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I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button. I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with t

by chpmrc 6y ago

I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button. I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button. I can book flights and hotels with the tap of a button. I can play with friends in virtual reality and actually sweat. I can watch a live stream of SpaceX launching reusable rockets in space. I could buy a car that is almost fully "self driving". I can exchange value with anyone in the world anonymously and with no delays or censorship thanks to cryptocurrencies. I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go. I can translate almost any language in real time, be it in writing, spoken or taken from an image. And so on...You can (and most of the time do) get paid to build interesting things. It's just that most of us are unable to look at the big picture and not realize that the combined effort of a team is more valuable than the sum of the individual efforts. And if you do actually work on stuff you don't find interesting there is enough demand that switching is not that hard. And if you want to solve puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles then there are plenty of resources for that. Plenty of choice in my honest opinion.

qz2 6y ago
To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue. Now we inherit the overhead of the software, demand pricing, apps that are made of shit and string (uber eats I'm looking at you) and zero customer service...
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Uhh. Before I didn’t even have Internet, much less a screen on which I could tap on a button.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I think the implication is that ride hailing, delivery ordering, and flight/hotel booking were possible to do by calling the company on the telephone. Which—if you already know precisely what you want—has almost as little friction as opening an app and tapping a button. (And to make that apply more often, these companies used to distribute fliers containing their “browsable UI.”) “Live streams” of rocket launches were on TV :) And driving, step-by-step directions, and translation were services provided by human beings. For the richer of us, they still mostly are services provided by humans, because the machine versions still aren’t quite as good. There have been VR systems at arcades since the 80s. The main difference today is that they’re consumer electronics you can bring home. (Not that that’s necessarily better for everyone; not every home has the room.) Cryptocurrency is fairly novel in the universality of the access it provides to such services. Before, you and your counterparty had to both have fancy Swiss bank accounts or Bahamian shell companies to exchange the funds through. Still possible, but you couldn’t just send the money to anybody, so it limited what you could do with dirty money. Now dirty money is almost as useful as clean money! :P
    - PinguTS 6y ago
      We had even Uber without having to phone someone in the 1980s. It was called black taxi market and you really just hailed a car in the street.
    - chpmrc 6y ago
      Calling has absolutely not the same friction as using an app. It's orders of magnitudes less efficient, more expensive and sometimes just impossible (good luck calling radio taxi in some countries where you don't speak the language). I think comparing what we could do 20+ years ago with what we can do now and saying "meh" is outright absurd. But, hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion.
      - freewilly1040 6y ago
        Not to mention the experience of calling a cab as a foreigner and having the driver take advantage of you by price gouging you or taking you on unnecessary detours.
      - brucifer 6y ago
        You might be overestimating the gap in efficiency. For example, last night, I ordered a pizza for pick-up, and the phone call took exactly 31 seconds. Even apps aren't instantaneous, but if they were, you're only talking about saving less than 1-2 minutes per day. In exchange for those time savings, apps introduce a lot of complexity and overhead: service fees, app updates, device storage, logins, behavioral tracking, etc. Now, that being said, there are a few unique advantages to apps, like being able to order taxis in a foreign country (as you said), or being able to share your GPS coordinates with the taxi.
      - xkcd-sucks 6y ago
        For people that don't embody crippling social anxiety, calling is less friction and more effective. I say this as one of those people, and still struggle to phone people when I know it will bring better results :)
    - gfxgirl 6y ago
      Not my experience. I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to take whatever it tells me. As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league. That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.
  - david_draco 6y ago
    There used to be telephones (with buttons). You could order all of the above through it, given a credit card.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      This is not something you can order: > I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.
      - StillBored 6y ago
        All these apps/etc work fine in, large top tier urban cities across the world. They fail miserably everywhere else, there are huge swaths of the US, where you don't be able to hail an uber. In those cases your falling back on the same methods used in the past. So, its still fairly common to see people hawking guiding/etc services inside or just outside of airports in central/south America, Africa, etc. If your going to places where the cell phone service is spotty, or your going outside the the main urban areas hiring a guide/translator might be the only way to get around.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue. Only if you were born fairly recently.
plazmatic 6y ago
All this, yet the world is unquestionably getting worse. Crazy times.
- celsoazevedo 6y ago
  Is the world really getting worse or is the amount of negative information we digest daily affecting our perception of how good or bad things actually are?
- chpmrc 6y ago
