I regretfully suspect this actually is the future of UI. You just need smart local models running fast enough to keep the framerate high, but that’s inevitable in the long term, isn’t it?
If I had to complain about any site/app it'd be datadog... each tab uses like 1gb in firefox.
It's like riding a bike with a tiny bit of resistance in the bearings. You will get used to it, and will probably feel like your bike is fine. But if you replace the hub and remove that friction, you will wonder how you ever tolerated riding a bike that way.
Why would you use a GPU and gigabytes of VRAM running a non-deterministic process for something a program can do on the CPU in milliseconds with kilobytes of memory?
Edit: oh, I saw you wrote a related comment after I posted this. So you already know that direct LLMs for UIs are all but inevitable...
It’s cheaper to hire developers, and quicker to ship software. The user experience be damned.
Of course they would pass that along to the consumer, but nobody is going to pay token-based pricing for something that used to be free and ad-supported, or a cheap monthly subscription.
The second one it's much, much faster.
Nowadays you hire a developer that can use Claude or Cursor out whatever and they will use any language. There are no expensive Rust developers anymore. Or even JavaScript ones.
There's a good reason why the UI for Excel, Photoshop and Word has hardly changed and remains consistent for years and that has worked for billions of people.
Many HN readers have forgotten the Windows 8 UI disaster already.
Want to extend the idea to office as a whole? Lync was replaced with Skype, OneNote came and went and then came back again. Groove, infopath, publisher, frontpage, SharePoint, various versions of Outlook, the office shortcut bar, photo editor, picture manager - they've all disappeared (some have come back again or been replaced with something else).
I used office XP and 2000 (blocked at the firewall; I mostly saved files as rtf for personal use) for years (admittedly this is mainly because they loaded in 0.5s on my crappy laptop and PC) until I was forced into upgrading to office 2007 by the need to pass around files for class with someone who complained incessantly about their stylesheets being lost every time I converted the file.
I'm still salty I can't waste my time editing 16x16 (32x32?) 256-color dicks into the toolbar icons i when I'm supposed to be writing essays or setting up autocorrect to quietly put typos into a shared computer (the computer isn't shared anymore, and it's no fun doing it to myself)
Gimp hasn't changed it's UI either, and no one uses it, because it sucks.
Maybe I do, if by "randomness" you also mean the ability to handle unexpected usecases. Imagine running something like:
$ ps "which processes are slowing my PC down??"