Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.

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I guess the downside is also pretty big: no face-to-face communication - which itself can be a detriment to gameplay in games like Poker or PvPvE games like Dead of Winter. Also the tactile-ness of board games is such a nice escape from everything being digitized these days.

Off the top of my head, I remember visiting the website for the movie Donnie Darko back when the film was originally released and being blown away at the strangeness and creativity of it.

Weird, I'm having the opposite experience with stackoverflow pages. Often I get pages from random websites that copy and paste stackoverflow content with some jammed-in SEO ABOVE the actual stackoverflow results.

* Awesome standard library - very little need to install packages from randos on the internet * LINQ makes performing complicated work with collections simple and readable * Great async model for work that needs to be done in parallel or scheduled

Was also impressed at how much stuff they managed to add to it over the years:

* Generics * Now runs just about anywhere: Windows/Linux/macOS/mobile * Null reference types largely gets rid of the endless 'Object not set to instance of ...' errors * Now supports some form of immutable data types (records)

Frankly most of the complaints I'm reading about here come from the companies that choose to use the technology rather than the tech itself.

Consider that when Disney made Bambi 2 in the 2000s, they came to the realization that their animators did not have the skill required to animate deer antlers and then basically had their hand forced into using CGI. In the 1930s this was not a problem: the film contains not just hand-animated antlers but beautifully painted backgrounds, an incredible score and some of the most expressive character animation ever produced.

It hardly seems to be a stretch to call animation done during Disney's golden age objectively better than what is being done today.

I think this is thankfully becoming at least slightly less common, at least among educated Americans. For me at least the combination of meeting more people outside my bubble, travelling and learning more about the history of the United States has led me to a similar conclusion that you have reached.

A few weeks ago I returned to my rural Minnesota hometown to see people that had come from families that had lived there multiple generations wearing confederate flag clothing. I wonder if they had any concept of which side their forefathers would have been fighting with back then.

Then I remember that it is an industry with tiny margins and remember my past work with small clients and come up with a similar list of thoughts that you have outlined here.

I've wondered why the frontend community hasn't gotten together and said, "The next version of JavaScript - is TypeScript!" I've been using TypeScript for five years professionally now and cannot understate how much easier it has made large frontend (not just Web, but mobile and desktop) projects. Surely enough thought and work has been put into TypeScript to make it the next standard.

I wondered how they did this second thing and guessed that it was parsing the JS code I was writing somehow. Either that or flooding the observables with values and making note of how changes trickle down. It turned out that it was doing neither of those things but frankly I didn't understand how it worked even when it was explained to me. Might be a good time to revisit and satiate my curiosity and take another look at it.