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Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

113 points by morpheos137 4y ago

morpheos137 4y ago
"Too big to fail" means everything fails. In my opinion we are on the precipice of civilization collapse. The reason is that people can no longer think logically and the tools they use are increasingly becoming a hinderence. The problem crosses multiple domains, not just "Tech." Basically we have reach a point as a civilization where failure and ineptitude are increasingly not penalized.
- GianFabien 4y ago
  We're living in the Golden Age: they with the gold (money actually) make all the rules. As the article mentions, the emergence of quasi-monopolies constrains decisions at all levels in service of further maximizing financial gains. The 99.9% are mere pawns in this game.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    Emergence? Monopolies are the norm, I believe. The 20th century in the United States (from the Sherman antitrust act, 1890, to the changes in the Reagan era, 1984ish) is an exceptional period.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  We optimized for the short term without caring about the long term (climate, sustainability, equality, prosperity). Now everyone and everything is in debt (money, natural resources, compassion), yea I could see it all fall apart.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Falling apart could result in a temporary and tragic setback, eg a period of stagnation and hardship, perhaps some world wars and some global population decline, but a civilization collapse though is still avoidable
paulpauper 4y ago
Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%. Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. Also, employees can capture this divergence by investing wages in index funds like the S&P 500. The divergence, which began in the early 80s, also tracks the start of the huge bull market. Profits that would go to employees are instead reflected in rapidly appreciating share prices and dividends. A lot more people today have IRAs compared to 40 years ago, representing significant wealth .
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. I don't see how. Those things aren't new, and aren't better than they used to be. Their impact applies to before "the divergence" at least as much as it applies now.
- bbor 4y ago
  Technically yes, the working class can become capitalists by just saving their money. Practically, I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a dishonest and rude suggestion, at best. Just because anyone can become a shareholder in a company that squeezes its employees dry for profit doesn’t mean that that company isn’t a weapon in the class war. From Wikipedia: Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Bob creating wealth does not imply he took from someone else. Capitalism works by creating wealth, not by redistributing it to themselves.
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
    Bezos increased his wealth by $100 billion over the last decade. If all that money was evenly distributed among Amazon's 1,500,000 employees instead, they would get like $6k more every year. That might be a nice bonus to the average Amazon employee making $30,000 a year, but it would hardly be revolutionary. I don't think 1% of people holding 32% of the wealth is that surprising or exceptional. A lot of people are in the bottom 50% because they don't save any money at all. I think these stats give people the idea that if you were to somehow take all the wealth from the top 1% and give it to the bottom 50% that this would vastly improve their situation, when in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference and would fuck up economic incentive structures.
JohnFen 4y ago
This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  If you look on the opposite side of the coin, you will see that we do have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. IMO these types of failures are simply a percentage of the overall tech, and the reason they seem prominent is because there is just a huge race in tech over the past decade. If you actually want to fix it and reduce that percentage, push to replace engineers with computers. A lot of engineering problems are search problems. Computers are better at search than humans.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I'm thinking mostly about software here, not tech in general. And I'm not saying that some things aren't better. But a lot of things are worse, and the trend worries me.
  - nikau 4y ago
    > have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. We have moved to products just being "good enough". An example is telco equipment, phones always just worked in the past, you would never expect an outage. Ask most people who had office or home phones up until the 90s and most would say they never had a single instance of their phone not working. Then we went to Voip, and now soft phones like MS teams, and reliability is shit. Its embarrassing that products like MS teams require multiple retry attempts each week just to make a simple phone call.
- RachelF 4y ago
  This is one of the best articles about software and tech I have read in years!
wilg 4y ago
Cathartic venting for some, perhaps, but not a very insightful piece. Rehashes various mostly wrong examples and comes to a predictably lame conclusion about “capitalism”.
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - sdf4j 4y ago
    Wow just wow
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
Counterexample: RaspberryPi. Little tech still has a future (but everything the author says about overhyped Big Tech outfits sounds pretty accurate). Personally I think it comes down to an over-financialized economy. Raising taxes on corporations and individuals while providing loopholes in the form of writeoffs for re-investing profits in R & D and manufacturing facility upgrades etc. is one obvious solution.
