the painstaking effort put into it. The world could use this sort of taste in a game, an activity, a tool, etc.


Yes, but you can make free apps for a wider audience. Or even just useful apps for yourself.

Can do what pleases you though. I sometimes work on intentionally useless apps just to try things out, but the idea is always to carry those ideas over to some app that has some purpose.


do you think makers of abstract art should do something more useful? how about people in marketing? landlords?


All of those things are useful.

With no abstract artists, art museums will have bare walls (which is fine, if the wall is the one they gave to me... but nobody wants to look at a bare wall and pretend its art for a whole museum!)

Marketting seems useless sometimes, but when Pepsi spent their marketting budget on community projects, they lost a ton of sales. My local ice rink has no marketting and nobody in the county knows it exists, even people who would like to do ice skating or ice hockey; a smidge of marketting would be super useful; other rinks in neighboring counties have doubled or more the number of kids playing hockey in the past few years since we got a local NHL team, but ours struggles to get a single full team at most age groups.

Landlords are not well liked on HN, but seems to me having a place to live on a month to month basis was pretty handy before I had the ability to make a long term commitment to a single place. I know some people buy a place to live for college, but an off campus rental seemed a lot more sensible to me. And similar when moving for work if you're not sure you'll be there long term, or you want out of a hotel before you're sure of what neighborhoods you like.


I personally don't care much for abstract art, but if your goal is to produce an art piece, then sure, that's a purpose. I don't know if OP was going for "art" or just having fun with the tech. I wouldn't count it as art because it's very much a copy of an existing piece of software, not an original piece.



> Others were made for study at art academies in the late nineteenth century and later, while the statue has also been replicated for various commercial reasons or as artistic statements in their own right. Smaller replicas are often considered kitsch.[2]

There you go. Many of them were commercial, not art. It does also say "artistic or statements in their own right" -- I'd like to know what statement they're trying to make, because I wouldn't generally describe carbon copies as art. It's a copy of art, but not really artistic in itself.


I'm happy to be downvoted/flagged for this, but please kindly fuck off from gatekeeping art.


I don't have a downvote button. And I'm not gatekeeping. I don't care what people do. Art is subjective, and carbon-copying is not within my definition or appreciation of art. If you think that's art, great, you do you.




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