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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

31–40 of 190 posts

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#31
Personal computing failed because desktop operating systems started trying to work for mobile.

Everything that is bad in UI is a direct consequence of that.

1. No tooltips, right click, middle click behavior because touch doesn't have that. No ctrl+click either.

2. Large click areas wasting screen space with padding and margins.

3. Low density UI so it can shape-shift into mobile version.

4. Why type on a phone when you can talk? Make everything a search box.

5. Everything must be flat instead of skeumorphic because it's easier to resize for other screen sizes.

6. Everything needs a swipe animation and views instead of dialogs because smartphones can't have windows.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#32
post #7

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

Because you cannot build it with merchants. This is a job for monks.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#33
post #30

Yeah dream on. I’m an engineer and know what structured data is. And yet I miserably fail to store my private files in a way that I can find them back without relying on search tools. So how on earth are we ever going to organize all the world’s data and knowledge? Thank god we found this sub-optimal “band aid” called LLMs!

Precisely this. This article might seem reasonable to anybody who has never tried to organize something as simple as a local music collection.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#34
post #5

I have often thought about how computers are significantly faster than they were in the early 2000s, but they are significantly harder to use. Using Linux for the first time in college was a revelation, because it gave me the tools to tell the computer "rename all of the files in this directory, keeping only the important parts of the name." But instead of iterating on better interfaces to effectively utilize the N t…

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

> Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

Well, I would say that if GP advertised themselves as being able to do so, and confidently gave an incorrect answer, their function as someone who is able to serve their advertised purpose is practically useless.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#35
post #5

I have often thought about how computers are significantly faster than they were in the early 2000s, but they are significantly harder to use. Using Linux for the first time in college was a revelation, because it gave me the tools to tell the computer "rename all of the files in this directory, keeping only the important parts of the name." But instead of iterating on better interfaces to effectively utilize the N t…

IDK, I think there is something adorable about taking a system that over trillions of iterations always performs the same operation with the same result, reliability unmatched in all of the universe… And making it more of “IDK what it answered the way it did, but it might be right!!”

Humans like games :)

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#37
post #7

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

Semantic web never existed. There was Google and Google had an API to get breadcrumbs to show on search results. And that's what people called "semantic web." A few years later they gave up and made everything look like a breadcrumb anyway. And that sums up the whole semantic web experience.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#39

I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids" To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc." Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very differe…

eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody externally has any standards, and the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better?

What happens in practice is that the culture exterminates the drive for improvement: not only are things bad, but people look at you if you're crazy if you think things should be better. Like in 2025 people defend C, people defend Javascript, people write software without types, people write scripts in shell languages; debugging sometimes involves looking at actual bytes with your eyes; UIs are written in non-cross-platform ways; the same stupid software gets written over and over at a million companies, sending a large file to another person is still actually pretty hard; leaving comments on it is functionally impossible ... these are software problems, everything is shit, everything can be improved on, nothing should be hard anymore but everything still is; we are still missing a million abstractions that are necessary to make the world simple. Good lord, yesterday I spent two hours trying to resize a PDF. We truly live in the stone age; the only progress we've made is that there are now ads on every rock.

I really wish it was a a much more ruthlessly competitive landscape. One in which if your software is bad, slow, hard to debug, hard to extend, not open source, not modernized, not built on the right abstractions, hard to migrate on or off of, not receptive to feedback, covered in ads... you'd be brutally murdered by the competition in short order. Not like today where you can just lie on your marketing materials and nobody can really do anything because the competition is just as weak. People would do a much better job if they had to to survive.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#40

I always appreciate our weekly Crankypants Take on LLMs. > AI is not a triumph of elegant design, but a brute-force workaround You can read and understand Attention Is All You Need in one hour, and then (after just scaling out by a few billion) a computer talks to you like a human. Pretty elegant, if you ask me. > The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would en…

Except it's all just smoke and mirrors.
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