Text as an interface | thesephist.com

Text is the most ubiquitous and the least user-friendly interface to information that we have. We have plots, we have graphs, we have tables. All of these are great. They are optimized for various different kinds of things for different uses. 

Text is not optimized for anything at all. It's just a thing that we inherited from 3,000 years a

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The transition from the CLI to the GUI abstracted away the laborious verbal communication between humans and computers and replaced it with visually appealing, expensively designed interfaces.

Over the last decade, we've seen "complex" design patterns evolve. The infinite canvas, chatbot interface, and even the command line have become omnipresent in today’s tools. Compared to bullet points, these patterns are more appealing: sleek, and playful to use. Interacting with an interface through the act of drawing, or chatting might be more sa... See more

Going back to Excel and shifting my metaphor up a level, today ChatGPT sometimes seems more like the original PCs than like Excel (or VisiCalc). It’s a general purpose technology, there’s a command line, and some stuff that’s theoretically magic, and a few things that are extremely useful to a few people, but we don’t yet have the richness of all t... See more

I get the feeling that the median vocabulary of interactions with computers is shrinking. I see so many people who’s entire computing experience is laboriously moving the mouse, clicking on buttons, and maybe poking ⌘C and ⌘V. For knowledge workers who spend half their waking hours using a computer, that’s akin to being a professional athlete who n... See more