Wow, I'm surprised at the banking account from 1998. That happened rather quickly given that the web wasn't really on anyone's radar until 95/96 or so.
It was brand new at the time. I remember thinking it was super cool that it existed at all. They also had a tele-banking service you could still use at the time.
The UI has only changed notably 2-3 times in that time period too, although at this point 99% of the time I use my smartphone app to access.
A practical definition of "creativity" is "can create interesting things." It's pretty clear that machines have become more "creative" in that sense over the last few years.
I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. They just give you a "solution". That's equivalent of a super bad junior dev that will cause more trouble than the amount they will solve.
That being said, I think we could make such a system. It just has to have training data that is competent...
Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will.
Some systems built on top of LLMs have this built in - Perplexity searches for example usually ask a follow up before running the search. I find it a bit annoying because it feels like about half the time the follow up it asks me isn't necessary to answer my original question.
> Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will.
That's rather missing the point. If your question makes no sense it will not ask a followup, it will spit out garbage. This is pretty bad. If you are competent enough to ask it to ask for followup then you are probably already competent enough to either not need the tool, or competent enough to ask a good question.
I have had chatGPT suggest that I give it more data/information pretty regularly. Although not technically a question, it essentially accomplishes the same thing. "If you give me this" vs. "Can you give me this?"
The "I did this cool thing" posts get way more upvotes than the "let's be startuppy" posts. I don't think the "hacker" population is as rare as you're suggesting.
I only just found out the other day that if you are playing a non-colorized GB cart on a Game Boy Color, holding down a direction on the dpad when the Nintendo logo appears will let you change the palette!
> When GNOME Shell happened, I was forced to go looking for a new window manager. I ended up installing Ratpoison.
Wow, I used Ratpoison around 20 years ago. SunOS labs in school used some window manager I couldn't stand (don't remember which) and I saw a classmate with basically no window chrome on their display, and was intrigued.
They helped me compile it (no small feat given our resource constraints) and off I went, until my hand started to cramp a year later from hitting ctrl-t so much. I switched to ion for awhile, and then ended up scavenging a linux box to do assignments from home.
I'm happy to see some folks still holding firm on the "no-pointer" front.
