'Tech' Gimmicks Are for Advertising, Not for Usability
The other day we mentioned a product made for demos, irrespective of costs or any other critical factor/s? It was produced by Apple and hardly sold. It was Apple's own "metaverse" (Facebook trying to invent a market by labelling VR/AR "metaverse", then rebranding as "Meta").
It failed. "Meta" sank into considerable debt and many layoff cycles. So now it's trying "hey hi" (slop erroneously framed as "AI"), as does Apple.
In the case of Microsoft, they latched onto slop when Windows and Office were dying, mostly to be replaced by Android and "apps". The slop they focused on was chatbots (or LLMs) and 3 years later there's still no viable, provable use case for them, only mountains of lost money, fake news, harms to Web sites (plagiarism and DDoS), and a lost sense of reality. It's also a net loss to the environment and air quality, which means human toll (fatalities) and harms to the ecosystem (biology).
Gimmicks have been around since I was born. I remember watching on television in the early 90s prototypes of self-driving cars, things akin to Google Glass, and even touchscreens came and went all the time (they had already been commercially available in the 80s but they never caught on).
Here I am typing on a keyboard very much like the one I used in the 80s (mechanical). I have a "2-D" mouse with a cord on it, I listen to a stereo manufactured in the early 90s, and somehow I'm productive in the absence of silly gimmicks. Forget about the "3-D" screens of the 90s. I don't use slop in any of my workflows. Everyone I know is the same: keyboard, mouse, no headset or some other malarkey (headsets with pictures were also commercially available in the 90s).
Gimmicks always come and go. Their pushers like to fake their potential; but they never "stick"; they cannot endure reality.
Gimmicks are for losers; don't let "FOMO" make you feel like a loser for giving them a pass. █
