Folks,
Stack Overflow is testing a new design:
https://beta.stackoverflow.com/questions
My proposition — we should coin a new term for a subset of enshittification for this new trend of turning every UI into an AI chat 
@strider chattification
Even before the rise of LLMs, I've seen many websites that have those stupid chat bubbles on the side, and those bubbles may either have notification dots, or the chats themselves fucking open (and while on desktop it may be a minor nuisance, on a phone it opens to fit the whole screen).
It's always "contact us", please, just contact our outsourced minimum-wage customer service or sales team that we enforce shitty daily quotas upon, please, look, we've designed this website to give you as little information about us or our product, or we've designed a horrible documentation website, so please just contact us, we promise we'll respond in at most 24 hours.
I have Intercom and Zendesk blocked network-wide because of these stupid chat pop-ups. And I worked with ZD at a previous job, it was interesting, but it's so slow and bad, but it's the only choice for CS or sales work. Nothing like ZD taking a gig of RAM because the UI is a bunch of React components taped together.
@strider now with LLMs it's always "ask this page", or "ask a question", "chat with this page" etc, as if we're talking to a real being, we're anthropomorphizing web pages and documentation because we couldn't bother hiring someone to write our docs properly, or we couldn't be arsed to write a proper Getting Started guide - or worse, all of the documentation is on Discord, Slack, etc.
OpenAI has a chatbox under each page, so you can "talk to the page", I've seen certain websites, documentation sites, including a few big news sites replace their search bars with chat boxes, when we've had stuff like Algolia and other good full-text search technologies for years now.
In a few years everything will be a chat box. Searching for an app on Google Play? Ask Gemini and it'll try its gosh darn best to find it, all the while avoiding scam apps, obvious clones, or actual malware that does sometimes slip through the cracks.
@strider Need to file taxes? Ask our chatbot. Need some help with taxes? Just talk to our chatbot. Here in Romania our government tax and anti-fraud collection agency (ANAF) introduced a "totally Romanian-made" chatbot for logged in users to ask about the meanings of stuff or how to do certain things, BECAUSE we've already ruined in-person interactions
There's nothing like going around a dozen institutions, getting berated by a bored old woman in her 50s because we don't use the right form, or that we're missing a document, or they give us a paper that we take to a different institution, have it signed, stamped, copied, processed, then take that copy and our dossier and come back and sit again and wait for our turn to finally do something, anything that has to do with our government
Want to start an LLC? Sure, just go to 20 different places, run around the city like a fucking jester, walking some sheets of paper around because we've enshittified our bureaucracy to this extent. Or pay a company or a lawyer.
@strider eMAG Romania recently introduced a chatbot currently in beta, that also supposedly uses a "totally Romanian-made" chatbot so you can ask it questions to find things you need, and it'll create a dedicated wishlist for you.
It's a nice feature in theory, I'll give them that, but it's another way to further enshittify online shopping, because when I search for 'Google Pixel 10' on the site I get dozens of sponsored products from companies like Samsung and Apple, phone cases, accessories and some keyboard-mashed Chinese brand names like woooxydis, eithfjso or zooarhe with their own cheaply-made accessories, when all I'm looking for is a fucking phone from a specific brand.
So we've enshittified our sites and our institutions, now we provide an enshittified solution to the problems we've created.
And when we enshittify LLMs further, we'll come up with a different solution to this problem.
@alextecplayz, thanks for sharing! I feel you, this frustration is no stranger to me
Though, as gruesome as it may sound, having to go 20 different places might be a bit safer nowadays when Western world is preparing for a mass ID leakage (not sure if I should laugh or cry here). Jokes aside, both scenarios are somewise dystopian
@strider at this point, it's just a personal preference for your flavour of dystopia to experience 😄
jk, but honestly I'm happy the Romanian government doesn't have a lot of online functionality exclusively because every attempt we've had so far was so abysmally mediocre and useless, that it almost never works.
It's so half-baked it's not even funny. For a few examples: new e-ID cards don't have an address listed on them, so if you're caught by a ticket inspector in public transport, they can't issue a fine because they require the address (since any deviation from how the address is written on your ID could be fought in court), so now they have to walk around with cops because only the cops have the new e-ID scanners.
When they opened up this year's online tax payment gateway so people could pay their taxes, it was overwhelmed and they thought it was a DDOS attack due to the sheer amount of people trying to pay their taxes.
@strider the new e-IDs are also supposed to carry some functionality akin to your national healthcare (CNAS) card, but since not all doctors have a specific e-ID reader, they can only read CNAS cards, not the new e-IDs, and the medical platform also needs a specific software version.
And also regarding CNAS cards, they're supposed to be automatically issued to you when you turn 18, but I never received mine so I just use my regular ID card at doctor's offices and in hospitals to check if I'm insured or not. They literally just didn't issue me a CNAS card for some reason, so I'd have to write a literal fucking letter and send it by post in order to request one.
It's just utterly half-baked shit, it's so dumb. Wasted millions of EUR provided by the EU for our digitalization efforts and we end up with this shit.
@strider and the worst one of all, ROeID, a dumb Flutter app where you create an account that's supposed to act as its own account + 2FA instead of individual accounts for government institutions, like your mayor's office, or ANAF, ONRC, and so on.
You take pictures of the front and back of your ID card, move around your face a little bit, record yourself saying some randomly-selected Romanian quote, and then you wait, for weeks, possibly months, before they approve your account because the ROeID team are horribly understaffed, so when the government required an e-signature (and so, ROeID PLUS a separately-purchased electronic signature via a few select vendors) for some ANAF filings or whatever, they were also overwhelmed and I had to submit my account for verification for like three times before I was finally granted access a month or so later.
...only for me to need to change my custom ROM, so now I have to do it all over again 😒
Just, a clown show from top to bottom.
@alextecplayz, not trying to trash Romania or anything but it feels like it's even scarier when a government like this tries to implement something new (like AI stuff responsible for sensitive information and legal processes) because then you know for sure they have no idea what they're doing.
It's sad. Not only what's doing on in your country but world-wide in general — so much potential to put technology into use which would actually benefit society but somewise it all still comes out wrong
@strider "not trying to trash Romania or anything" don't worry about it, we Romanians trash it every day 😄
But it's funny, Moldova and its substantially smaller resources and investments has managed to create a beautiful government app that unifies a lot of basic stuff like paying taxes or accessing your own info on your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=md.egov.evo&hl=ro
I really wish we could have something like this, who knows what the future holds.
As for the AI, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's just a wrapper for ChatGPT or some other big tech AI service like Claude.
Encapsulation is a common programming term to describe hiding or preventing access to details of a structure to make it easier to use correctly, reason about it, and reduce bugs. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulation_(computer_programming)
En*crap*sulation is then the technique of wrapping something that works in a layer of AI (crap) and, while it also hides details, it generally makes the wrapped thing more or less useless.
I suggested it in thread a few years ago specifically about enshittification related neologism, but it seems folks have been using the term outside of AI examples to just mean wrapping up bad code or adding a bad wrap to good code.
@nikunashi, thanks for the explanation 
Yeah, I see how it can be tempting to use this term to refer to general behaviour rather than specifically AI related
Vick
AlexTECPlayz
NikuNashi