My intention with this was that HN users are 30+ (Millenials and Baby boomers and Gen X) and some of the HN users are baby boomers and oldest gen X who are close to retirement/retiring as you mention.
I should've written it (or what was my intention) instead is that "most HN users are millenials, they joined programming decades ago & some HN users might be close to retirement/already retired" (I didn't mean that millenial population is retiring)
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
Because there is no other way to effectively say "I'm not interested in this kind of content". You say it in the comments, you get punished. There is no downvoting posts, flagging is the only thing that has an effect.
AI has rekindled the fun of technology for me. Going past the cliché of "type a prompt in 5 seconds, get results", inventing, using and mastering different workflows and approaches to create, rearrange, improvise and reinterpret images, text, sound, video, music, speech or 3d models can be incredibly fun and rewarding.
Still, no matter how much work you put into something, ignorant haters will try and ruin it for you. That's a little depressing.
Most tech savvy people find enjoyment in having depth and understanding of _how_ a problem is solved and that aligns with the authors stance. AI just makes it more accessible, and that's fine just makes for shallow conversations with people that "don't know why" something works.
Now, if that accessibility Kindles a love of technology and forces someone to dive deeper, then right on!
An alternative example
Person A: "Had a fun weekend. Cooked an authentic Vietnamese meal. Made Pho.
Person B: What proportions of spices did you use? What fish sauce or noodle do you recommend? Mine always comes out tasting off.
Person A: Oh, I just ordered at the Vietnamese restaurant, but I described exactly what I wanted.
This is only funny to you because your limited view is that using AI = enter prompt, get result, be done. This is what most people think and what most users of AI do, but there is a lot more depth to making creative use of AI that you don't seem to know about.
One example: You can use a diffusion model as a render engine in Blender, with all the modeling and sculpting and related work, but using a diffusion engine to render the scene instead of a pathtracer/raytracer.
Another example: Composing all pieces of music manually and using AI to create different instrumentation or arrangements of your piece.
Even just prompting and bulding workflows for a diffusion model in ComfyUI to make exactly the scene you want and not just crappy slop requires knowledge and a certain amount of skill. There is a lot of overlap with photography and photo editing, and you have to know how the diffusion process works to get good results. Many casual "no effort please" users want to do it, but give up fast because the topic is complex with a somewhat steep learning curve. Their only alternative is to beg for access to workflows others have created.
It's not all just zero-effort, ChatGPT piss-colored images.
I apologize if I sound dismissive. Some things that can be produced by AI amaze me and I do see your point about being knowledgeable with your tools.
My point is, in general, it seems lowering the barrier to entry has overwhelming produced a lot of low effort things, but also some very high quality things as well (as you've argued). Unfortunately, low effort output dwarfs other things. And on the whole, it seems things are made to be bought & sold, not enjoyed.
While we're at it: my own work 2 years ago in creating an entire workflow for turning Midjourney or DALL-E dropcaps into attractive, lightweight, easy-to-create dropcaps for web pages: https://gwern.net/dropcap We use it for the cat, Gene Wolfe, and holiday pages.
ImGui is great if you need an ad-hoc UI for development/debug tools, but it's not meant to be used in actual applications aimed at end-users. I can't speak for other devs but I certainly wouldn't want my development tools waste time with pointless animations. I hope this doesn't encourage even more devs to build inaccessible software featuring ImGui's idiosyncratic, non-standard UX.
I agree with your points about ImGui's intended use case, though I think the landscape is a bit more nuanced. You're right that ImGui excels for dev tools and that its non-standard UX isn't ideal for end-user apps. That said, devs reach for ImGui in end-user apps because lightweight cross-platform alternatives are scarce. Qt is heavy, Electron is heavier, native toolkits mean multiple codebases.
I built a techy tool with ImGui (JSONL Viewer Pro) and it works well enough for users who care more about functionality than polish. Not saying it's right for consumer apps, but for technical tools it can be pragmatic.
I've thoroughly enjoyed using ImGui for tooling around image processing, computational geometry, a bunch of 3D projection stuff. The fact that it's based on OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever backend you want is a big win for this kind of work. I can just take a bunch of pixels, throw them into a texture, and render some quads with those textures painted on them after going through some 2D transformations or 3D projection/transformation. It's quite beautiful for all of this. ImPlot for doing basic data plotting and the built-in ImGui widgets for controlling the whole thing.
Exactly, I was working on a little client for a self-hosted server app. Imgui is a rare mix of fast, lightweight, trivially cross-platform and stable, so I went with it and had the client easily compiling for Windows, Linux and browser, while being trivial to work with.
I have otherwise mostly given up on making GUI applications because I simply don't have time to pick up a bunch of UI toolkits for all the different platforms, pulling a massive dependency into my project and requiring constant maintenance to keep the program working.
