Thanks for making me feel old. I remember reading slashdot a lot and also freshmeat.net to find new interesting software. I don't think I like the modern software experience, by comparison. It's all shoddy rehashing of the client/server model, where the client is crap and slow, and so is the server.

I think that's because in general shipping in the UK became incredibly expensive during and after COVID, and never ever went down again. Coupled with Brexit, shipping companies all pushed their prices up en masse for no apparent reason, and it's never gone down again.

Being older, I remember homework involving a trip to the library to look through lots of books for 1 tiny bit of information needed for the homework.

For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.

The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.

Very clever and quite frightening. Well done.

Personally I like using LLMs for getting information (not chat) or solving problems, and I like the fact it's text and I can read it quicker than a normal conversation, and don't need to look for facial cues when ingesting the information provided (am I autistic?), but I might be a minority...

Some people might really find this useful.

I used OrganicMaps for navigation from the UK through France, Germany, Switzerland, back into France and then Spain last year on a 2 week enjoyable camper van trip. It can take a while for routing changes if you ignore it and decide to drive elsewhere, and I don't really use the voice alerts (I just have it on my phone on the dashboard via a magnet), but all in all it worked really well.

Although I would like speed limits shown in MPH in the UK, OrganicMaps' KMH limits were useful on the Continent.