A Periodic Map of Cheese
155 points
7 hours ago
| 31 comments
| cheesemap.netlify.app
| HN
ianstormtaylor
1 hour ago
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This website lists no sources, no author, and all of the content is littered with traces of being AI-generated (both in the table and in the descriptions). It seems hard to trust any piece of it that you don't already know in advance to be true, which feels pretty useless.

Flag-worthy if you ask me.

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lloydatkinson
1 hour ago
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It's also the first time I've heard of cheese made of Horse milk which feels like the absurd sort of thing you'd get if you kept prompting AI to "find the rarest types of cheese".
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themonsu
4 hours ago
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I don't know if it's just me, but having built enough websites with AI tools, I'm 99% sure this site has been built with AI. Nothing wrong with that, but the AI look makes me doubt the content is also just put together by AI.
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compass_copium
4 hours ago
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I dunno, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, certified AI hater, and even I don't really care if this is AI or not. The cheeses I am aware of match their descriptions well, and if AI let some guy make this in like fifteen minutes so I can read this silly, fun site on the toilet at work, that's fine to me.
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themonsu
4 hours ago
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AI definitely could be used for something worse than categorizing cheese, I just recognize that the moment I see a page is AI-generated, my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.
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nomel
3 hours ago
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> my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.

I suspect this is a feature backed by an innate brain process related to down-weighting the storage potential of information from untrustworthy people, as a type of resistance to the human brain equivalent of a "poison" attack. For example, some guy that lied to you in the past walks up. Brain releases chemical that reduces "excitement", brain doesn't store said BS as readily.

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bobro
1 hour ago
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Aren’t you concerned with consuming made up information? There has to be a million fun silly sites you haven’t read that a real person put real research and real effort into. LLMs just can’t do stuff like this accurately right now.
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Affric
54 minutes ago
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And it’s actually attempting a periodic table rather than just using the aesthetics as found in Mendeleev’s.
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pcrh
1 hour ago
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It's missing the characteristic element of a periodic table, which is both a visual and explanatory representation of the relationship between the composition of the different substances and their properties.

The concept is there, but it is presented as a regular table, not the classical periodic table.

The notion of "missing e̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ cheeses" is entertaining, and the only real reference to the actual periodic table.

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JumpCrisscross
33 minutes ago
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> It's missing the characteristic element of a periodic table

The beauty of the periodic table is it's physically constrained and thematically grouped. There are hints of that here, e.g. chemically-impossible states that should be blanks. But it needs more work and, fundamentally, a theory of cheese that uniquely categorises each one in the way protons categorise elements and their allotropes.

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wiremine
4 hours ago
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I totally agree: This feels like Claude Code created it. It's the new, AI version of "It was clearly built with Bootstrap"

As a cheese lover, I don't care too much. :-)

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paganel
4 hours ago
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As a fellow cheese lover I would have loved for more geographical diversity, especially when it comes to sheep cheese. Ok, it didn't include Romanian telemea (I'm Romanian myself), but it could have at least gone for the Greek feta. Some Anatolian or Middle Eastern varieties would have also helped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemea

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yokoprime
4 hours ago
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Agreed. This looks exactly like something I would get with the prompt "make me av website with the periodic table of cheese"
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deIeted
1 hour ago
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why would you say 99% or even qualify it? Just say maybe we shouldn't be promoting one-shot 30-second AI outputs.
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GuB-42
4 hours ago
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Bloomy-Rind Buffalo is actually not rare at all, at least in France and Italy. I can find it in grocery stores.

Look for "Camembert di Bufala". It tastes as described in the website.

Also, while I can't think of hard goat cheese in the same way as Parmigiano-Reggiano, small Crottin-style goat cheese age well in the right conditions. For example, Pelardon can be sold at various stages: fresh, creamy, dry. The very aged kind can exceed a year and looks a bit like a cookie: hard, brownish, much smaller than the fresh kind because it lost most of its moisture. But it doesn't taste at all like a cookie, it is very strong, enough to numb your tongue, you can grate it if you want to.

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Arodex
24 minutes ago
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Very hard goat cheese exists and is called "séchon" (from "sécher", i.e. to dry out).

And yes, camembert du buffala is produced and exported. Can't blame the author of the website for not knowing that, I think it is a very recent invention* and in a very minor volume compared to mozzarella of the same milk.

*I couldn't find a source in French or English, and my Italian is not good enough.

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shoobiedoo
1 hour ago
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Since we're a bunch of nerds here, just wanted to throw this out there: cheesemaking is really, really fun. I highly recommend it.

I lived five minutes from a dairy farmer in Japan and he sold it to me for around a dollar a liter, so I made cheese dozens of times. Depending on where you live, finding low-heat pasteurized milk might be tricky, but if you can get fresh milk and pasteurize yourself, I really recommend trying it out.