- atherton33 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's a good counterexample? It hasn't been possible to actually buy a Raspberry Pi anywhere in something like a year, though the hype rolls on.
- mrslave 4y ago
  I don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.
  - beebmam 4y ago
    There's ZERO reason to buy one right now, but when they're at their normal price, they are fun toys.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    The price and stock are from current supply problems. I have dozens from when you could get them on sale. The lack of case is for tinkerers to make their own, although there's an official one you can buy now too. Binary blobs are a valid complaint, but machine code will be easily reversed engineered by transformer models in a year or two.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
> Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power. I assume the author is talking about the US. Genuine question: How does the software industry look in more non-capitalist countries? Is it flourishing without these issues. I bet their equivalent of Apple Maps was perfect on first release! The software industry has issues but I am sure the author has a causal link from capitalism to these issues coming up in a second edition of this post that is thoruoughly researched! (Edit: any snark is accidental!)
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Wasn’t the Apple Maps software pretty much correct on day one but they had a data issue for some areas?
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    Yep, but that is all capitalism's fault! And we should change over to another economic system where their equivalent didn't even have data issues on day one.
    - latency-guy2 4y ago
      It is hilarious, seeing as capitalism is firmly expected to meet the ever changing and increasing needs of the luddites that sit opposite of it. But capitalists can't make the same demands of it's enemies. What a shame.
paulpauper 4y ago
This is an example of confirmation bias. It overlooks all the examples in which technology works and makes improvements to people's lives. Things like airline safety and medicine have made big advances. But I think some of the bullshit is superfluous features that do nto do anything or seem redundant. Why is there a warning if you try to turn the volume up too loud on windows? So annoying. Or McAfee being preinstalled and then annoying popups (bloatware). In that sense, I agree with the author.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don't have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis/development paralysis where you don't spend your time on important stuff. A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch: Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty good open world game (if not the messiah some people got hyped for), Apple Maps is not bad these days (especially in California), the iPhone 4 is now considered pretty revolutionary, hell even Windows Vista was not that bad after all the patches!
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch Right. His point was that these things are being released before they're fully baked. That's a problem, and one that is much more common now.
  - wilg 4y ago
    I think there’s a good argument to be made it’s not a problem at all.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      You don't see a problem with releasing unfinished work? When has that ever been acceptable in any discipline?
      - wilg 4y ago
        It’s typically in the eye of the beholder what “finished” means. With stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 I’m not at all fussed by there being bugs in a complicated video game. But most of the complaining about the game was feature requests. Maybe those elements make you like the thing less, but it’s not necessarily incomplete. You’re rarely gonna ship something perfect.
mdorazio 4y ago
I don't quite know what the author's conclusion is here. Capitalism is bad? Part of the problem in my mind is that consumers don't actually punish these behaviors. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is massively profitable even though it was so shitty at launch. The same is true of many of the other examples in the list. So if companies are going to still make tons of money by cutting more and more corners, why wouldn't they?
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  He wants all software to be built at the speed of Mars probes, I guess
drewcoo 4y ago
If "bullshit" means this, then that's what you'd expect from "fake it til you make it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit But I think the author really just means software failures. The truth is that we make software to just barely work, knowing we can fix it later. But apparently the author somehow hasn't been exposed to software ever. Further, I think the author is angry and knows something isn't right in the world and is railing on the software industry. I think (hope) that's misplaced anger, but the author is probably right to be angry about . . . something.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft's new terminal [32]." "In the article Software Disenchantment, author Nikita Prokopov exposes how bad software has become commonplace in our daily lives [35]. From programs that get incredibly bigger and slower with each new version, offering little or nothing more in return, to the fact that they get worse as they are used, to the most complete chaos that is the software development process. For example, when creating an empty (!) project in npm for web development more than 50,000 files are downloaded, taking about 350 MB. This house of cards is so fragile that it gives rise to situations that are, to say the least, embarrassing. In 2016, an npm library called Left-pad, downloaded about 2 million times a month, was removed from the repository by its author, resulting in many web projects around the world crashing, including large corporations, forcing npm to revert the deletion [36]. The library, which contained 10 trivial lines, could be implemented in a few minutes even by programming students." Some, but not all, developers get defensive when the issue of "bloat" is raised. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842863
