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I think I need to go lie down

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Re: I think I need to go lie down

#341

Post by toyg »

code_runner wrote: post #256
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if "do everything manually and slowly so that you never have to set realistic expectations" is a great way to do business. It’s called Expectation Management. It’s how successful business is done. Marketing 101: Under promise, over deliver. P.S. Apple is quite good at this IMHO. I notice they often very quickly go from product announcement to product availability. My theory for why this is good is that…

i'm not replying about the concept of under promise, over deliver, but more like.... why would you avoid a tool that helps you do something quickly because you don't want to explain to your client that some steps aren't as fast to do as others.

You wouldn't avoid the tool, just avoid surfacing it too explicitly - by being too fast or by explicitly boasting about it.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#342

Post by godshatter »

lxgr wrote: post #100
smcleod wrote: post #10

Ugh Twitter / X. That site needs to die - it’s honestly so broken, none of the redirects seem to work today.

At this point I’m assuming this is broken on purpose (for visitors not logged in). I wonder if people still on there realize that their posts are essentially not visible for unregistered users anymore without jumping though major hoops.

Did they fix it? Everything seems to be working for me and I don't even have a twitter account.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#343

Post by pixl97 »

pc86 wrote: post #134
isilofi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Almost none of those get i18n, hotkeys, shortcuts, taborder, screenreaders and other accessibility right.

Most users don't care about any of that, either. And I would argue that i18n and l10n belong outside your language's framework (and obviously outside CSS).

Most users only use about 10% of the features of your software...

The problem is, for every user it's a different 10%.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#344

Post by financltravsty »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #302
api wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct. When we went to the browser we took 30 years of UI development knowledge and UI/UX principle and flushed it down the toilet. Only very recently have we started to gain composability in browser UIs through things like React, and it's a sad facsimile of the widget composability we had in WYSIWYG UI development on PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The web is a shit UI platform, but that's…

It's also a shit document platform even though that is what it was designed for.

HTML is a shit spec. Without strong semantic elements, it's impossible to reliably parse any HTML document without using your eyes.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#345

Post by financltravsty »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #154
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

I was discussing with a client how to integrate our software with his. He sent me a screenshot of the main form. I put the screenshot into ChatGPT and said “make a react form like this in bootstrap”. Made some adjustments, added my software, a few hours later showed the client who was knocked out to see a proof of concept of our systems integrated so quickly. When doing web development I often take a screenshot of a…

how do you put a screenshot into chatgpt?

1. Take your screenshot

2. Switch model to ChatGPT 4

3. Click the attachment/paperclip button in the prompt bar

4. Send

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#346

Post by davio »

withinboredom wrote: post #176
lovasoa wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking about that a lot recently. Where I work, we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business. Maybe we are doing something very wrong, but I am under the impression that most of the code that gets written anywhere is extremely low-entropy. This low-entropy, repetitive coding is not limited to the user interfaces. We do tend to describe the same structures…

> we spend a very small fraction of our time on building things that are unique to our business. I usually see this in places/cultures that value code-beautification projects rather than delivering value to the customer. Sometimes, they even want to do the latter, but actually do the former. If you work somewhere that focuses on delivering value, the devs constantly complain about technical debt that will never, ever…

I describe our work as an endless loop of taking data from the screen to the database and back again.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#347

Post by renegade-otter »

Anyone remember IBM's Rational Rose? You fed it a UML diagram of what you wanted to do, and it generated C++ stubs. That was two decades ago or more. I tried it once, and that was it. You still had to do the "last 10%" which is the most important 10% in software.

These tools are definitely more "magical", but these are essentially an iteration of what we've already had.

Code generation from UML was all the rage for a while too, until it wasn't. People realized its limitations at some point. Sort of like ORMs - if you are not policing SQL generation like a hawk, you are going to end up with an awful non-performant system.

Ultimately it is a productivity and prototyping tool - it will not do the hardest parts and integrations for you, at least not in the way you may want exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rational_Rose_XDE

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#348

Post by danenania »

imjonse wrote: post #33

Such recent demos show both how impressively ML/AI has advanced recently, and how unimpressively repetitive and unoriginal tasks keep being reimplemented by millions of developers worldwide. Since most UI screens can be accurately described in one or two paragraphs, it's no wonder they can be represented in much detail in a relatively small embedding vector.

While I agree at a high level, it's also important to understand that most of these demos are being carefully cherry-picked. If you are just seeing the viral demos on social media, you're going to think AI is further along than it actually is for more complex tasks. People who are non-technical and not using AI in anger to get real work done are going to be the most susceptible to this.

Those in the weeds are generally going to have a more nuanced view of the benefits and challenges--i.e. that it's incredibly useful but also very fallible and requires careful hand-holding to get production-ready results.

I say all that as an AI optimist. The value is real and the most impressive demos are glimpses of where we're heading. But it's going to take some time before the median result catches up to the hype.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#349

Post by redleggedfrog »

renegade-otter wrote: post #347

Anyone remember IBM's Rational Rose? You fed it a UML diagram of what you wanted to do, and it generated C++ stubs. That was two decades ago or more. I tried it once, and that was it. You still had to do the "last 10%" which is the most important 10% in software. These tools are definitely more "magical", but these are essentially an iteration of what we've already had. Code generation from UML was all the rage for a…

Oh god, you're making my PTSD kick in. What this will all lead to? Clients going in making UI that appears to work fine and then asking developers to wire it in to the greater eco-system that will necessarily surround it, telling you "Look! It's almost done!" and then you're going to have PTSD too.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#350

Post by dghlsakjg »

gtirloni wrote: post #114
creshal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UIs should be repetitive, but we keep reinventing them anyway to satisfy the vanity of product owners/designers/managers/clients/... and built entire industries around making slightly the UIs slightly more differently than the last time.

Usually things naturally get mature and stop changing so much (e.g. some software reaches such maturity level that it starts offering LTS releases). This doesn't seem to be the case with UI toolkits. Is that because we still don't understand things well enough to design a decent foundation?

I would say that in the long term/big picture we have figured out a pretty standard UI for computers. In the 1980s you probably had to read a pretty hefty book for any given model of computer to be useful. Now, we can sit down in front of just about any computer and trust that the Mouse and Keyboard will exist, and act like we expect (i.e. the left button on the mouse is for selecting, there are arrows on the keyboard which can control a cursor, etc), and that the GUI software will be substantially similar regardless of manufacturer (windowed programs, a bar of some sort on the lower edge of the screen for controlling the OS, a bar at the top of the screen for controlling the active window, etc.)

The parts of the UI toolkits that change are the least consequential. Round or square corners, buttons, skeumorphism, etc...

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