The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players.
Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.
Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.
They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.
Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)
Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.
But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.
I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.
I feel like we could go beyond that, especially for more app-like experiences. Maybe we want themes that do things like "add specific trim to make editable fields more identifiable." or adding "high contrast" versions of the themes for low-quality screens or low-vision users.
There's no reason a webpage shouldn't be as themable as, say, a GTK or Qt based desktop application.
We should be trying to snatch back styling power from the designers and putting it back on the user-agent's side. Let the page look brutalist until the user has chosen an appropriate theme for their needs rather than railroading them into what someone in Marketing decided looked good.
I'm frustrated that there's not "solid" instructional tooling. I either see people just saying "keep trying different prompts and switching models until you get lucky" or building huge cantilevered toolchains that seems incredibly brittle, and even then, how well do they really work?
I get choice paralysis when you show me a prompt box-- I don't know what I can reasonably ask for and how to best phrase it, so I just panic. It doesn't help when we see articles saying people are getting better outcomes by adding things like "and no bugs plz owo"
I'm sure this is by design-- anything with clear boundaries and best practices would discourage gacha style experimentation. Can you trust anyone who sells you a metered service to give you good guidance on how to use it efficiently?
yea that is probably the worst part of these techs becoming mainstream services and local-LLM'ing taking off in general: working with them at many points in any architecture no longer feels... deterministic i guess. way too fucking much "heres what i use" but no real best practices yet, just a lot of vague gray area and everyones still in discovery-mode on how to best find some level of determinism or workflow and ways we are benchmarking is seriously a moving target. everyone has their own branded take on what the technology is and their own branded approach on how to use it, and it's probably the murkiest and foggiest time to be in technology fields that i've ever seen :\ seems like weekly/monthly something is outdated, not just the models but the tooling people are parroting as the current best tooling to use. incredibly frustrating. there's simply too much ground to cover for any one person to have any absolute takes on any of it, and because a handful of entities are currently leading the charge draining lakes and trying to compete for every person and every businesses money, there's zero organized frameworks at the top to make some sense of this. they all are banking on their secret sauce, and i _really_ want us all to get away from this. local inference has to succeed imo but goddamn there needs to be some collective working together to rally behind some common strats/frameworks here. im sure there's already countless committees that have been established to try and get in front of this but even that's messy.
i don't know how else to phrase it: this feels like such an unstable landscape, "beta" software/services are running rampant in every industry/company/org/etc and there's absolutely no single resource we can turn to to help stay ahead of & plan for the rapidly-evolving landscape. every, and i mean every company, is incredibly irresponsible for using this stuff. including my own. once again though, cat's already out of the bag. now we fight for our lives trying to contain it and ensure things are well understood and implemented properly...which seems to be the steepest uphill battle of my life
When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
The "children's version" has to be engineered to assume some adult users anyway-- since you're going to have some types of helicopter parents logging into the same platforms the kids are on to make sure they're all right. So the threat model of "what if a paedophile gets a Club Penguin account" is already wargamed out.
In many cases, this consists of dramatically limiting user-to-user comms, hyper-aggressive filtering, sometimes even to restricting to pre-canned messages only. (I'm sure someone is already encoding morse code ethnic slurs into patterns of friendly gestures, but that's another story).
The difference is that iOS was clearly designed to wow the consumer. It was shiny, it offered the promise of full-scale web browsing and the established media ecosystem. It was not a power tool. (remember the first versions didn't even offer third-party apps).
Windows CE/Mobile was heavily shaped by the corporate presence. People didn't queue up at midnight at Best Buy to buy CE devices, they were sent down from IT and ran a handful of bespoke line-of-business apps. People associated them with big clunky barcode scanner devices, not sleek hi-fi media players. It had all the consumer charm of a corporate lanyard and ID badge.
I'm not sure they could have respun the existing product to get that to "sexy consumer facing item" without a huge rework anyway. And the rework was excellent-- I liked Windows Phone enough to own 3 (a Lumia 1020, then replacing it with a 530 after the screen broke, and a bargain 640 as a modest upgrade) The experience was smooth even on the bottom-range device and it felt more holistically designed than contemporary Android.
There aren't really that many apps that make sense to work in a full-fat form all the way from wearable to phone to tablet/laptop/desktop.
Tablet/Laptop/Desktop is probably solvable by a single toolkit set (remember the brief era of Windows 7/8 tablets, many of which had fold-back or snap-on keyboards and pointing devices if you needed precision beyond what a touchscreen could offer?) but I don't really want to run KiCAD on my phone or a smartwatch, for example.
Saying outright "we have different tooling for big and small devices" (or even three sets-- large device/handheld/wearable) should steer developers into providing tools built to the task and purpose. Maybe the phone/wearable version only has limited tools that work well on a tiny screen and is as a result smaller and more efficient?
I always wondered "what if the Salvation Army had tanks?"
If so much of the problems of aid delivery are due to failed, corrupt states, could we be better served by using some of the foreign aid spend to install and maintain governments that at least aren't an impediment to aid delivery?
Yes, this would be a neocolonial programme, but one done with slightly less blatantly self-serving intentions than the previous generation of "civilization is mysteriously completely coupled with letting the home country raid your natural resources."
But there's also meta-question: assume we're given all the logistical support we need. Are we even delivering the right kind of aid? Aid programmes are often sold to the donor countries as a convenient sink for their agricultural overproduction or scrap merchandise as much as anything else, and meanwhile the locals are begging for tooling to pull themselves up the value chain and increase self-sufficiency rather than just bags of rice and unwanted T-shirts that leave them dependent again in a few months.
Software 30 years ago was more amenable to theming. The more system widgets you use, the more effective theming works by swapping them.
Now, we have grudging dark-mode toggles that aren't consistent or universal, not even rising to the level of configurabilty you got with Windows 3.1 themes, let alone things like libXaw3d or libneXtaw where the fundamental widget-drawing code could be swapped out silently.
I get the impression that since about 2005, theming has been on the downturn. Windows XP and OSX both were very close to having first class, user-facing theming systems, but both sort of chickened out at the last minute, and ever since, we've seen less and less control every release.
I think what you're describing as "theming" is more "custom UI". It used to be reserved for games, where stock Windows widgets broke immersion in a medieval fantasy strategy simulator and you were legally obliged to make the cursor a gauntlet or sword. But Electron said to the entire world "go to town, burn the system Human Interface Guidelines and make a branded nightmare!" when your application is a smart-bulb controller or a text editor that could perfectly well fit with native widgets.
We are talking about software development not user configuration. So “theming” here clearly refers specifically to the applications shipping non-standard UIs.
This also isn’t a trend that Electron started. Software has been shipping with bespoke UIs for nearly as long as UI toolkits have been a thing.
What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."
Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.
It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.
> What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?
Subsidies.
> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure
Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.
Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.
My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.
Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.
Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.
They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.
Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)
Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.
But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.
I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.
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