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This is why technology is becoming garbage. In 2025 instead of copy paste, we fire up a gpu in a datacenter. it feels like "software engineering" is just becoming a BS contest for "how much AI can we shoehorn into everything"


Not fully disagreeing, but this lack of copypaste is not an intended ai feature.

- The “magic ocr thingy” exists for things like taking a picture of the real world and grabbing text from it, or grabbing text from a video from something you saw recorded there. Think translating a foreign sign or whatever.

- interfaces have, for unrelated reasons, become more hostile to standard actions like copypaste.

As a result people end up having to ocr-scan interfaces with the tool.


Some of it is because how people interact with and use tech has changed.

Mobile users have completely outpaced laptop/desktop users, and mobile users don't think in terms of files and text, so to them copy & paste is less important. The mythical "average user" moves arbitrary text and data around using screenshots and screen recordings instead of text and files.

Yes, it's incredibly inefficient, but I think it's evolved that day because selecting text is a real pain on a small touch screen, and companies have been trying to abstract away any concept of a filesystem for a long time.

So you or I might care and be bothered that we can't copy & paste something from UI chrome or content in a "web app" but the average person won't care, they'll just take a screenshot.




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