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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

When we got a form of such search, it searched all of the internet alongside with the functions of your software on your computer. You had to tell it manually what software you have and when it found something you had to fish out the description of what to click to get the functionality you are seeking and then click through some dumb ui to actually invoke it.

Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."

Success of agents is founded on the profound and sustained failure of all of the software designers and developers ever.

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> Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."

Actually they’re the second thing. The first thing was studying computer science.

In a (maybe un-) related note, Docker is basically this but for using C/C++ libraries. In 40 years no one was able to solve the mess

> In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

apropos ?

I don't understand this question. Please elaborate.

Isn't that what the command "apropos" does?

Not if I can't do

apropos switch desktop to dark mode

and

aprops set dns to 8.8.8.8

I know this is not what you want, but actually:

   $ apropos dns
   [...]
   resolvectl (1)       - Resolve domain names, IPV4 and IPv6 addresses, DNS resource records, and services; introspect and reconfigure the DNS resolver
   [...]
   $ man resolvectl
   [...]
     dns [LINK [SERVER...]], domain [LINK [DOMAIN...]], default-route [LINK [BOOL...]], llmnr [LINK [MODE]], mdns [LINK [MODE]], dnssec [LINK [MODE]], dnsovertls [LINK [MODE]], nta [LINK [DOMAIN...]]

           Get/set per-interface DNS configuration. These commands may be used
           to configure various DNS settings for network interfaces. These
           commands may be used to inform systemd-resolved or systemd-networkd
           about per-interface DNS configuration determined through external
           means. The dns command expects IPv4 or IPv6 address specifications
           of DNS servers to use. Each address can optionally take a port
           number separated with ":", a network interface name or index
           separated with "%", and a Server Name Indication (SNI) separated
           with "#". When IPv6 address is specified with a port number, then
           the address must be in the square brackets. That is, the acceptable
           full formats are "111.222.333.444:9953%ifname#example.com" for IPv4
           and "[1111:2222::3333]:9953%ifname#example.com" for IPv6. The
           domain command expects valid DNS domains, possibly prefixed with
           "~", and configures a per-interface search or route-only domain.
           The default-route command expects a boolean parameter, and
           configures whether the link may be used as default route for DNS
           lookups, i.e. if it is suitable for lookups on domains no other
           link explicitly is configured for. The llmnr, mdns, dnssec and
           dnsovertls commands may be used to configure the per-interface
           LLMNR, MulticastDNS, DNSSEC and DNSOverTLS settings. Finally, nta
           command may be used to configure additional per-interface DNSSEC
           NTA domains.

           Commands dns, domain and nta can take a single empty string
           argument to clear their respective value lists.

           For details about these settings, their possible values and their
           effect, see the corresponding settings in systemd.network(5).


   [...]

Not too bad in my opinion. (I didn't actually knew before how to set the DNS server, never needed to do it.)

Quite uselsess, it doesn't tell me which file to edit, what to put in there, nor what command to invoke with what arguments.

People can do and do better with googling. Proportion of people who found the answer to that question through apropos to people who found that answer googling is probably less than a million to one.

The man pages certainly tell you how to set your DNS to 8.8.8.8. You just have to do a bit more reading than what the agent would give you. But there's a side benefit to that extra reading, you learn how to do more things. Sometimes that's useful, sometimes it isn't. But you don't know if it is useful or not until later, you can only find out in time

Be on GNOME

Press super and type “dark mode”

What happens?

I’m not sure I understand the desire to control computers with conversational language. Computers are a collection of on off switches. I personally would much prefer being able to control exactly which on off switches to switch, instead of just telling the black box to do something and for it to make no mistakes. It just doesn’t strike me as a good idea to give the incomprehensible matrix weight the ability to make decisions about what to do on my machine. There’s just far too much ambiguity for my comfort here.

I sort of agree that this is the consequence of software hell but it's not so much designers couldn't figure out the need for search from the start but that designers gradually made things so complicated you needed a global search functionality and then didn't provide it.

I mean, Android settings has global search because the settings menus for each Android phone is different (wtf) and some settings aren't even accessible except searching.

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