Comment by api

This is fascinating. I’ve been using ollama with no knowledge of this because it just works without a ton of knobs I don’t feel like spending the time to mess with.

As usual, the real work seems to be appropriated by people who do the last little bit — put an acceptable user experience and some polish on it — and they take all the money and credit.

It’s shitty but it also happens because the vast majority of devs, especially in the FOSS world, do not understand or appreciate user experience. It is bar none the most important thing in the success of most things in computing.

My rule is: every step a user has to do to install or set up something halves adoption. So if 100 people enter and there are two steps, 25 complete the process.

For a long time Apple was the most valuable corporation on Earth on the basis of user experience alone. Apple doesn’t invent much. They polish it, and that’s where like 99% of the value is as far as the market is concerned.

The reason is that computers are very confusing and hard to use. Computer people, which most of us are, don’t see that because it’s second nature to us. But even for computer people you get to the point where you’re busy and don’t have time to nerd out on every single thing you use, so it even matters to computer people in the end.