[edmundsauto]

> what am I looking at right now?" Who needs that?

Anyone who is sight impaired, or doesn’t have their glasses on while reading a menu, or looking at a sign in another language.

It’s clearly not in final form. In 1978, people couldn’t see the use of home computers. In 1988, most people were saying the same thing about email. In 1998, most people were saying the same thing about the internet.

It might not prove out, but evaluating something super early isn’t all that interesting. Let’s see where we are in 2030 at least.

[XMPPwocky]

> It’s clearly not in final form. In 1978, people couldn’t see the use of home computers. In 1988, most people were saying the same thing about email. In 1998, most people were saying the same thing about the internet.

Give it a few more years for more people to forget about how hard things like NFTs got pushed with the same sort of arguments- then this'll come off better.

[plasticeagle]

That one technology worked does not automatically mean any other technology will. There is no argument that begins "A worked and so B will too". Also, email is pretty much dead as a technology - it's just spam and password reset emails at this point.

[edmundsauto]

I think parent was not saying new tech will succeed, merely there is an extended hangover/negativity due to recent busts.

Regarding email - it's probably one of the most used bits of technology in existence, and I bet it has a similar OOM economic impact to something like Excel. Calling it a dead technology is not accurate - so much business is done via email, especially internally at SMB.

[edzitron]

I realize that these are commonly-held tropes, but where is the actual article that says this? There's the famous "the internet isn't a big deal" thing in Newsweek (and funnily enough that piece is extremely prescient in many other ways!), but I don't know if I've seen the kind of hype-busting then.

But also...the reason they might have is that email kind of sucked back then. Of course you wouldn't see the promise in something that was clunky and slow and nobody used.

This isn't a comparable to LLMs, though, because even someone who found them clunky could see why you'd want to send an email versus sending a letter.