I work on lots of smaller client projects - usually named by the hostname. I absolutely don't understand how at some point the github search got so great it became unable to find my own repo by its name.
We have since switched to self hosted Forgejo instance. Unsurprisingly the search works.
This was before Actions and a whole lot of other non-git related stuff. There was years (maybe even a decade?) where GitHub essentially was unchanged besides fixes and small incremental improvements, long time ago :)
> The improvements to PR review have been nice though
I dunno, probably the worst UX downgrade so far, almost no PRs are "fully available" on page load, but requires additional clicks and scrolling to "unlock" all the context, kind of sucks.
Used to be you loaded the PR diff and you actually saw the full diff, except really large files. You could do CTRL+F and search for stuff, you didn't need to click to expand even small files. Reviewing medium/large PRs is just borderline obnoxious today on GH.
I find it impossible to use the current diff view for most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all available sections...
They have somehow found the worst possible amount of context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
They definitely have. Github evolved a lot faster after the microsoft acquisition, I remember being mildly impressed after it was stagnant for years (this is not an opinion on whether it was evolving in the right direction or if it was a good trade-off)
> It’s like corporations are angry that they need to go through us to get our money.
This is why I think the "you're the product" saying is wrong. You're just some annoyance to managers (whether they're trying to use you just for user numbers and ad views or they're trying to get your money), whose product is the company (shares or just outright selling the company).
What’s your example for this? Because my experience in e comm is that targeted advertising is awful (I bought a lawnmower last week, Amazon knows I bought it. I am now getting ads for lawnmowers, suggested products for lawn mowers, rather than lawn care, gardening tools, or anything to do with the lawnmower I’ve already bought), sites are absolutely overrun with ads and suggested placements for the product they want to sell me rather than the one I’ve searched for, and that everyone except Amazon interrupts the checkout flow with multiple up-sells, verifications, 2FA prompts, 3d Secure validations…
I feel the opposite. It's inconvenient having to type (or voice) anything.
How much text do you have to type into Amazon when shopping? Usually just a product category, and then you just scroll and click around. A lot of the optimizations, like showing related products, or saving payment or shipping info, are essentially reducing text entry.
Why is this good? I want an impartial consistent system for shopping. If I can find it at a different site for a lower price, I should be able to do so. I should also be able to have it give me non-bot reviews and ask relevant questions about the product.
The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.
The buyer of this technology is not shoppers, it's retailers. The measurement of quality is "does it make us more money?" not "does it help me make better buying choices."
Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget.
A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.
Is there a way to measure users "making the best choice?" You could measure the amount of time spent comparison-shopping, but most people are terrible at that anyway; it's an acquired skill for sure. Besides a willingness to spend time, it seems like an impossible-to-quantify metric even in the abstract.
Maybe the best proxy metric is whether the customer returns the product. But the store will also be willing to eat more returns on a higher margin item if they make more profit at the end of the day.
I don't think I agree. If I overpay by 10%, I'll never know it and probably wouldn't return it even if I did know--once the shrinkwrap is off, too late. If a superior product exists but I don't find it, by definition I wouldn't know and wouldn't return the thing I did buy.
Cynically, the customer might not know if they overpaid but the retailer doesn’t care about that. Where “making the best choice” actually cashes out is the customer DAU dropping (rare) or product returns increasing.
That's a cynical way to look at it. Most likely the LLM will take a cut of sales and they'd be more or less indifferent who cuts the check. There's a market for this sort of thing. People will go to the best LLM for shopping. If the LLM is a shitty product, people will switch. LLMs are increasingly commoditized.
All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggregator they go from 1 to many retailers. LLMs will go from 1 aggregator (Amazon) to many so it will be better. And they don't have to invest a lot in UI/UX as chat is the interface.
I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.
Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.
Catalog is impartial? Then why are ~40% of every search I do on Amazon a sponsored product? There is no pure "catalog" especially with cheap crap coming out every day from no-name Chinese labels.
Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?
I just had a horrible thought. Maybe online stores will just take away the ability for customers to see the full inventory and force you to go through the chatbot. This will allow them to fully control the shopping experience even more.
If you want running shoes, you have to go through their chatbot.
Amazon might already have the monopoly power to do this. They would just need to swap out the search bar for a chat box.
It's possible, but then wouldn't retailers who don't force their customers to crawl through an LLM maze eat their lunch? Natural economics at play would still happen I think
Maybe. In a world where people are already vendor locked to Prime or Walmart there’s a nonzero switching cost. Amazon product search already has a ton of problems but they get away with it because of free 2 day shipping.
Do you have any examples? Because from Amazon to Uber, they're not great from an end user perspective. It's not like people who like the website will stop using it because of chatgpt, this would be attracting people who complain about the website/app. People are always complaining about amazon for example, i don't like the experience but I haven't had all that much bad product experience from them, but people who keep saying they're getting bad products on Amazon can maybe use chatgpt, talk to it so it understands what they're looking for in natural language, in a way the search bar can't and keep their patronage.
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to products the vendor wants them to buy, not the products the shoppers actually want (or need).
