Exactly, so why would you want to make users scroll through all of them?
Mac OS comes with something like 80 apps out of the box. I have over 200 on my system, and I'm pretty stingy with space. I immediately delete stuff I try and don't like.
So the noobs who know nothing about Spotlight typically come back with some absurd suggestion like "put a shortcut to the Applications folder in your dock."
> The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder.
It wasn't a blunder. It was absolutely intentional to force users to start using the AI component.
I suspect someone probably pointed out no one would use it because launchpad has a better UX, so they removed it and forced the three finger pinch to launch spotlight.
I'm currently using the following to fix it.
- Bug in preferences that disabling show home also disables 3 finger pinch.
- I'm using AppGrid as my new launchpad.
- Using better touch tool to activate launchpad with 3 finger pinch.
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers.
> the brands have a closer connection to their customers
That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too.
[1] Nor do we really want there to be? I mean, I get that this seems bad because ZOMG AMZN, but in general do we actually want to be handing more market control to manufacturers vs. middlemen and consumers?
As the source article covers, some manufacturers routinely ensure this kind of closer connection through contractual promises from authorized retailers. (Obviously any individual person who buys a product can still resell it, but for things like clothes consumers widely understand this to be a separate "second-hand market".) Amazon invests a lot of effort themselves in the consumer experience, they understand very well that stuff isn't just stuff and it matters how you sell it.
> No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here.
I don't disagree with you on a personal opinion side, but the more expensive brands have a snobbery about who they sell to. To me it seems less about quality and more about "I'm rich" app style of fashion.
It's not bad because ZOMG AMZN, it's bad because *Amazon is a monopoly*, and thus anything they do to take more control should be treated with extreme suspicion.
Again, no such thing. There's no antitrust regulatory framework that recognizes the ability of "small" brands to constrain their downstream markets in ways "big" ones can't.
People are getting bent out of shape here, again, based on the specific player. But seriously what do you really think the solution is supposed to look like? I just don't see a fix here that won't make things worse, and I absolutely don't see one available under current law.
Did I say this was a legal argument? I don't see that anywhere.
And there's absolutely zero chance the current administration is going to take any positive antitrust steps unless the target just happens to be one that seriously pisses off Trump.
"Monopolies shouldn't be allowed to control everything" is a practical, economic, and moral argument before it is a legal one. If there is no legal framework to protect small brands from a company like Amazon coming in and doing these things, then perhaps there should be. (It's possible, though unlikely, that there's no practical way to do so without sufficient negative side effects that it harms more than it helps: I haven't sat down and tried to work out the second- and third-order effects.)
In case it's not abundantly clear, one very likely endgame of this for Amazon is picking the products within this subset that do the best, ripping them off itself (either fully legally, for simple manufactured goods, or questionably or outright illegally for things one buys because of the design—like shirts with particular art on them), and selling those under the cost the original creators need to be profitable. Those creators then go out of business. Then Amazon can, if they wish, raise the prices to whatever the market will bear.
The creators lose. The consumers lose. Even the wholesalers and manufacturers likely lose, if they're still involved, because Amazon is going to be paying them less for the same product due to economies of scale.
> Did I say this was a legal argument? I don't see that anywhere.
Ahem, I said that, in the comment to which you responded. Forgive me for making assumptions about the context of discussion.
But that said, I still don't see where you're going with this. No fix for what you want exists that wouldn't also outlaw stuff like fashion consultants, custom PC builders and thrift shops.
Of course it wouldn't, if those businesses weren't also monopolies.
It really is frustrating sometimes dealing with people on HN who assume that there can only ever be one set of rules for how businesses can deal with each other: that no matter how dominant a given company gets, you can never make them abide by a preset more-restrictive ruleset, or design specific rules for them that prevent them from abusing that dominance to hurt other people or businesses.
Antitrust law is specifically designed to do exactly that. It has been essentially abandoned over the past 3-4 decades in the US, in favor of Gordon Gekko's motto of "greed is good", with the Chicago School's "principles" essentially being "if it's more efficient™ for the economy, that's better; monopolies are more efficient™, so we should just let them do whatever they want," but what I describe is (more or less) what it is supposed to do.
> I mean from the off, people were claiming 10x probably mostly because it's a nice round number,
Purely anecdotal, but I've seen that level of productivity from the vibe tools we have in my workplace.
The main issue is that 1 engineer needs to have the skills of those 20 engineers so they can see where the vibe coding has gone wrong. Without that it falls apart.
I read a book called "Blood in the machine". It's the history of the Luddites.
It really put everything into perspective to where we are now.
Pre-industrial revolution whole towns and families built clothing and had techniques to make quality clothes.
When the machines came out it wasn't overnight but it wiped out nearly all cottage industries.
The clothing it made wasn't to the same level of quality, but you could churn it out faster and cheaper. There was also the novelty of having clothes from a machine which later normalised it.
We are at the beginning of the end of the cottage industry for developers.
We had "free clothes" for years, decades now. I don't mean cheap I mean literally free, as in $0.0 software. Cheaper software isn't new.
Also there are still clothe designers, fashion runways, and expensive Patagonia vests today. The clothing industry is radically different from back then but it's definitely not gone.
It didn't kill everything. Some survived but not to the extent that it was.
> The clothing industry is radically different from back then but it's definitely not gone.
Small towns had generations of people who had learned skills in making clothing / yarn. To do the work you needed years of experience and that's all you knew.
Once the industrial revolution hit they hired low skilled workers that could be dumped at a moments notice. It made whole villages destitute. Some survived, but the far majority became poor.
That was one industry. We now have AI at a point to wipe out multiple industries to a similar scale.
I posted elsewhere, but you are looking at the wrong part of the chain.
We have cheap (or free) software for large markets, and certain small markets where software developers with hobbies have made something. If every niche that will never be able to afford a large 6-figure custom software could get slop software for an affordable price, then that establishes a foot-hold for working its way up the quality ladder.
Luddism arose in response to weaving machines, not garment-making machines. The machines could weave a piece of cloth that still had to be cut and sewn by hand into a garment. Weaving the cloth was by far the most time consuming part of making the clothing.
Writing code is not at all the most time consuming part of software development.
> The current Vibe coding systems can do the full pipeline.
For small and relatively simple projects, sure. In codebases that are either large, complex, or fairly novel, I've been consistently disappointed by the hands-off approach.
There are plenty of small, relatively simple projects out there. Lots of websites and cookie cutter apps to make. But that's never been the stuff I wanted to work on anyway.
I use Claude code constantly, but it's not nearly as reliable as any of the colleagues I've worked with.
If you used the car as an analogy instead, it would make more sense to me. There were car craftsmen in Europe that Toyota displaced almost completely. And software is more similar to cars in that it needs maintenance and if it breaks down, large consequences like death and destruction and/or financial loss follows.
If llms can churn out software like Toyota churns out cars, AND do maintenance on it, then the craftsmen (developers of today) are going to be displaced.
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