"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI."
Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we'd have a freakin' API to make a restaurant reservation and wouldn't have to go through multimodal hell.
> phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly
Do you mean like the pocket protection on my galaxy phone where it knows when it's in my pocket and blocks accidental touches?
Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity.
What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running.
Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that.
I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.
What's that adage about premature optimization?
“All of my interviews involve premature optimization”?