Dan Dean

Dear product people: I just want to be REALLY clear here:

If your product
forces me to engage with your LLM
I will not use your product.

I don't want your summaries,
or your suggestions,
or your chats,
or your sparkle icons,
and I don't want to program browser extensions to forcibly hide all that shit.

May 21, 2025 at 12:13amWeb
Show threadDan DeanMay 21, 2025

It's not that I'm a luddite – I really love technology.

It's that you're destroying your products and making them get in my way.

You turning your products into un-fun, rent-seeking, sycophantic, yes-man-voiced, insufferable shit holes.

It's exhausting.

Show threadDaniël Franke May 21, 2025

@dandean I'm betting you'll get this a lot, but luddites never hated technology, the luddite movement criticises what social changes the technology being forced by the capital class was doing to their lives, as it was destroying the cottage industry and replacing it with factories. This took power away from the workers and put it in the hands of the capital holders.

There's a decent amount of modern tech workers that call themselves neo-luddites in response to what big tech has been doing in the last decade or so.

For the rest, totally agree. :)

Show threadFelix 𝄢 (what is normality)May 21, 2025
@dandean @janl (I'm still a bit bummed by the current meaning of "luddite", because they too didn't oppose technology but opposed technology concentrating the control of the means of production into the hands of the wealthy and at the same time the loss of expertise of the workers. Sometimes I think we are descendants of the original luddites, as we don't oppose technology (git is in essence a blockchain, LLMs do indeed make certain products better, …) but we oppose that it essentially is used to concentrate wealth/power in the hands of few. And sorry for the digression 😅)
Show threadJan Lehnardt May 21, 2025
@thegcat @dandean — @tante et.al. are changing this
Show threadJonas KöritzMay 21, 2025

@dandean you don't really need a UX or UI design team if you're just throwing features into an LLM chat box thingy. And good UX design is *hard*!

Are applications just becoming Text mode on steroids now? Hopefully at least professional users will still demand efficient and well thought out user interfaces to complete their tasks.