It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why.
But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan,
and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel.
The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors.
Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources.
There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive.
Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file),
was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME.
Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..
One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11.
I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was..
Case in point:
Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around.
And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too..
It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...]
Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ...
Is it because we are out of space? I don't know,
every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ]
(because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.)
Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by
a spyglass.
So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for.
Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need,
apart from maybe the single spyglass icon?
Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have,
has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/.
Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in.
The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/.
We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs.
In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on.
But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).
did they mention that you can cheat this when e.g. singing, by changing pitch dynamically to fit the chords you are working with?
In theory, a synthesizer or sound card could do the same.
Of course, this could have other undesirable side effects.
I am glad this essay was on the right side of the fence, otherwise I would have written it myself in response..
Our company is currently one of countless, where we just had a "get with the program" meeting with our PMs, where they showcased stuff they had added to our enterprise system in hours and days, and told us that they expected us to start delivering with the same tools techniques and speed..
Meanwhile, my team had spent that same working day before that meeting, trying to figure out why our production databases were suddenly getting hammered; it turned out some system was suddenly calling an expensive query endpoint 10k (10.000) times each hour, during business hours.
Guess 3 times whose vibe-coding adventures were responsible for those 10k calls :-/.
Other than that, I noticed during the meeting, that their vibe-coded demo added module to our enterprise system only dealt with happy-path of the data updates,
but would leave debris in our database for all the edge cases. Happy times. But heck yeah, let's just ram it straight into production. I wonder who will take care of adding support/clean up for the edge cases.
file sizes in explorer is my pet peeve, it should be a builtin.
When I am coding and making small projects, I want to see the bytes.
I hate that everything is shown as "1 or 2 k".
and it is a hazzle to get access to and install of the mods that show bytes column.
It should just be an extra column available by default 'Byte Size'.
Usually, I can easily tell bad AI slop, because it is just that - sloppy - the bullet points, the 'delving' and all that.
But how can you tell this article was also AI-tainted?
On a second skim, I can sort of sense some of it - the bulletpoint-enthusiasm, the idiosyncratic segues (?) that link sections/paragraphs of the text.
But it didn't trigger for me immediately, or cause me concern..?
I'm worrying that soon, I will have to hunt for non-AI essays by them just being worse written/more 'crude' and not as eloquently written as an AI would do :-/
Basically, seeking out "authentic human slop".
It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this;
I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too.
But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.
I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression.
(1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me().
(2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call.
(3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?",
where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)
() I suspect what they are though..
Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where
the people in charge of teams can understand them,
plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view
contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").
We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains,
which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.