Set text size as preferred, underline links (or not), turn off display name styles (or not), ui density compact or default, chat message display to compact, space between message groups 0px, turn off all the animated emojis and gif animation stuff if you want.
In client use, there's a button to hide member list (or not).
You can definitely make discord look like a slightly less dense IRC client (mainly because of the channel picker) if you want. And if you want to go really crazy use it in a browser and userscript customize it or use betterdiscord.
I think a lot of the features like embeds and emoji reactions add a lot of value compared to IRC (which I think is also why the IRC world is trying to add those features).
Why are we pretending everyone's code is an etalon of quality? Most software out there is probably hot mess already. No think behind it, let alone ultrathink.
Exactly, before the rise of LLMs it was not at all uncommon to hear people claiming that their job is to just Google API calls or copy and paste code from Stackoverflow. The context back then was that companies are being picky by hiring people who can demonstrate some modicum of understanding of data structures and algorithms because all any developer does is tweak some CSS or make some calls to a database to glue together a CRUD app... why should anyone be expected to know how to reverse a linked list, or how a basic sorting algorithm works... just download an npm package to do that stuff and glue it all together with a series of nested for loops.
With the rise of LLMs that do all of that... those people shutup and shutup real fast.
I used to run all three major OS' where I saw no real difference in me using it for the apps etc I needed. As I leaned more heavily on the development side, linux kind of prevailed. Windows 8.1 and Yosemite were the last of the other two I've used for real. Never had to look back to other two since, be it for work, games or whatever.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering.
In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.
Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in.
I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.
I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.
This insufferable period of AI will eventually come to an end. We just have to power through as people get fed by it. Mindless writeups, social media posts, emails, cold calls.. they all bear common trait of no to low effort and it shows. It's as vapid and empty as the impulse that thought it would be a good idea. Some of us consciously go by the rule that if you haven't bothered to write, we're not going to bother to read.. rest will grow into the same mindset. Spam farms pretending to be sales optimizations, linkedin lunatics with "valuable messages", low effort slackers larping to be engineers.. it's all going to go away and true value will prevail. Right now, it's not too much different than nigerian prince letters, industrialized.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
It's funny, being someone who was terminally online then and now, back then I had immediate access to orders of magnitude more information than I did a few years prior as well as a normal person. These days the amount of information I can pull at the drop of a hat is so much more than back then it is mind boggling. Also a normal person isn't that much different in capability vs a terminally online person such as myself.
Yes, and that imo kind of cheapens the whole effect of it. We're witnessing something similar now with genAI and slop people produce with it. First few moments it was wow, look at all of this and now it's noise.
Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.
I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.
Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
> Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se.
Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.
> They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.
I always considered grok as also ran. Like grokipedia or what's the name. It has reach since it's free to an extent to produce low quality slop / spam.
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