alt Hacker NewsWhat software today matches the incredible look and feel of say Delicious Library?
What popular consumer software today matches the incredible extensibility of Winamp?
Who is developing fun tools like Coverflow, which was popular enough that Apple incorporated it into iTunes.
You actually do see some of this today but it’s almost entirely limited to software tools, because software devs are willing to spend a little more effort on the tools they use because they know their users can just develop an alternative otherwise.
AI might change this, but well crafted software was genuinely disappearing for the past decade and a half.
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The extra work required to delight users is still work. Most people won't be bothered to spend the time. It's so much easier to create the average and move on.
The baseline has moved down, but it also encourages laziness. Those who break out of the "Claude, do the thing, no mistakes" rut will do great things.
So much this. I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Dangerous Dave, Prince.exe , TDCGA.exe, and installing all the amazing jungle of applications in DOS , Win3 and later [anybody remembers the Win3 program, that made your icons move? the logo was a rabbit in a hat]. Winamp, Musicmatch, SoundForge, all the CADs for more or less professional work, etc.
Now it's all websites.. or horrible android apps. Open source is the only thing remaining.
The good thing is that with LLMs, it is more and more possible to add all sort of cool functionality to existing code. And soon we will be able to add functionality also to compiled programs [like adding line numbers to windows note pad as a "cracking" tutorial, that was so cool].
Just yesterday I added the functionality of "show all unread" to an open source C++ low resource Slack desktop app [the official one is so bad]. And also I added VIM bindings to a text editor.