  Except it's not. Books like Factfulness show it quite clearly. We have our fair share of problems but quality of life has been steadily improving almost everywhere and almost exponentially in some areas.
  - NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
    Quality of life is improving, but condition on the planet are rapidly decreasing/
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  No, it's not. Life has been much better overall. What things are you seeing that is getting worse? I would say things are getting exposed and change is taking place. And you are just being introduced to the harsh reality that exists outside your initial bubble.
- jlangenauer 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure the world is getting worse, but I am certain that it's becoming more complex. And when the finite cognitive capacity of every human being must manage that complexity just to survive (let along propser), it sure feels like it's getting worse.
  - NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
    - Global Warming - Loss of topsoil - Extinction of species - Thawing permafrost - Rise of far right in many countries - Reinstated nuclear arms race - Corrupted government and financial institutions ...
notacoward 6y ago
Aren't most of the examples you list kind of orthogonal to the issue at hand? They seem more related to living in a world where software exists than to actually being the one who builds it.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I think you may have missed the point that someone had to build all that stuff, and the universe of software in the business world (where people are employed to write software) is large.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    Did I miss the point, or did you? Someone has to clean out the sewers too. Somebody does, and maybe they make good money to make up for the unpleasantness - I certainly hope so - but that doesn't make it a fun job. If software development has become sewer cleaning, isn't that something worth talking about?
coldtea 6y ago
So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions? People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket, or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they could work today, which they don't...
- derefr 6y ago
  > or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders. This is also the thing that everyone who makes fun of those “as seen on TV” products needs to be reminded of: they’re not really for you. For many products, there’s a smaller core of people who actually need the product, and then a much larger halo of people who might want the product if you sell it the right way. For the As-seen-on-TV products, the core market is usually “old people who don’t move around well, or have the grip strength/dexterity necessary to operate hand tools.” But even the core market doesn’t like being advertised to in a way that points out their problems. They’d rather that you wrote your pitch to target the larger halo market, and then they will see that ad, and notice the particular benefits to themselves as a core-market member. So in the end, you get things like the ad for the Snuggie (whose real point, IIRC, is that it’s a robe that someone can put on an infirm person without having to lift them to get it around them) that instead markets it as a sort of weird throw-blanket with arms; or ads for VR headsets that market them as being for Beat Saber. In both cases, the advertising is ignoring the core market with a need for the product, knowing that they’ll discover it on their own once they see the advertising aimed at the larger market.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders. Yeah, that's a valid market. But they're touted as some ultimate revolution / need, to everybody, when they're trivial in utility (outside that niche), few asked for them or would care about them without heavy marketing, and all at the same time basic needs (like health, a job, housing, education) get increasingly shitty...
bluntfang 6y ago
>I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button. Where do you live? I would say the same but in under an hour. Is this a little hyperbolic?
- xkcd-sucks 6y ago
  Shit I live in the #3 housing cost city in the USA and after 8pm I can get precisely zero decent restaurants to deliver in any amount of time. Domino's will deliver at 9, but the same is true in the boonies.
nescioquid 6y ago
Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went from mid-century to now. "[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?" (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...) Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results, technological optimism in the future is deflated.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff though, we should have been way further along there. But this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly technologically changing period in human history in computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or science fantasy writers envisioned.
  - nescioquid 6y ago
    > its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.
Sevii 6y ago
Yes, you can get paid to build interesting things. But the work you will be doing is not going to be interesting. Working as part of a team with the 1000s of engineers on Uber or Office or Alexa is going to be tedious no matter how valuable you think the product is.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  That wasn't what I meant with "interesting" though. Useful and polished products often involve tedious work. What I mean when I say "interesting" is that the programming involves something new and different. Messing around with unconventional and weird data structures, trying out new niche languages and paradigms, etc.
cambalache 6y ago
Not if you dont have enough money
rellekio 6y ago
You should watch the Cube and it's sequels.
leothecool 6y ago
We can do all this amazing stuff but we can't allocate cloud resources by simply calling a constructor. Wild times.

by chpmrc 6y ago

qz2 6y ago

To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue. Now we inherit the overhead of the software, demand pricing, apps that are made of shit and string (uber eats I'm looking at you) and zero customer service...