- vba616 4y ago
  You can, anyone can, write all your programs with the mindset that you are given X amount of memory, and you use it as a cache or buffer like they did back when computers had 64K or whatever. It would solve a lot of what I see as the problems of modern software. For so many years, people have pursued the false vision of a programming environment where resources can be assumed to be infinite. The problem is, no matter how much memory you have, if you take a data structure that reasonably fits in your vast amount of memory, and then you inadvertently multiply its size, you won't have space. Or to put it another way, all finite numbers are infinitely smaller than infinity, so the delusion that any finite number is equivalent to infinity will always bring people to grief. Could someone please write a manifesto along the lines of "malloc considered harmful"? Just. Say. No.
emodendroket 4y ago
> After the fiasco that was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 — a game estimated to cost more than 300 million dollars, including the performance of actor Keanu Reeves —, many people began to question how far the so-called late stage capitalism can go. Really? Releasing a multi-year software project worked on by many, many people that was buggy but still more or less served its purpose is someone's idea of capitalism teetering on the precipice? If we truly believe "bad results for consumers" means capitalism itself is reaching its end stages, an earlier stage of capitalism featured people just brazenly selling pills with tapeworm eggs as a weight loss supplement and no real regulatory apparatus equipped to stop that, so what was that? "Late-stage capitalism" is becoming one of those buzzwords that doesn't mean much of anything.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  I had to start over from the beginning 3 times due to completely main plot breaking bugs, and this was on 1.4+ versions . Still had a side quest broken. That is not a "more or less" serving it's purpose.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I played the game from beginning to end without any major incidents on launch. But even then it was eventually fixed and I still don't think this is a harbinger of the collapse of global capitalism.
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      I agree "collapse of global capitalism" would be a stretch. That being said I also think platform mattered a lot. I played on PS4Pro fwiw
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        Yeah, I think that is true as well. I had just upgraded my PC for the first time in many years and was looking for something to showcase what the hardware could do when I picked it up. All the bugs I encountered were pretty minor.
gaucheries 4y ago
> Apple, known for supposedly delivering sleek products, launched in 2010 the iPhone 4, still under the tutelage of Steve Jobs. Within hours of release, users flooded the internet to complain about dropped connections and abrupt reductions in internet speed. The problem, according to Jobs, was with users holding the iPhone 4 with their left hand [8]. As this was a hardware issue, it was never really solved. They did fix it with later versions of the iPhone 4 and with the iPhone 4S. Also, I remember that they made the "bumper" cases to alleviate the issue with the antenna: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/IPhone_4_Bumper https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/IPhone_4_Bumper
- hinkley 4y ago
  I still peer pressure friends into putting cases on their phones. If you were using an iPhone 4 without a case you're just a madlad. It was never a question if you needed a case, but if you could find one that wasn't ridiculous. For any phone there were maybe 3 manufacturers I liked, and they kept changing every few years.
darth_avocado 4y ago
I find that I generally agree with the sentiment but putting Apple in this list is a little preposterous. Yes Apple Maps was terrible, but with continuous improvements, at the moment it is a good if not the best product. Outside of that, they have had very few bad products that they released (yes including the $1000 stand) in the last decade.
- duncanc4 4y ago
  The butterfly keyboard was pretty terrible. They continued selling the model for years before finally removing it. Customers didn’t get any recourse until the recent lawsuit, but that only applies to certain US states. Apple still denies any wrong doing.
maerF0x0 4y ago
The only sentence I disagree is this one > We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society. Swap "power" and "money" and I agree. > We are allowing too much MONEY to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of POWER First step, stop giving them your money. 2nd, take away what they've illegally or otherwise ill gotten.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  money is power. they are interchangable. money==power.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    If this were true then why are there countless examples of rich people losing power throughout history?
    - tasuki 4y ago
