Ironically, Japanese menus almost universally have pictures of the food, and often (amazingly detailed) plastic models* of the dish in the window.
I frequently wish this was adopted by western restaurants, as being surprised by what actually arrives on my plate after I order is a regular occurrence.
I'm fully onboard with see-and-point.
The plastic 3d models are mostly in tourist areas.
There are so many restaurants in Japan (especially sushi, soba, tonkatsu, ramen, and izakaya) that have no images whatsoever. Often a handwritten menu or even wall-mounted menus are all that are available.
It's a confirmation bias thing: people come to Japan and go to restaurants with photos on the menu and food models, they think it represents all of Japan. They don't read Japanese, so they may not even know that they walking past a great restaurant without any food displayed outside nor images on menus inside.
It may partly a legal thing: Japanese law is big on not-misleading consumers. Depictions are considered close to formal promises of what you'll actually receive, or at least actual ingredients that went into it.
This is opposed to, say... an artistic free-expression of a shared aspirational dream of what the product's platonic ideal, and/or a bunch of things which are meant to evoke the feelings they hope you have in your subjective heart after your joyous nonrefundable purchase.
I'm not sure how well it could be adopted and adapted for American law, but I wish someone'd try.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*NFPp...
None of this is helped by how slow the Magic Link is. Supposedly the DataRover 840 was much faster but I've never owned one to tell for sure.
The UI of the Newton MessagePad (I own several) is far from perfect but makes much more sense than MagicCap. It also requires fewer taps to reach different functions.
Every once in a while I'll pull out my Magic Link but the insanity of the UI just inspires me to put it back in a box.
The folder metaphor for the Mac desktop was reasonable, but it effectively stopped there (as it should), rather than try to embed filing cabinets and document archives into pretty pictures to click and point as if it were a game to be played once rather than a daily driver.
We can still do this, but thankfully the ui paradigm seems to have advanced to the point that it assumes users don't need to see a stack of every directory they opened. And if they do, Miller columns are superior anyway
As developers we have the best of both worlds: direct visual manipulation, but also a language-centric control of richer objects in the terminal.
Being able to flip between these has always felt like a superpower.
Though, I do find that breaking down instructions into concrete specific steps and validating the LLM output is its own skill that is not too dissimilar to the mindset needed for coding.
Anti-Mac: “You won't always have to work that hard”
AI (Apple Intelligence) is the Anti-Mac:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/11/12/misguided-apple-intellige...
“It’s really quite a different message than a bicycle for the mind.”
I think what it describes is about right too: computers programs should have a REPL and we should have agents that can input them for us if we don't want to get into the weeds and wish to automate tasks, in some ways anticipating the browser too.
Ah, there it is. The slippery slope that has stubbornly refused to be slippery for many decades now. Perhaps the author is completely misunderstanding these "metaphors".
(And even setting AI aside, I think many people would agree that e.g. Windows 11 gives them less "control" than versions of Windows from decades ago, with the advantage of being harder to break in some ways. Same on the Mac side, and even in the GNU/Linux ecosystem in some ways.)
In the best cases, those options were redundant or irrelevant to your goals anyway (compilers most of the time).
In most cases, they add mild inefficiencies (OSes, libraries, frameworks, build tools, etc. and sometimes the compiler).
In the cases of LLMs, WYSIWYG, low-code, etc. you're straight up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and setting the house on fire while you're at it too. Such is impatience and greed.
This distinction between control over the outcome and the available options is no longer as subtle as it once was in the bad old days when everyone was more naive. It is genuinely interesting. I'm not wanting to be negative for the sake of it. I actually think we've had glimpses of more reasonable compromises in the highly constrained by committee environments of app/web dev.
There is a degree to which you can retain control with those higher-level abstractions, but it tends to be just as much or more work to maintain the illusion for their less experienced end users. You end up with more scaffolding than building. This is ultimately why we hire devs anyway and abandon those tools.