yoz-y 6y ago
Uhh. Before I didn’t even have Internet, much less a screen on which I could tap on a button.
- derefr 6y ago
  I think the implication is that ride hailing, delivery ordering, and flight/hotel booking were possible to do by calling the company on the telephone. Which—if you already know precisely what you want—has almost as little friction as opening an app and tapping a button. (And to make that apply more often, these companies used to distribute fliers containing their “browsable UI.”) “Live streams” of rocket launches were on TV :) And driving, step-by-step directions, and translation were services provided by human beings. For the richer of us, they still mostly are services provided by humans, because the machine versions still aren’t quite as good. There have been VR systems at arcades since the 80s. The main difference today is that they’re consumer electronics you can bring home. (Not that that’s necessarily better for everyone; not every home has the room.) Cryptocurrency is fairly novel in the universality of the access it provides to such services. Before, you and your counterparty had to both have fancy Swiss bank accounts or Bahamian shell companies to exchange the funds through. Still possible, but you couldn’t just send the money to anybody, so it limited what you could do with dirty money. Now dirty money is almost as useful as clean money! :P
  - PinguTS 6y ago
    We had even Uber without having to phone someone in the 1980s. It was called black taxi market and you really just hailed a car in the street.
  - chpmrc 6y ago
    Calling has absolutely not the same friction as using an app. It's orders of magnitudes less efficient, more expensive and sometimes just impossible (good luck calling radio taxi in some countries where you don't speak the language). I think comparing what we could do 20+ years ago with what we can do now and saying "meh" is outright absurd. But, hey, everyone is entitled to their opinion.
    - freewilly1040 6y ago
      Not to mention the experience of calling a cab as a foreigner and having the driver take advantage of you by price gouging you or taking you on unnecessary detours.
    - brucifer 6y ago
      You might be overestimating the gap in efficiency. For example, last night, I ordered a pizza for pick-up, and the phone call took exactly 31 seconds. Even apps aren't instantaneous, but if they were, you're only talking about saving less than 1-2 minutes per day. In exchange for those time savings, apps introduce a lot of complexity and overhead: service fees, app updates, device storage, logins, behavioral tracking, etc. Now, that being said, there are a few unique advantages to apps, like being able to order taxis in a foreign country (as you said), or being able to share your GPS coordinates with the taxi.
    - xkcd-sucks 6y ago
      For people that don't embody crippling social anxiety, calling is less friction and more effective. I say this as one of those people, and still struggle to phone people when I know it will bring better results :)
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    Not my experience. I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to take whatever it tells me. As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league. That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.
- david_draco 6y ago
  There used to be telephones (with buttons). You could order all of the above through it, given a credit card.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    This is not something you can order: > I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      All these apps/etc work fine in, large top tier urban cities across the world. They fail miserably everywhere else, there are huge swaths of the US, where you don't be able to hail an uber. In those cases your falling back on the same methods used in the past. So, its still fairly common to see people hawking guiding/etc services inside or just outside of airports in central/south America, Africa, etc. If your going to places where the cell phone service is spotty, or your going outside the the main urban areas hiring a guide/translator might be the only way to get around.
ekianjo 6y ago
> To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue. Only if you were born fairly recently.

plazmatic 6y ago

All this, yet the world is unquestionably getting worse. Crazy times.

celsoazevedo 6y ago
Is the world really getting worse or is the amount of negative information we digest daily affecting our perception of how good or bad things actually are?
chpmrc 6y ago
Except it's not. Books like Factfulness show it quite clearly. We have our fair share of problems but quality of life has been steadily improving almost everywhere and almost exponentially in some areas.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  Quality of life is improving, but condition on the planet are rapidly decreasing/
kyawzazaw 6y ago
No, it's not. Life has been much better overall. What things are you seeing that is getting worse? I would say things are getting exposed and change is taking place. And you are just being introduced to the harsh reality that exists outside your initial bubble.
jlangenauer 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure the world is getting worse, but I am certain that it's becoming more complex. And when the finite cognitive capacity of every human being must manage that complexity just to survive (let along propser), it sure feels like it's getting worse.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  - Global Warming - Loss of topsoil - Extinction of species - Thawing permafrost - Rise of far right in many countries - Reinstated nuclear arms race - Corrupted government and financial institutions ...

notacoward 6y ago

Aren't most of the examples you list kind of orthogonal to the issue at hand? They seem more related to living in a world where software exists than to actually being the one who builds it.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think you may have missed the point that someone had to build all that stuff, and the universe of software in the business world (where people are employed to write software) is large.
- notacoward 6y ago
  Did I miss the point, or did you? Someone has to clean out the sewers too. Somebody does, and maybe they make good money to make up for the unpleasantness - I certainly hope so - but that doesn't make it a fun job. If software development has become sewer cleaning, isn't that something worth talking about?

