something i think about a lot is this ui thing where people have basically decided that anything greater than, i dunno, ten items is impossible to display or arrange in any meaningful way so instead we’ll use search or ai + search or some mcguffin instead of trying to solve that problem.

there’s an implicit assumption that any search will winnow the collection to some manageable size where now you can paw at it like a monkey. but if your collection is large enough, you still have to look through a lot of things in some order without any useful facets to filter or group on or what have you.

“everything apps” (and operating systems like macos and ios) have this problem and just kick the can down the road seemingly forever and the real drag is that the design conventions seems to follow suit instead of innovating here.

i think this is a roundabout way of realizing that geocities’ naive neighborhoods/numbers were not perfect but actually pretty useful (again, even if imperfect)