> A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
That is precisely the point.
Chats may suck as an interface, but majority of the value and promise of end-user automation (and more than half the point of the term "User Agent" (as in, e.g., a web browser)) is in enabling comparison shopping in spite of the merchants, and more generally, helping people reduce information asymmetry that's intertwined with wealth and power asymmetry.
But it's not something you can generally sell to the vendors, who benefit from that asymmetry relative to their clients (in fact, I was dumbfounded to see so much interest on the sales/vendor side for such ideas, but I blame it on general AI hype).
Adversarial interoperability is the name of the game.
RockAuto also has what some might consider a "dated" interface, but honestly it's light years better than trying to use NAPA's or CarQuest's website or god forbid looking through dealership parts counter websites. I honestly wish regular retailers would have stuck more closely with what worked for more B2B focused ecommerce, i.e. I wish shopping Best Buy or Home Depot was more akin to McMaster, Fastenall or some of the nicer supply house web portals.
Just made an order from them. It's weirdly comforting to know there's a company that knows I need clevis bolts and is willing to sell them to me for a transparent price.
Not sure you're aware but you initially sound like you disagree with the post you replied to, only to follow up by enthusiastically reiterating that author's words as if in agreement.
You realize what shoppers and vendors each consider to be "good" e-commerce sites are fundamentally opposed concepts?
Maybe? I'm not sure which way the OP is arguing, in particular because of that "(Good)". So perhaps I misread the comment as arguing the opposite of what it is.
Where are these sites? Everywhere I shop online is full of distractions and attempts to funnel me away from what I wanted and confuse me along the way.
Not that a chat interface would be an improvement.
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying.
I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
> I don't think so. I know for a fact that search terms are a minefield of gotchas and hacks caused by product decisions that reflect ad-hoc negotiations with partners and sellers. It's an unstable equilibrium of partners trying to shift attention to their products in a certain way. I think that calling this fragile equilibrium optimized has no bearing with reality.
You think a crude, unoptimised "minefield" is the route that leads to something as delicate as a "fragile equilibrium?" I don't see something as carefully balanced as your unstable equilibrium even being something that could exist without the processes involved having been refined down to a science. The only real alternative that meets your narrative would be that this is an industry that runs entirely on hope and luck (and enough human sacrifices to keep ample supplies of both on hand).
When I shop for special hardware (e.g. bicycle shift gear) it is usually underspecified.
If the information does not exist in the text block, a chat bot is of no use.
Chat bots don't belong to an e-commerce site; chat bots belong on the outside, specifically to comparison-shop and pull in some external information to de-bullshitify offers, correct "mistakes" and "accidental omissions" in the listings, resolve the borderline-fraudlent crap companies play these days with store-specific and season/promotion-specific SKUs with different parameters all resolving to same model/make name (think Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that are not actually deals, just inferior hardware with dedicated SKU).
Agree. AI is (currently) fantastic at "de-bullshitifying" the internet. "Give me a table that compares Products A & B by z, y, and z." Companies have gone out of their way to make comparison shopping near impossible. Specs are hidden, if they're shown at all. Just figuring out if a certain TV had an ARC-HDMI out required downloading the manual.
I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.
The use case for chat interfaces would be as follows:
Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.
Reliable information on this does not exist on vendor sites, though. It exists on Reddit and in books and in med/physio papers and bunch of other places a SOTA model has read in training or can (for now) access via web search.
LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
Idk I earnestly tried using LLMs to find me the smallest by volume regular ATX PC case 3 months ago and it was a nightmare. That info is out there, but it could not avoid mentioning ITX, mini atx (sometimes because Reddit posters messed up) and just missed a bunch of cases. And letting in any mistakes meant I had to double check every volume calculation it did.
I found the Jonsbo D41 without the help of LLM despite trying. (There might be a few smaller but they are 3x the price)
LLMs don’t weigh and surveil the options well. They find some texts like from Reddit in this case that mention a bunch subset of cases and that text will heavily shape the answer. Which is not what you want a commerce agent to do, you don’t want text prediction. I doubt that gives the obscure but optimal option in most cases.
We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
> they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.
The problem is that the chat transcript is legally binding. If the chatbot makes incorrect statements which the customer relies on for their complex purchase, then you're going to have to refund them.
Probably because there's a ton of code that deals with nested parentheses across languages in the training data, and models have learned how to work around tokenization limitations, when it comes to parentheses.
> While people have an image frame rate of around 15-20 images per second to make moving pictures appear seamless,
This is just...wrong? Human vision is much fast and more sensitive than we give it credit for. e.g. Humans can discern PWM frequencies up to many thousands of Hz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb_7uN7sfTw
The overwhelming majority of people were happy enough to spend, what, billions on screens and displays capable of displaying motion picture in those formats.
That there is evidence that most(?) people are able to sense high frequency PWM signals doesn’t make the claim that 15 to 20 frames per second is sufficient to make moving pictures appear seamless.
