The provided example is really bad and ignores why customer service is sometimes a good idea. I guess it's been so bad and corrupted by disingenuous marketing for so long that people have forgotten.

Suppose you need to buy some stuff for an upcoming project or vacation, but don't want to go down a research rabbit hole for the next hour(s) to cure your ignorance. Suppose you don't even want to have a conversation with the AI. You just want it to build a shopping cart. At most, hopefully, your effort is just pruning the cart before placing the order (if even that).

I'm not saying AI wouldn't be corrupted like human customer service. I'm saying that we're actually pretty close to this already on Amazon with their AI, but not all ecommerce can be or has to be Amazon.

This probably isn't that far off. That would keep the contact lenses inert and passive (no added side effects and no power needed).

The color change could also be subtle enough to require a sensor in smartglasses, but I don't think that's too bad. If the lenses ever get to the point where they're relaying multiple things, you're going to need a sensor anyway to demux those signals.

I like the concept, but it needs more interesting content. I was actually confused for a few rounds.

As soon as I realized it's just a game of trivia and "spot the AI image/video", my scores improved dramatically. It's like a switch flipped in my brain and I stopped overthinking these.

It seems like that's the opposite of what you intended?

> The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.

I suppose if you break your glasses, squirt real hard, and drop down about 30 IQ points, then sure.

We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.

What we all see irrefutably happening is some new people are just barely able to do slightly more than they used to. That's the impact we'd expect from a better search engine and a better "I'm feeling lucky" button which, of course, is what this era of AI is.

> We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.

Yes, absolutely. This is a very far future. But that future is (maybe, possibly, hopefully) coming, unlike this other future which is absolutely never coming.

Why "hopefully"?

Having AI "do the task directly" sounds just as miserable as anything else people keep insisting is the future. We can't rely on probabilistic methods. We will still need humans in the loop to pin down the deterministic parts and also the parts we intended (often the same, but not always).

What else did you have in mind?

Humanity has dreamed of being able to control computers by having actual conversations for the last 80 years or so based on nearly all sci-fi movies ever released, and that dream is finally becoming reality. And it's not a coincidence - talking is the most natural, the most human way to interact with a computer, and the only reason we haven't done that successfully before was technical limitations. By which I mean, if not for technical limitations, we'd have been talking to our computers a long freaking time ago. Wait, how old is Siri now?

If AI keeps getting better, then it is inevitable that voice conversations will become the dominant way in which mostbpeople use most computers for most tasks most of the time. It's just part of human nature and there's no way around it. The only way this doesn't happen is if AI never becomes good enough to support it.

Personally, I'm not a fan of voice input. But I want AI to get better. And the future where voice conversations work well enough to be used as the main HCI method is inevitably also the future where voice conversations are used as the main HCI method by most people. I'm hopeful for technological progress, that's all. It's just that you cannot have this progress but not have people take advantage of it in this exact way.

Compare it to the future where most people vibe code their own apps, which has zero chance of happening no matter how good AI gets.

Nice attempt at slipping one past, but the industry is far from doomed. Where do you work now that you believe that?

Holdouts feel everything is doomed.

Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.

Article author is excited. I am too.

I exist outside your dichotomy.

I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.

It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.

This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.

"I exist outside your dichotomy" is one for the ages.

There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.

It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.

I think that it should not need to be mutually exclusive. You can make it you can enter the programs yourself (if you prefer to do for whatever reason, including, it does not work well (like you mention), or because of Dijkstra objection or other objections to the use of AI for programming the computer or AI in general), but that AI can also be possible.

You're welcome to not make things.

Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?

That's the wrong reason to do something.

For me, I made things because I liked the process of making things, it was never really about the result. Much like solving crossword puzzles is about the process itself, not about getting the answer.

Then nothing has changed. You're free to continue doing things as you like.

Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.

You are completely right. I am not entitled to anything. But before I was paid to have fun, I spent years trying to get better at it and then suddenly it completely lost its value. From fun of solving crossword puzzles to the dread of validating if crossword puzzles bot solved crossword puzzle correctly, with worse pay, less job security or opportunities.

I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.

I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.

You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.

If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.

> Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels.

This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.

Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?

I have, at the risk of being a meme, put spreadsheets in cells via OLE. It was glorious.

Can you extract values from the embedded spreadsheets to do math in the host sheet?

What was that syntax like?

This is exactly right. The elasticity on the buying side (not private equity) just isn't there like it may have once been.

So then you optimize your workflow, but at what cost?

I find it much more painful to put in any amount of time into something that isn't what I intended. Of all the places to insist on efficiency, this is probably the most unreasonable.

> the offline option exists the way the wheelchair ramp exists at certain train stations: installed after the fact, satisfying a regulation, pitched at an angle no wheelchair on earth can climb. We are all expected to pretend grandma can make it up, and to act only mildly surprised when we find her at the bottom again.

It's hyperbole like this that breaks the illusion for the post. I'm not an editor, but if you're trying to make a valid point you need one man. Stinkeroo.

I’m not sure what part of this seems like hyperbole to you.

It's interesting about MiSTer. It was wedged into the article so awkwardly and suddenly that it felt like a definite advert, but it mostly said it was shit and only get it if you like frustratingly broken systems. I still think it was a reverse psychology form of an ad

The Mister part is what seems like hyperbole? Or the ramp? Or not having good offline options?

why make a point when the robot can spew out 1500 words of cliches and other nonsense

This is especially true on a CRT. People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.

Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.

Gran Turismo 3 was where I first started experiencing the "uncanny valley" of graphics. The game looked and felt incredible... so incredible that the lack of damage felt like an immersion-breaker in a way I hadn't experienced before.

> People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.

I remember going to an electronics store with my friend. I couldn't figure out why they had a broadcast football game playing on a 15 inch LCD display up front. I assumed it was a game but then watched it for a few cuts and was so certain it was live footage...

It was a madden game on PS2 in demo mode.