After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers

After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers

  • alcasa@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.

    Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great… if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.

    As a matter of fact I don’t believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don’t ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn’t have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn’t have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn’t use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.

    But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.

    • beeng@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Something like the Linux unix philosophy of doing 1 thing and doing it well comes to mind. FOSS no less.

      • lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        That philosophy has never been successfully been applied in the GUI space and especially not in the Linux world. Bash/Shell gets away with it because it has pipes and scripting that allow you to plug different apps together to form something bigger. In the Windows world they tried something like that with OLE and NeXTSTEP did something with DisplayPostscript, but none of it stuck around to become a foundational layer for GUI apps the way pipes are for command line tools. These days all GUIs are back to being monolithic blobs.

        • beeng@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Begs the question for gui’s then or?

          I always wonder what another interaction scheme would look like if it weren’t for “click”, I’ve always wondered about tunnels or roads, like we do in real life, to continuously travel toward a destination, rather than discretely click.

          Didn’t have to be this way. CLI is underrated as any computer dev knows, power is in the knowledge. How about we apply the AI search problem to cli commands, what happens then?

          • lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I always wonder what another interaction scheme would look like if it weren’t for “click”, I’ve always wondered about tunnels or roads, like we do in real life, to continuously travel toward a destination, rather than discretely click.

            There is the filter graph or node graph, found in things like Unreal Blueprints, Blender or ComfyUI. That’s kind of the GUI version of a pipe and even quite a bit more powerful as you can have multiple inputs and outputs. But it’s just something individual apps implement, it’s not something any OS has as a native primitive.

            For something a little more CLI-like, there is Archy, which is kind of like Emacs, where programs are just commands that operate on the same bit of data, not complete separate things, but that never made it past some prototypes and it’s hard to see how it could work for the whole OS, where you have to deal with a wide variety of file and data formats. It had a commercial predecessor with Canon Cat in 1987, but that also ended up a dead end.

            Another thing is Project Xandau, this is more of an alternative to the WWW than just a GUI/OS, but it would have had some neat properties like links to and quotes from other documents being actual references to those documents, not copy&paste. But again, nothing but prototypes.

            Unix shells just assume everything is text, which makes all the small tools possible. But the GUI world contains a lot more than just plain text, which makes it difficult to come up with any universal scheme that can have the same flexibility. Even HTML, which is the closed thing to an universal data format in the modern GUI world, fails quite miserably here as, as it ends up being just a format for content consumption, not a format that is used in the creation and management of the data.

            At the current pace we’ll have AGI long before we have any real innovation in GUIs. Will probably end up with StarTrek like interface sooner or later where you just say what you want and the AI figures out how to get it, ChatGPT already isn’t that far off and can handle a lot of simple grep/sed like tasks quite well, even shell one liner can be produces with a reasonable rate of success. What’s is a way to let it access and operate on local data.