      Do you have many examples of people who have lost significant power and stayed as rich as before? I'm sure there are some, but think it rather rare: usually, loss of power is accompanied by loss of money.
      - corbulo 4y ago
        But if they have the money, how could they lose the power in the first place? If money=power it should be impossible. I would say it is the majority of cases that people who lose power retain their wealth. Violent ends to power is exceedingly rare comparatively.
        tasuki 4y ago
        > But if they have the money, how could they lose the power in the first place? If money=power it should be impossible. I don't see why this should be true. If money=power, surely that has nothing to do with whether you can lose it or not? Generally, when you have something, you can lose it sometimes, no?
BirAdam 4y ago
The author keeps saying capitalism is at fault but I’d argue the bigger issue is that the world economic system is not capitalist at all. The world economic system is debt based and not capital based. Debt is accumulated as if it were capital instead of saving for future investment. Essentially, the time order is reversed. Instead of sacrificing the present for the future, the future is sacrificed for the present. The entire economic system functions in this manner, and it perverts every signal. It encourages spending now, ROI now, and worry should never happen. Of course, this also means that debts eventually collapse and the system collapse wipes out all but the largest players, concentrating all wealth at the top. This will keep happening as long as the system is debt based.
dangus 4y ago
You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism. With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor. What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve? On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in my day page load sizes were small and now everything is bloated” take we’ve all heard a thousand times. Like, holy shit please stop my phone has a 100Mpbs+ cellular connection, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage I don’t care that websites are 7MB. There’s nothing actionable about this monstrosity and all it can do is make you upset over a bunch of random shit you can’t control.
- nikau 4y ago
  Counterpoint, I click a link to load a feature page on the google cloud console, it takes around 10 seconds if not longer to load on a modern PC. Meanwhile vendor products from early 2000s loaded their web interfaces instantly. And they had more functionality.
  - dangus 4y ago
    Oh my god please stop. “And they had more functionality” lmfao which cloud provider had more functionality in 2000? Which cloud provider existed in 2000? Funny joke though I’m dying over here. Hold up I gotta go install Macromedia, Java, RealPlayer, and enable ActiveX.
    - nikau 4y ago
      Go look at gcp load balancer feature set vs something like an f5 from 20 years ago.
      - dangus 4y ago
        How much does an f5 cost?
        4y ago
somsak2 4y ago
Just hilarious to me to lay the blame for 'bad' software at the feet of capitalism when one of the 'purest' capitalist countries, the US, is so dominant in this sector worldwide. Of the 100 largest tech companies, 62 are from the US. Next-highest China has 9. [0] Where's all the great software developed by non-capitalist economies? [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-by-market-cap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
- reset8 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - somsak2 4y ago
    Feel free to check out some rankings of this stuff by people that have thought about it methodically rather than just cherry-picking examples. US is ranked 6th and 20th in the world by Fraser Institute and Heritage Organization, respectively. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalist-countries https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalis...
darthrupert 4y ago
Of all the things we are bringing back from the past, why does communist propaganda have to be one of them? Why do people, smart people! keep making almost the exactly same mistakes? Modern socialists have clearly studied history, but how are they able to interpret it like this?
- morpheos137 4y ago
  What if the only viable futures are communism or collapse? Consider as capitalism grows in complexity the grasp of the invisible hand grows weaker until it loses its grip. Does the world really need a new iPhone every year when people can hardly afford rent? Does making monopoly aspiring app for dog walking (Wag) to enrich a few sophomoric founders or defraud a few more gullible investors really constitute efficient rationing of scarce resources? What if we are an the last stages of a faltering system?
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    It is possible that we are, but it's certain that communism is not the thibg that's gonna save us.
  - willywanker 4y ago
    Ah yes, communism. This time we will surely get it right because of our arrogance and hubris combined with total cluelessness about human nature and how spectacularly communism and its sibling socialism failed everywhere they were tried (And no, Scandinavian countries aren't 'socialist' just because of running a welfare program that happens to be funded by much heavier taxes on all their citizens than Americans could imagine)
- deleted 4y ago
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andrewstuart 4y ago
What’s the point here? Should the industry be perfect?
ameyv 4y ago
Agree with Article to some extent. To mention what good software without bloatware looks like, go checkout https://nirsoft.net https://nirsoft.net website. Small size and absolutely wonderfully working tools made by single dev. Its epitome of craftmanship. PS: Also System internals tool made by Mark Russinovich
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

