If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.
That is the alternative timeline for software I always wanted to live in, both as a user and as a developer. Make it 100 different tools instead to make it even more likely that there is a close enough match.
Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.
If you give people a limited set of tools they quickly improve until then they need (well, want) different tools. In order to keep your customers you'll inevitably end up adding new things.
I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.
Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.
Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.
No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try.
Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better.
Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
I dunno. I get that we have different needs, but I enjoy testing out new productivity tools. I'm sort of a productivity-software-junkie. I don't use almost any of the things I try, but I enjoy exploring the market.
Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.
This post is about some highly interactive software with a lot of design decisions, and this thread is about finding whether or not your 20% feature niche is supported.
Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.
This is the moving force behind all investments of the past decade or so. Crypto? Everyone involved knows it's empty, but they hype it up anyway because they believe some people buy the bullshit, and plenty of people gobble it up and signal boost it because they think they're ahead of the pack. NFTs, same thing. Tesla stocks was probably the one that started it. Pokemon cards.
It's just one pump and dump scheme after another. The difference now is every one of them is too big to fail.
In a way, it's perfect. If what you're promising is sufficiently vacuous and you're a true believer, you can get away with. If you're promising something concrete and deliverable, fraud is so much easier to prove.
Yeah, I remember people saying that about making 1m model 3s per year, landing rockets, getting 10k+ satellite privately into orbit, and getting millions of subscribers using internet via those satellites.
Maybe just maybe the guy does actually get things done, and if you didn't hate him you'd see that?
(yes, there are some things he hasn't gotten done. That doesn't take away from what he has gotten done)
Please understand that his companies succeeding in some things doesn’t make the things that are exaggerated, overpromised, or just plain naked hype with no backing somehow practical. It’s an interesting effect of our age that for some figures to some people if any criticism is considered unwarranted then all criticism must be disregarded.
It reminds me of growing up in the evangelical church and all the pastors who’d still keep their followers even after they show up in new cars or fly first class, taking the tithes from old ladies on their pension.
That's really understating things. He has promised so many things at various times that the "hits" are at best 10% of what he says. You can't just cherry pick his successes and say "well maybe this will work too" with a track record like that.
This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all.
To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time.
But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.
Sure, there's a lot of process that is entirely justified, but there's also a whole lot of process that exists for reasons that are no longer relevant or simply because there are a lot more people whose job it is to make process than whose job it is to stop people from making too much process.
Given that we have written record going at least as far back as Socrates bitching about the kids these days, I think it's pretty consistent. But it's different this time, I'm sure of it.
Given the author’s domain is .co.uk, and there’s a reference to part of the UK at the bottom, I’d say this is likely aimed at an average Y10/11 (15-16 y.o.). It could perhaps be used with more able kids lower down the school, but I doubt it would be accessible to any under the age of 13.
Yeah, and "I found one paper that says X" is very weak evidence even if you're correctly interpreting X and the specific context in which the paper says it.
reply