Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

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I think we have seen this sort of 'process' before, with the introduction of GPU acceleration and fast animation on UIs. It played out like this:

1. Software is fast and UI is instant, things happen instantly

2. UI is instant and software is slow - UI will lag

3. UI is animated with transitions and sofware is slow - people are initially happy, but it wears off in weeks

4. Software gets optimized, now UI animations take longer than getting the underlying data

5. The logical endpoint. Software is fast. UI needs to be instant Remove all animation and let UI render instantly; This is what most users actually prefer.

The parallel with LLM websites is direct imo. We're now getting these fancy websites, but once the magic wears off, everyone will go back to the 'text and links on page' style.

Text is not ideal in many cases. I work with CNC algorithms. I have opus 5.5 optimising algorithms. When I don't understand what it is blathering on about I ask it to sketch some svg animations to explain itself. I've been shocked at how on point most of them are. You still have to watch out for the odd hallucination but I have some base prompts that tell it always to use scripts and real math to generate SVG rather than do it by inference. With some tweaking it can create some shockingly godd one off animations to explain part of an algorithm it's working on. Text is simply difficult to comprehend when a picture can do the job much better.

> people don’t like animations and yearn for text and links only

I don’t think this is the case in general, well done animations are nice.

Only on day 1. After that, I’m blind to animations (best case) or annoyed at having to wait for them to finish before proceeding with my task.

I think the ability to retrieve and display data in <20ms, thereby leading to interactions that are instant is still an open and underexplored UX issue.

What if you could just hover a link and all the important data would just appear?

What if you started typing a command in console, and the execution results would appear speculatively as soon as you hit the key?

Some programs do this to some limited degree, but besides the humble textbox and outside videogames, instant interactivity is seldom seen.

One word:

SUBSTANCE.

That's all that matters.

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