113 points by morpheos137 4y ago

"Too big to fail" means everything fails. In my opinion we are on the precipice of civilization collapse. The reason is that people can no longer think logically and the tools they use are increasingly becoming a hinderence. The problem crosses multiple domains, not just "Tech." Basically we have reach a point as a civilization where failure and ineptitude are increasingly not penalized.

GianFabien 4y ago
We're living in the Golden Age: they with the gold (money actually) make all the rules. As the article mentions, the emergence of quasi-monopolies constrains decisions at all levels in service of further maximizing financial gains. The 99.9% are mere pawns in this game.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Emergence? Monopolies are the norm, I believe. The 20th century in the United States (from the Sherman antitrust act, 1890, to the changes in the Reagan era, 1984ish) is an exceptional period.
candiddevmike 4y ago
We optimized for the short term without caring about the long term (climate, sustainability, equality, prosperity). Now everyone and everything is in debt (money, natural resources, compassion), yea I could see it all fall apart.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Falling apart could result in a temporary and tragic setback, eg a period of stagnation and hardship, perhaps some world wars and some global population decline, but a civilization collapse though is still avoidable

paulpauper 4y ago

Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%. Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. Also, employees can capture this divergence by investing wages in index funds like the S&P 500. The divergence, which began in the early 80s, also tracks the start of the huge bull market. Profits that would go to employees are instead reflected in rapidly appreciating share prices and dividends. A lot more people today have IRAs compared to 40 years ago, representing significant wealth .

JohnFen 4y ago
> Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. I don't see how. Those things aren't new, and aren't better than they used to be. Their impact applies to before "the divergence" at least as much as it applies now.
bbor 4y ago
Technically yes, the working class can become capitalists by just saving their money. Practically, I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a dishonest and rude suggestion, at best. Just because anyone can become a shareholder in a company that squeezes its employees dry for profit doesn’t mean that that company isn’t a weapon in the class war. From Wikipedia: Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Bob creating wealth does not imply he took from someone else. Capitalism works by creating wealth, not by redistributing it to themselves.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  Bezos increased his wealth by $100 billion over the last decade. If all that money was evenly distributed among Amazon's 1,500,000 employees instead, they would get like $6k more every year. That might be a nice bonus to the average Amazon employee making $30,000 a year, but it would hardly be revolutionary. I don't think 1% of people holding 32% of the wealth is that surprising or exceptional. A lot of people are in the bottom 50% because they don't save any money at all. I think these stats give people the idea that if you were to somehow take all the wealth from the top 1% and give it to the bottom 50% that this would vastly improve their situation, when in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference and would fuck up economic incentive structures.

JohnFen 4y ago

This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.

ActorNightly 4y ago
If you look on the opposite side of the coin, you will see that we do have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. IMO these types of failures are simply a percentage of the overall tech, and the reason they seem prominent is because there is just a huge race in tech over the past decade. If you actually want to fix it and reduce that percentage, push to replace engineers with computers. A lot of engineering problems are search problems. Computers are better at search than humans.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I'm thinking mostly about software here, not tech in general. And I'm not saying that some things aren't better. But a lot of things are worse, and the trend worries me.
- nikau 4y ago
  > have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. We have moved to products just being "good enough". An example is telco equipment, phones always just worked in the past, you would never expect an outage. Ask most people who had office or home phones up until the 90s and most would say they never had a single instance of their phone not working. Then we went to Voip, and now soft phones like MS teams, and reliability is shit. Its embarrassing that products like MS teams require multiple retry attempts each week just to make a simple phone call.
RachelF 4y ago
This is one of the best articles about software and tech I have read in years!

wilg 4y ago

Cathartic venting for some, perhaps, but not a very insightful piece. Rehashes various mostly wrong examples and comes to a predictably lame conclusion about “capitalism”.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
[flagged]
- sdf4j 4y ago
  Wow just wow
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

photochemsyn 4y ago

Counterexample: RaspberryPi. Little tech still has a future (but everything the author says about overhyped Big Tech outfits sounds pretty accurate). Personally I think it comes down to an over-financialized economy. Raising taxes on corporations and individuals while providing loopholes in the form of writeoffs for re-investing profits in R & D and manufacturing facility upgrades etc. is one obvious solution.