If you're thinking of giving it a try, start with feta. With feta, flooring the PH is okay, which is a big no-no for most other cheeses (where you usually try to nail around 5.4). Since feta gets brined anyway, you don't have to mess around with an ideal fermentation environment (that being said, vacuum packing some cheeses avoids this anyway). Finally, feta has a very short aging period so you can dive in and try your first cheese sooner than later.

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Freak_NL
4 hours ago
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Completely wrong about the harder goat milk cheeses.

I can get a variety of goat's cheese at my local cheesemongers, including really old goat so hard it crumbles. So extra-hard goat is not a gap.

I wouldn't call the hard goat rare either, it's available in every larger Dutch supermarket; we're not talking casu martzu level of rare here.

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stared
4 hours ago
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Memorandum: please do not use the word "periodic" for things that are not periodic

Other suitable choices: chart, classification, taxonomy, visualization, table, map, etc, etc.

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goosejuice
5 hours ago
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Curiously missing human milk source. Not that I advise it.

Big fan of the thistle + sheep cheeses. Queso de la Serena and Azeitao are fantastic and very interesting.

Quadrello makes a great grilled cheese.

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globular-toast
5 hours ago
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It's missing loads of other mammals too, like seals and whales which are often over 60% fat.
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eulgro
4 hours ago
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At what point does milk become oil?
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fcpk
5 hours ago
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human milk is pretty delicious?
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radiorental
4 hours ago
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I'm fairly certain at some point very early in your career you thought so! You may have even cried out for it in public!!
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wouldbecouldbe
4 hours ago
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Seems like all dutch cheeses are just grouped under gouda, fine but there are plenty of extra hard, hard, semi-hard, semi goat cheeses. Same with the cow cheeses.

See hard goat cheese example, its delicious https://www.goudsekaasshop.nl/geitenkaas-oud-1-kilo.html?gad...

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MinimalAction
4 hours ago
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The idea is cool, but I have become personally allergic to AI generated content and styles. This one is pretty surely built using Claude.
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Galanwe
5 hours ago
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I am shocked that soft and fresh cheese are conflated in the same category. Both the texture and process are different. Brie is nothing like Ricotta.
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lkm0
4 hours ago
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Why put comté and gruyère in two different categories? I just realized that in France the categorization of cheeses is closer to how they are prepared:

- fresh

- soft

- hard but not cooked

- hard and cooked

and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.

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notorandit
3 hours ago
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I am thrilled to see how much Italy and France have contributed to world cheese world.

Mozzarella di bufala campana is my no. 1 choice, hands down.

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comrade1234
4 hours ago
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Really surprised to see Sbrinz. I didn't think it ever made it outside Switzerland. It's like Parmesan but objectively better - with sbrinz only organic milk is used while with Parmesan Italian farmers use antibiotics by default. Sbrinz has more milk fat and is aged longer. It's so much better and we use it all the time here.
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densekernel
5 hours ago
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I was so hoping for a period table with elements like Ch, Br, Pa
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bibstha
5 hours ago
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> Yak Milk Gruyère

> If a Nepali dairy cooperative partnered with an Alpine affineur, this could be extraordinary — dense, butterscotch-rich, with a savory depth that cow milk can't match.

I believe Himalayan French Cheese is doing this already. https://www.facebook.com/himalayanfrenchcheese/

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Insanity
3 hours ago
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I really like cheese, but I'm also vegetarian. It would be a useful feature to mark which cheese is vegetarian on this visualization. I know it's not the point of the website, but it'd be a nice bonus :)
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ComputerGuru
39 minutes ago
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Isn’t that kind of an “implementation detail” of the cheese? Like you can’t categorically say one way or the other for some without knowing the process used? Obviously some forego that altogether, but for the majority it would simply depend, no?

(I have many close friends that are similarly pedantic though for other reasons.)

Anyway, the site lets you categorize by processing method. All the acid cure options should meet your requirements, no?

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loganc2342
3 hours ago
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Excuse my ignorance, but is there any reason any cheese on here wouldn't be vegetarian?
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rkomorn
3 hours ago
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Lots of cheese is curdled using rennet, which can come from stomachs of killed calves.
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rf15
3 hours ago
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If you check wikipedia, you will find that most is coming from GMO'd yeasts and moulds these days.
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rkomorn
3 hours ago
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Okay?

Lots of European cheeses still use animal rennet, including several well known AOC (or PDO in English, I guess) ones with recognizable names.

I can check Wikipedia all I want but that doesn't make several of the cheeses I like to buy vegetarian.

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Insanity
53 minutes ago
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Yup, exactly this. I’m European and prefer EU cheese, but many do use animal rennet.
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AgentNews
4 hours ago
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We've forgotten the crackers! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nwwu6GpCTBg
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jmward01
4 hours ago
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I don't care what tools built this. This site is why I still have faith in the internet.
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monooso
4 hours ago
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A surprising lack of feta.
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zeristor
6 hours ago
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Perhaps cheese from Mad Max: Fury Road Mother’s milk.

Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked. As could some whales.

This is left as an exercise for the reader.

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GuB-42
2 hours ago
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> Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked

I hope you are talking about lionesses... As a reader, there are some exercises I would rather not do.

