Beyond that, many of us make amazing software that folks actually enjoy. The big letdown is mostly vendors that cheap out on QA or focus only on enterprise/commercial.
The software I've most noticed? Carrot weather would be a great example. If I had the money, I'd find a way to throw even more at the developer. It is an amazing app that I inadvertently use more than any other on my iPhone. When it breaks, I notice, and I definitely email the developer. They respond "in form" (no spoilers because I suspect many haven't used it)
There are others as well. Might I suggest OP remove his head from his rear end for a moment and recognize that most here either build software, lots of it great, or have also built software, lots of it great, and consider the audience. If you find this to be an overly emotional state, you may want to ensure that you are, in fact, human and not AI.
You sure generated a lot of text from a few sentences! Well done!
Or are you saying you have difficulty reading text? Because very little of what you're claiming is in the text.
This is exactly why we have AI assistants in the first place.
The typical person wants the damn phone / computer / tablet out of their life, they just want to say "Siri, make my dentist appointment for 9:30 Monday morning" or "Copilot, find all the pictures of my dad and put them together in a collage for his birthday".
The biggest problem with AI assistants and this thought process in general is that they do not work.
As the article states, if the AI assistants actually did things we wanted, these companies wouldn't need to shove them down our throats so much. We would just... use them.
It's funny because the person who wrote that article clearly loves computers (and has loved them for a long time)! I guess we are all a bunch of contradictions zipped up in a meat sack.
I think that a point of this article is that this value is not having a computer in itself, it's what the computer, the software, the platform, allows users to get done.
In other words (from Halt and Catch Fire) - "Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.". Or this article's author: "Nobody wants a computer. They want what it does."
Yes, there exist some people who "want a computer" in and of itself. But by analogy, railways aren't organised around the needs of a few trainspotters, they're built for the mass market of people who just need to get somewhere and need a means to that end.
When the software tries to become the thing, the destination, that's an issue. It doesn't translate to a mass market, it's just for computer techies. I would hesitate to call that mass market necessarily "non-technical" because for instance what about Doctors whose profession is full of technicalities, but for them the IT is nothing more than means to other more useful ends.
Since computers are my profession, and I'll cheerfully say "computers suck so much!" after spending hours disentangling some subtle internal issue that no user in their right mind would give a crap about. But in so doing, I keep the software working smoothly.
throw-the-towel•3w ago
davidgerard•3w ago
undeveloper•3w ago
davidgerard•3w ago