atherton33 4y ago
I'm not sure that's a good counterexample? It hasn't been possible to actually buy a Raspberry Pi anywhere in something like a year, though the hype rolls on.
mrslave 4y ago
I don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.
- beebmam 4y ago
  There's ZERO reason to buy one right now, but when they're at their normal price, they are fun toys.
- flangola7 4y ago
  The price and stock are from current supply problems. I have dozens from when you could get them on sale. The lack of case is for tinkerers to make their own, although there's an official one you can buy now too. Binary blobs are a valid complaint, but machine code will be easily reversed engineered by transformer models in a year or two.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

> Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power. I assume the author is talking about the US. Genuine question: How does the software industry look in more non-capitalist countries? Is it flourishing without these issues. I bet their equivalent of Apple Maps was perfect on first release! The software industry has issues but I am sure the author has a causal link from capitalism to these issues coming up in a second edition of this post that is thoruoughly researched! (Edit: any snark is accidental!)

Gigachad 4y ago
Wasn’t the Apple Maps software pretty much correct on day one but they had a data issue for some areas?
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Yep, but that is all capitalism's fault! And we should change over to another economic system where their equivalent didn't even have data issues on day one.
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    It is hilarious, seeing as capitalism is firmly expected to meet the ever changing and increasing needs of the luddites that sit opposite of it. But capitalists can't make the same demands of it's enemies. What a shame.

paulpauper 4y ago

This is an example of confirmation bias. It overlooks all the examples in which technology works and makes improvements to people's lives. Things like airline safety and medicine have made big advances. But I think some of the bullshit is superfluous features that do nto do anything or seem redundant. Why is there a warning if you try to turn the volume up too loud on windows? So annoying. Or McAfee being preinstalled and then annoying popups (bloatware). In that sense, I agree with the author.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don't have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis/development paralysis where you don't spend your time on important stuff. A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch: Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty good open world game (if not the messiah some people got hyped for), Apple Maps is not bad these days (especially in California), the iPhone 4 is now considered pretty revolutionary, hell even Windows Vista was not that bad after all the patches!

JohnFen 4y ago
> A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch Right. His point was that these things are being released before they're fully baked. That's a problem, and one that is much more common now.
- wilg 4y ago
  I think there’s a good argument to be made it’s not a problem at all.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    You don't see a problem with releasing unfinished work? When has that ever been acceptable in any discipline?
    - wilg 4y ago
      It’s typically in the eye of the beholder what “finished” means. With stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 I’m not at all fussed by there being bugs in a complicated video game. But most of the complaining about the game was feature requests. Maybe those elements make you like the thing less, but it’s not necessarily incomplete. You’re rarely gonna ship something perfect.

mdorazio 4y ago

I don't quite know what the author's conclusion is here. Capitalism is bad? Part of the problem in my mind is that consumers don't actually punish these behaviors. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is massively profitable even though it was so shitty at launch. The same is true of many of the other examples in the list. So if companies are going to still make tons of money by cutting more and more corners, why wouldn't they?

readthenotes1 4y ago
He wants all software to be built at the speed of Mars probes, I guess

drewcoo 4y ago

If "bullshit" means this, then that's what you'd expect from "fake it til you make it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit But I think the author really just means software failures. The truth is that we make software to just barely work, knowing we can fix it later. But apparently the author somehow hasn't been exposed to software ever. Further, I think the author is angry and knows something isn't right in the world and is railing on the software industry. I think (hope) that's misplaced anger, but the author is probably right to be angry about . . . something.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft's new terminal [32]." "In the article Software Disenchantment, author Nikita Prokopov exposes how bad software has become commonplace in our daily lives [35]. From programs that get incredibly bigger and slower with each new version, offering little or nothing more in return, to the fact that they get worse as they are used, to the most complete chaos that is the software development process. For example, when creating an empty (!) project in npm for web development more than 50,000 files are downloaded, taking about 350 MB. This house of cards is so fragile that it gives rise to situations that are, to say the least, embarrassing. In 2016, an npm library called Left-pad, downloaded about 2 million times a month, was removed from the repository by its author, resulting in many web projects around the world crashing, including large corporations, forcing npm to revert the deletion [36]. The library, which contained 10 trivial lines, could be implemented in a few minutes even by programming students." Some, but not all, developers get defensive when the issue of "bloat" is raised. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842863

