810 karma · joined February 11, 2010
Remember winamp skins?
"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." - Shklovsky on defamiliarization
What pg is really writing about is enshittification, consumerism.
Interestingly AI Agents are all about disrupting the hard bounds of existing data and interaction models and it turns out the lowest common denominator is often the winner. Eg.: file system > database, grep > embeddings, markdown > pdf, generative ui > portals, computer use > api-s etc.
There simply is no need for all that abstraction / interface / infrastructure to eg. answer questions about documents or to keep track of todo lists, workflows or sending messages etc. when you have glue that can translate between the data models.
sure... sure nobody.
My experience is that Azure OpenAI is waay behind on API and model parity compared to the same thing from OpenAI.