krschacht

I was just using ChatGPT to help me pick an SDK library. It mentions a few options by name (e.g. Baileys, whatsapp-web.js), but when I click those names rather than opening a browser with the source page like it used to, it now opens a modal and uses ChatGPT to basically generate a fake homepage for this tool.

From what I can tell, there is no longer any way to easily get to the underlying web page that was referenced in generating its answer to my question.

This feels like a pretty meaningful step backwards. Am I missing something?

What are the most futuristic computing interfaces you can think of, that just aren’t widespread yet?

(In line with Gibson’s famous quote that, "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.")

Is there a good reason why the UI we see in sci-fi don't make it into actual products?

Maybe there is some true limitation inherent in this style UI which causes them to stay as mere experiments / novelty?

I'm thinking about demos like this which I've seen go by HN over the years (I'm not involved in any of these):

LCARS demo: https://www.mewho.com/ritos/

Tron-like terminal: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui

Sci-fi UI components: https://github.com/arwes/arwes

And I've long been a fan of designers like gmunk doing UI work for film: https://gmunk.com/Oblivion-GFX

But I'm genuinely confused why the actual UIs we all use on a daily basis are all so derivative of one another when the space of UI possibilities is so vast.