vba616 4y ago
You can, anyone can, write all your programs with the mindset that you are given X amount of memory, and you use it as a cache or buffer like they did back when computers had 64K or whatever. It would solve a lot of what I see as the problems of modern software. For so many years, people have pursued the false vision of a programming environment where resources can be assumed to be infinite. The problem is, no matter how much memory you have, if you take a data structure that reasonably fits in your vast amount of memory, and then you inadvertently multiply its size, you won't have space. Or to put it another way, all finite numbers are infinitely smaller than infinity, so the delusion that any finite number is equivalent to infinity will always bring people to grief. Could someone please write a manifesto along the lines of "malloc considered harmful"? Just. Say. No.

emodendroket 4y ago

> After the fiasco that was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 — a game estimated to cost more than 300 million dollars, including the performance of actor Keanu Reeves —, many people began to question how far the so-called late stage capitalism can go. Really? Releasing a multi-year software project worked on by many, many people that was buggy but still more or less served its purpose is someone's idea of capitalism teetering on the precipice? If we truly believe "bad results for consumers" means capitalism itself is reaching its end stages, an earlier stage of capitalism featured people just brazenly selling pills with tapeworm eggs as a weight loss supplement and no real regulatory apparatus equipped to stop that, so what was that? "Late-stage capitalism" is becoming one of those buzzwords that doesn't mean much of anything.

maerF0x0 4y ago
I had to start over from the beginning 3 times due to completely main plot breaking bugs, and this was on 1.4+ versions . Still had a side quest broken. That is not a "more or less" serving it's purpose.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I played the game from beginning to end without any major incidents on launch. But even then it was eventually fixed and I still don't think this is a harbinger of the collapse of global capitalism.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    I agree "collapse of global capitalism" would be a stretch. That being said I also think platform mattered a lot. I played on PS4Pro fwiw
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Yeah, I think that is true as well. I had just upgraded my PC for the first time in many years and was looking for something to showcase what the hardware could do when I picked it up. All the bugs I encountered were pretty minor.

gaucheries 4y ago

> Apple, known for supposedly delivering sleek products, launched in 2010 the iPhone 4, still under the tutelage of Steve Jobs. Within hours of release, users flooded the internet to complain about dropped connections and abrupt reductions in internet speed. The problem, according to Jobs, was with users holding the iPhone 4 with their left hand [8]. As this was a hardware issue, it was never really solved. They did fix it with later versions of the iPhone 4 and with the iPhone 4S. Also, I remember that they made the "bumper" cases to alleviate the issue with the antenna: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/IPhone_4_Bumper https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/IPhone_4_Bumper

hinkley 4y ago
I still peer pressure friends into putting cases on their phones. If you were using an iPhone 4 without a case you're just a madlad. It was never a question if you needed a case, but if you could find one that wasn't ridiculous. For any phone there were maybe 3 manufacturers I liked, and they kept changing every few years.

darth_avocado 4y ago

I find that I generally agree with the sentiment but putting Apple in this list is a little preposterous. Yes Apple Maps was terrible, but with continuous improvements, at the moment it is a good if not the best product. Outside of that, they have had very few bad products that they released (yes including the $1000 stand) in the last decade.

duncanc4 4y ago
The butterfly keyboard was pretty terrible. They continued selling the model for years before finally removing it. Customers didn’t get any recourse until the recent lawsuit, but that only applies to certain US states. Apple still denies any wrong doing.

maerF0x0 4y ago

The only sentence I disagree is this one > We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society. Swap "power" and "money" and I agree. > We are allowing too much MONEY to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of POWER First step, stop giving them your money. 2nd, take away what they've illegally or otherwise ill gotten.

effingwewt 4y ago
money is power. they are interchangable. money==power.
- corbulo 4y ago
  If this were true then why are there countless examples of rich people losing power throughout history?
  - tasuki 4y ago
    Do you have many examples of people who have lost significant power and stayed as rich as before? I'm sure there are some, but think it rather rare: usually, loss of power is accompanied by loss of money.
    - corbulo 4y ago
      But if they have the money, how could they lose the power in the first place? If money=power it should be impossible. I would say it is the majority of cases that people who lose power retain their wealth. Violent ends to power is exceedingly rare comparatively.
      - tasuki 4y ago
        > But if they have the money, how could they lose the power in the first place? If money=power it should be impossible. I don't see why this should be true. If money=power, surely that has nothing to do with whether you can lose it or not? Generally, when you have something, you can lose it sometimes, no?