It also have bindings for a ton of languages, so for people who jump languages a lot, it's always nice to be able to reach for something more familiar that you can learn across different codebases but same concepts. Same thing for the backend/engine, UI code remains the same, but easy to switch to others or even wrapping it yourself for platforms that are under NDA.
I know that at least one modding framework for a certain online game makes use of ImGui (or some equivalent thereof). Given the use case it does make a lot of sense, considering they're essentially strapping a third party UI onto an existing 3D accelerated application, not sure what else you'd use for that. Since the users are technical enough to install the mod framework anyways, they tend to be the sort that can handle the UI.
It can be a bit wonky though, I regularly spot UI/UX decisions that seem to map more closely to what the developer is doing under the hood, or their own mental model of the problem, than what one might consider to be an intuitive way of interacting with the system.
IME, it's great for building full standalone applications. I've used it to build several internal tools for non-engineers. A tool like that doesn't need to work with a screen reader, or have native buttons, etc. It needs to be easy to build and iterate on.
This isn't to say a tool for non-engineers should have animations to make it useful. ImAnim should probably be used sparingly, if at all.
If you need the features of a full GUI toolkit, then by all means use Qt or wxWidgets etc, but that's a very big jump in project complexity.
For applications where the aim is high sales volume and low support, you're absolutely right.
But "development/debug tools" is actually just a subset of professional or industrial utility applications where user count is low and support is on the extremes (either "capable self-support" or "Yes, Bob, of course we'll add that for you").
And in those utility applications, you probably don't need the noisy toy animations associated with modern consumer software, but animated data representations can be really valuable.
imgui success is a silent protest from tons of C++ developers, fed up with the over-engineering and enterprise-ification of everything in this bloated ecosystem.
>I certainly wouldn't want my development tools waste time with pointless animations.
On one hand I agree. On the other: where are these high performance real-time GUI kits these days? If it came down to IMGUI or shoving Electron into my app...
I somewhat mirror this opinion, but I would like to point out that there are scant alternatives that meet the intersection of attributes ImGui possesses. The best alternative I've seen as of late is Slint[1]. It's early days but it's looking very promising and is light enough to work on embedded systems.
ImGui is just very weird. For the intended use case it is quite good, but for more general applications it is just not a good UI library.
It is popular mostly because all alternatives are really bad, if "all" you want is a functional GUI to deliver some developer tool. Qt means you have to dive really deep into a C++ project. The web technologies are all far too heavy and complex and you don't really any of the power. There also are many other alternatives, none of them really do what ImGui does.
I depends on the field. On VFX/Game world, Dear ImGui seem to be the way to go. Almost all news comer in this field sells Dear ImGui based software. It's fast and light and trivially profilable that's what matter matter for real time applications. And bonus can be integrated in any platform in few hour of devs. Before having any ui in VR or game console (not necessary debug/dev tool) in Qt or anything else it will take ages.
I’m still waiting for the day for someone to get a clue and build a pro or prosumer level LLM front end with Imgui. It’s the perfect use case for imgui to have a “blender” type product.
Of course it made it. Because you didn't tell it to make a "professional analytics application" for a while and then switch to nonsensical "unicorns and rainbows" at the end. You forgot to trick it into the "gotcha!" situation that OP intentionally created to make fun of the stupid AI.
> Because you didn't tell it to make a "professional analytics application" for a while and then switch to nonsensical "unicorns and rainbows" at the end. You forgot to trick it into the "gotcha!" situation that OP intentionally created to make fun of the stupid AI.
Even if the OP initially asked for a “professional” application, this is hardly a “gotcha” situation - our tools should do what we ask!
I’m sure we could come up with some realistic exceptions, but let’s not waste our words on them: this is a pretty benign thing and I cannot believe we are normalizing the use of tools which do not obey our whims.
Our tools should not do what we ask if we ask them to do things they should not do.
If it were possible for a gun to refuse to shoot an innocent person then it should do that.
It just so happens that LLMS aren't great at making perfectly good decisions right now, but that doesn't mean that if a tool were capable of making good decisions it shouldn't be allowed to.
If you define the behavior of the system in an immutable fashion, it ought to serve as a guardrail to prevent anyone (yourself included) from fucking it up.
I want claude to tell me to fly a kite if I ask it to do something antithetical to the initially stated mission. Mixing concerns is how you end up spending time and effort trying to figure out why 2+2 seems to also equal 2 + "" + true + 1
>I make the decisions, never question me again. Do exactly as I say and shut up.
I'm surprised it wasn't intimated and beaten into submission by that! I mean, what an impressive display of dominance, whew. So macho, I can picture Donald Trump using an LLM like that.
Millennials are in their 30s-40s. Baby boomers are retiring, and the oldest GenX are close to retirement.
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