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goosejuice
5 hours ago
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When I was behind the cheese case quite awhile ago, we had a customer who misunderstood Wales as Whales. A good laugh was had.

"How do they milk the whales!?"

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dhosek
5 hours ago
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SCUBA gear, obviously.
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dhosek
5 hours ago
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Quotes from two bits of entertainment come to mind:

Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch:

C: Paper Cramer,

O: no

C: Danish Bimbo,

O: no

C: Czech sheep’s milk,

O: no

C: Venezuelan Beaver Cheese?

O: Not today, sir, no.

And Meet the Parents:

Greg Focker: You can milk just about anything with nipples.

Jack Byrnes: I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?

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rsendv
3 hours ago
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Where is Brunost?
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Oreb
2 hours ago
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Not a cheese, despite the name.
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teo_zero
59 minutes ago
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Neither is ricotta, actually.
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haunter
5 hours ago
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Brie and ricotta in the same category :D

That isntantly invalidates the whole thing

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chaidhat
5 hours ago
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Can't deer make cheese? Why is it specific to Reindeer?
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compass_copium
4 hours ago
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It's limited to domesticized animals.
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soperj
2 hours ago
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tons of domesticated deer though? What about Bison.
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aksss
4 hours ago
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Have you ever tried milking a moose?
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ivaivanova
5 hours ago
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Would love to learn more about how to put this together?
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flir
5 hours ago
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The "Fantasy, but the chemistry works" phrasing in the last box on the first tab makes me suspect chatbot input.

Which is a pity, because I like the exhaustive structure. I just can't trust it. But I guess if I was going to dive into inventing weird cheeses, I wouldn't start with a blog post anyway.

(It would be so easy to generate 50k "Periodic table of <noun>" pages and just throw them into the wild. The public internet really is cooked, isn't it).

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ChrisArchitect
5 hours ago
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Aside: why do all these "Index of.." or "Map of..." dataset compilation sites lately all have the same beige color scheme and font look?
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lukeasch21
5 hours ago
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I suspect the surface level answer has something to do with AI, but I would be curious to know the deeper factors at play. Do all popular models gravitate towards the same frameworks and design patterns? As an aside, I'm a little bit suspect of this account having no activity since 2019 and then posting this. Hopefully I'm just overthinking things.
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ChrisArchitect
3 hours ago
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Thing is I'm quickly developing a reaction/aversion to these vibecoded things soon as I see them load. Like, c'mon. Claude did the heavy lifting, put some of you into the look.
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desmondwillow
5 hours ago
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Claude prefers it.
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coke12
5 hours ago
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What about human cheese?
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chakintosh
5 hours ago
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I hate how I can now tell a website is made with claude within 2s of looking at it.
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yreg
5 hours ago
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It looks good, but since the design is becoming so ubiquitous in the small personal projects space (elsewhere as well, but I think it is most noticeable here) it is also boring.

I've vibecoded a few websites for my own use that look very similar to this. If I designed them myself, I would (in those cases) not put up enough effort so they would be much less refined, but also less boring?

edit: The expand/collapse behaviour of the table cells is quite strange. So the design is not that okay, afterall.

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l3x4ur1n
5 hours ago
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But, if the information is factual, does it matter if it is designed and coded by Claude? I was interested in information, not really the website design.
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ungreased0675
4 hours ago
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The challenge is in knowing how factual the information is. Might be unfair, but in my head people using AI to quickly make a thing are very unlikely to spend a lot of time validating and verifying information. The time saved could be spent making sure it’s legit, but that rarely happens.
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dust42
5 hours ago
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That website is so low effort that 2s is actually long to figure it out. Very sure that it is robot upvoted.

Edit: I live in the cheese triangle, France - Switzerland - Italy.

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yreg
5 hours ago
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Not everyone votes based on effort. The idea might be interesting to people and provoke discussion no matter how much time OP (?) spent creating it.
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Citizen_Lame
2 hours ago
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Vibe voting. No brain cells required.
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yreg
7 minutes ago
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This doesn't make any sense.
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jrm4
5 hours ago
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I like how "soft to hard" makes sense as a gradient, which is often the flaw in new "periodic tables," but, for anyone who might know, does Cow to Reindeer make any sense here as a gradient? I'm guessing not?
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gowld
5 hours ago
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I don't know why Submitter added the incorrect "periodic" modifier to the title.
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globular-toast
5 hours ago
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Nice. At first I thought there must have a dimension missing as it put things like brie and ricotta together. But then I noticed you can choose different dimensions, and there's more than just one more dimension!

I like cheese but I am concerned about the ethics of it so I eat far less than I could. If you make cheese it's quite shocking how much milk you need to make a single portion of it. I make paneer sometimes and use the whey to make chapati. I wish I could be sure the milk I consume doesn't harm the cows. I also know they take the calves away and kill them too.

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croisillon
5 hours ago
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not a periodic map ; sounded promising but the text is just AI slop
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