BirAdam 4y ago

The author keeps saying capitalism is at fault but I’d argue the bigger issue is that the world economic system is not capitalist at all. The world economic system is debt based and not capital based. Debt is accumulated as if it were capital instead of saving for future investment. Essentially, the time order is reversed. Instead of sacrificing the present for the future, the future is sacrificed for the present. The entire economic system functions in this manner, and it perverts every signal. It encourages spending now, ROI now, and worry should never happen. Of course, this also means that debts eventually collapse and the system collapse wipes out all but the largest players, concentrating all wealth at the top. This will keep happening as long as the system is debt based.

dangus 4y ago

You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism. With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor. What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve? On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in my day page load sizes were small and now everything is bloated” take we’ve all heard a thousand times. Like, holy shit please stop my phone has a 100Mpbs+ cellular connection, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage I don’t care that websites are 7MB. There’s nothing actionable about this monstrosity and all it can do is make you upset over a bunch of random shit you can’t control.

nikau 4y ago
Counterpoint, I click a link to load a feature page on the google cloud console, it takes around 10 seconds if not longer to load on a modern PC. Meanwhile vendor products from early 2000s loaded their web interfaces instantly. And they had more functionality.
- dangus 4y ago
  Oh my god please stop. “And they had more functionality” lmfao which cloud provider had more functionality in 2000? Which cloud provider existed in 2000? Funny joke though I’m dying over here. Hold up I gotta go install Macromedia, Java, RealPlayer, and enable ActiveX.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Go look at gcp load balancer feature set vs something like an f5 from 20 years ago.
    - dangus 4y ago
      How much does an f5 cost?
      - 4y ago

somsak2 4y ago

Just hilarious to me to lay the blame for 'bad' software at the feet of capitalism when one of the 'purest' capitalist countries, the US, is so dominant in this sector worldwide. Of the 100 largest tech companies, 62 are from the US. Next-highest China has 9. [0] Where's all the great software developed by non-capitalist economies? [0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-by-market-cap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...

reset8 4y ago
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- somsak2 4y ago
  Feel free to check out some rankings of this stuff by people that have thought about it methodically rather than just cherry-picking examples. US is ranked 6th and 20th in the world by Fraser Institute and Heritage Organization, respectively. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalist-countries https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalis...

darthrupert 4y ago

Of all the things we are bringing back from the past, why does communist propaganda have to be one of them? Why do people, smart people! keep making almost the exactly same mistakes? Modern socialists have clearly studied history, but how are they able to interpret it like this?

morpheos137 4y ago
What if the only viable futures are communism or collapse? Consider as capitalism grows in complexity the grasp of the invisible hand grows weaker until it loses its grip. Does the world really need a new iPhone every year when people can hardly afford rent? Does making monopoly aspiring app for dog walking (Wag) to enrich a few sophomoric founders or defraud a few more gullible investors really constitute efficient rationing of scarce resources? What if we are an the last stages of a faltering system?
- darthrupert 4y ago
  It is possible that we are, but it's certain that communism is not the thibg that's gonna save us.
- willywanker 4y ago
  Ah yes, communism. This time we will surely get it right because of our arrogance and hubris combined with total cluelessness about human nature and how spectacularly communism and its sibling socialism failed everywhere they were tried (And no, Scandinavian countries aren't 'socialist' just because of running a welfare program that happens to be funded by much heavier taxes on all their citizens than Americans could imagine)
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andrewstuart 4y ago

What’s the point here? Should the industry be perfect?

ameyv 4y ago

Agree with Article to some extent. To mention what good software without bloatware looks like, go checkout https://nirsoft.net https://nirsoft.net website. Small size and absolutely wonderfully working tools made by single dev. Its epitome of craftmanship. PS: Also System internals tool made by Mark Russinovich

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