coldtea 6y ago

So we've mostly solved trivial non-problems if/not regressions? People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket, or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... I'll give you "self driving cars" -- well, I would if they could work today, which they don't...

derefr 6y ago
> or, god forbid, to actually meet friends and not in VR space... These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders. This is also the thing that everyone who makes fun of those “as seen on TV” products needs to be reminded of: they’re not really for you. For many products, there’s a smaller core of people who actually need the product, and then a much larger halo of people who might want the product if you sell it the right way. For the As-seen-on-TV products, the core market is usually “old people who don’t move around well, or have the grip strength/dexterity necessary to operate hand tools.” But even the core market doesn’t like being advertised to in a way that points out their problems. They’d rather that you wrote your pitch to target the larger halo market, and then they will see that ad, and notice the particular benefits to themselves as a core-market member. So in the end, you get things like the ad for the Snuggie (whose real point, IIRC, is that it’s a robe that someone can put on an infirm person without having to lift them to get it around them) that instead markets it as a sort of weird throw-blanket with arms; or ads for VR headsets that market them as being for Beat Saber. In both cases, the advertising is ignoring the core market with a need for the product, knowing that they’ll discover it on their own once they see the advertising aimed at the larger market.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >These technologies really do solve problems for some people. Ignoring the temporary problem it’s solving for most-everyone right now, VR lets quadriplegics and house-bound invalids go places that aren’t accessible, e.g. the middle of the jungle. And VR is also useful for assisted visualization in the treatment of PTSD and other associated disorders. Yeah, that's a valid market. But they're touted as some ultimate revolution / need, to everybody, when they're trivial in utility (outside that niche), few asked for them or would care about them without heavy marketing, and all at the same time basic needs (like health, a job, housing, education) get increasingly shitty...

bluntfang 6y ago

>I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button. Where do you live? I would say the same but in under an hour. Is this a little hyperbolic?

xkcd-sucks 6y ago
Shit I live in the #3 housing cost city in the USA and after 8pm I can get precisely zero decent restaurants to deliver in any amount of time. Domino's will deliver at 9, but the same is true in the boonies.

nescioquid 6y ago

Reading this litany of technologically-enabled consumer achievements, I thought of David Graeber who visited the disappointment we sometimes feel for how things actually went from mid-century to now. "[...]Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?" (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...) Kinda makes your list seem like an indictment. Today's world is the world capital wants to make. When you do open your awareness to the scale of effort and the broadest results, technological optimism in the future is deflated.

vikramkr 6y ago
I think its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s. A lot of those ideas are "thing that exists, but more magic." We have helicopters, but it turns out zoom calls work just as good to meet people, without the air traffic control nightmare. We have the internet at our fingers, an advance so monumental that its nearly impossible to imagine life before this. Teleportation and antigravity - I mean - at a point- thats just plain magic. I will grant the space stuff though, we should have been way further along there. But this willfully ignores the mind bending amount of technological progress that we've made in the most rapidly technologically changing period in human history in computation, biotech, nanotechnology, etc etc just because we didn't achieve some of the magic that soft sci-fi or science fantasy writers envisioned.
- nescioquid 6y ago
  > its nonsensical to condemn the rate of progress because we didn't achieve a vision of science fantasy grounded in what people thought in the 1950s That wasn't really the claim. The idea is that the ends of technology have been chosen by corporations, rather than what would have been most generally useful to humankind. Hardly an earth-shattering observation.

Sevii 6y ago

Yes, you can get paid to build interesting things. But the work you will be doing is not going to be interesting. Working as part of a team with the 1000s of engineers on Uber or Office or Alexa is going to be tedious no matter how valuable you think the product is.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
That wasn't what I meant with "interesting" though. Useful and polished products often involve tedious work. What I mean when I say "interesting" is that the programming involves something new and different. Messing around with unconventional and weird data structures, trying out new niche languages and paradigms, etc.

cambalache 6y ago

Not if you dont have enough money

rellekio 6y ago

You should watch the Cube and it's sequels.

leothecool 6y ago

We can do all this amazing stuff but we can't allocate cloud resources by simply calling a constructor. Wild times.