I’ve walked in to rooms where the LED lighting looks fine to me, and the person I was with has stopped, said “nope” and turned around and walked out, because to them the PWM driver LED lighting makes the room look illuminated by night club strobe lighting.
That's not really right. Most NTSC content is either 60 fields per second with independent fields (video camera sourced) or 24 frames per second with 3:2 pulldown (film sourced). It's pretty rare to have content that's actually 30 frames per second broken into even and odd fields. Early video game systems ran essentially 60p @ half the lines; they would put out all even or all odd fields, so there wasn't interlacing.
If you deinterlace 60i content with a lot of motion to 30p by just combining two adjacent fields, it typically looks awful, because each field is an independent sample. Works fine enough with low motion though.
PAL is similar, although 24 fps films were often shown at 25 fps to avoid jitter of showing most frames as two fields but two frames per second as three fields.
I think most people find 24 fps film motion acceptable (although classical film projection generally shows each frame two or three times, so it's 48/72 Hz with updates at 24 fps), but a lot of people can tell a difference between 'film look' and 'tv look' at 50/60 fields (or frames) per second.
That association seems to be an unfortunate equilibrium because higher frame rates seem to be "objectively" better, similar to higher resolution and color. (Someone without prior experience with TV/movies would presumably always prefer a version with higher frame rate.)
In general yes. Low framerates can be used deliberately to make something feel more dreamlike but that is something that should only used in very specific cases.
Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.
It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.
It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series.
From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.
I think familiarity is a major factor, but the lower frame-rate and slower shutter speed also creates motion blur, which makes it easier to make the film look realistic since the details get blurred away. I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.
> I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.
Curiously I can already get in this mindset with 24fps videos and much, much prefer the clarity of motion 48fps offers. All the complaining annoyed me, honestly. It reminds me of people complaining about "not being able to see things in dark scenes" which completely hampers the filmmakers ability to exploit high dynamic range.
Tbf, in both cases the consumer hardware can play a role in making this look bad.
I went out of my way to see the Hobbit in 24 and 48 fps when it came out, and weirdly liked 48 better. It was strange to behold, but felt like the sort of thing that would be worth getting used to. What I didn't like was the color grading. They didn't have enough time to get all the new Red tech right, that's for sure.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They standardized on 24 back when sound on film took over Hollywood, and we now have a century of film shot at that speed. It's what "the movies" look like. There have been a few attempts to introduce higher frame rates, like Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and James Cameron's Avatar, both at 48 fps, but audiences by and large don't seem to like the higher frame rates. It doesn’t help that we have nearly a century of NTSC TV at ~60 fps[1], and our cultural memory equates these frame rates with live tv or the "soaps," not the prestige of movies.
[1]Technically 29.97fps but the interlacing gives 59.94 fields per second.
I haven't seen a single person complain about avatar. I wonder if the issue with the hobbit wasn't the 48fps at all but rather something more akin to when we shifted to HD and makeup/costume artists had to be more careful.
Because movies (in film form) are projected an entire frame at a time instead of scanned a line (well, actually a dot moving in a line) at a time onto the screen. I read somewhere (but no longer have the link) that when projecting the entire frame at once as film projectors do lower frame rates are not as noticeable. I do not know if modern digital projectors continue to project "whole frames at once" on screen.
Movies are not projected using the scan and hold approach used by typical computer displays. They have a rotating shutter which blinks every frame at you multiple times. This both helps to hide the advance to the next frame but also greatly increases motion clarity despite the poor framerate.
But blinking a frame multiple times rather than once creates a double (or triple etc) image effect. To get optimal motion clarity which compensates Smooth Pursuit without double images, one would need to flash each frame once, as short as possible. But that's not feasible for 24 FPS because it would lead to intense flickering. It would be possible for higher frame rates though.
Maximum depends on what it is you are seeing. If it’s a white screen with a single frame of black, you can see that at incredibly high frame rates. But if you took a 400fps and a 450fps video, I don’t think you would be able to pick which is which.
The discussion on flicker fusion frequency (FFF) and human vs. canine perception is fascinating. When building systems that synchronize with human physiology, like the metabolic digital twins I'm currently developing, we often find that 'perceived' seamlessness is highly variable based on cognitive load and environmental light.
While 24-30fps might suffice for basic motion, the biological impact of refresh rates on eye strain (especially for neurodivergent users) is a real engineering challenge. This is why I've been pushing for WCAG 2.1 AAA standards in my latest project; it’s not just about 'seeing' the image, but about minimizing the neurological stress of the interaction itself.
I review most of the code I get LLMs to write and actually I think the main challenge is finding the right chunk size for each task you ask it to do.
As I use it more I gain more intuition about the kinds of problems it can handle on it's, vs those that I need to work on breaking down into smaller pieces before setting it loose.
Without research and planning agents are mostly very expensive and slow to get things done, if they even can. However with the right initial breakdown and specification of the work they are incredibly fast.
In vitro is great for publication though. If I out bleach and Alzheimer's plaques in a petri dish I bet I could publish that sodium hypochlorite treats Alzheimer's
The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX.
Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.
I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.
A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.
> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
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