16 ms·

I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how

I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice things, we don't get the product of all that knowledge; instead we get whatever cost optimized bullshit gets shat out of a factory run by MBAs. This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different

throwaway173738 4y ago
The problem is, as always, the MBAs.
- rusk 4y ago
  It’s not MBAs place to set public policy though is it? If it’s the MBA’s fault at all it’s because they’re doing their job which is optimising the product to the market. If the markets not optimising the right things then that’s a failure in the market. Maybe the market is being manipulated somehow has it was for the old incandescent bulbs - but that’s not necessarily the fault of the management tier … some economise regulate for consumer value … some for profit
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    The problem is that people have a limited amount of caring and markets are really good at taking advantage of consumer ignorance. If you care about color rendering but don't know what color rendering is, you can't shop for it (and if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet).
    - rusk 4y ago
      Sounds like issues that could be solved by some market regulation - rules about labelling - etc etc but to many that would be tantamount communism
      - raintrees 4y ago
        Instead of force, maybe voluntary? Publish/promote a set of standard measurements for consumers, then let consumers drive the manufacturers. "The Market" will follow the consumer if the consumer is strongly inclined about its desires - I think we have seen this play out in other consumer electronics niches... When I was a teen, I wanted an alligator on my shirt, and not too long after I started seeing simulacra shirts... Enough of a demand for more than one entity to mimic it...
    - mcronce 4y ago
      > if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet This drives me absolutely insane. When we were shopping for a TV for the living room a few years ago I wanted a 120Hz display. Finding one was a pain in the ass because all anybody wanted to list in marketing material was the backlight strobe rate; you had to dig and dig to find the panel rate. No, I don't care that you can flash the backlight at a thousand Hz, I want an actual panel that's well synchronized with 24FPS content, and I don't want to spend hours of research to figure out which displays have one.
    - kansface 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm back to wanting a curated shopping experience. I don't want the cheapest thing. I don't want multiple options- thats worse than nothing. I don't want to worry about counterfeits or knockoffs. I don't want to do research, consult the relevant /r and then look through comment history to see who is paid to say what. I want a store to have an opinion and stock high quality stuff. I would happily pay a premium to offload decision making.
  - roughly 4y ago
    It remains the case that you don't discard your identity as a person or personal responsibility when taking a job somewhere, and the purpose of an MBA for the last 40 years has been to produce crappier products for less money while charging consumers the same amount. It's not the MBAs place to set public policy, but it's also broadly an admission of some kind of serious cultural failure to say we need public policy to prevent a large group of people from stripping everything they get their hands on down to the studs for short-term gain, and it doesn't say great things about that group of people, either.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Painfully broad generalisation
- greggsy 4y ago
  I have an MBA. It’s not mine or any of my peer’s jobs to provide crap products to ends users - thats up to shareholders to decide.
  - SargeDebian 4y ago
    How does that work? The head of engineering gets a unit cost reduction target and then they call some shareholders to come review some proposals for which option works best? Do they show up with a printed certificate showing they own at least one share?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Public companies are required to hold annual meetings with shareholders where they vote for board members and bring up proposals. Shareholders may choose to vote for board member with views about managing the business that they agree with. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-shareholders-vote.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
  - Phlarp 4y ago
    Pass that buck on down the line.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    So what would you say you do here?
  - transcriptase 4y ago
    It’s your job to decide whether to make the world slightly worse and make an extra dollar, or maintain/improve quality while finding efficiencies elsewhere. The second option may be more difficult but let’s not pretend there aren’t companies that choose it and succeed.
    - greggsy 4y ago
      That’s a very ignorant perspective. For me, it’s rarely about efficiency, and almost always about improving outcomes for workers and users. Micromanaging efficacy to maximise profit is an economists job. If the general public wants a cheap, bad product, they can do so, but they rarely have the inside knowledge to discern quality. Marketing is responsible for telling miseducating them.
- dyno12345 4y ago
  it doesn't take a degree to figure out when consumers are only comparing prices when shopping
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
taneq 4y ago
Cost optimization IS the limits of the technology. All the nice things you mention are the result of large amounts of work by exceptional people. This costs money. Most of them require higher-spec components, or more design time, or more complicated fabrication and assembly. These things also cost money. Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).
- marcellus23 4y ago
  Are there companies out there creating premium LED bulbs without these problems?
  - bradstewart 4y ago
    Yes. Philips has and Waveform have pretty decent midrange bulbs. Ketra has really, really high quality stuff.
  - drorco 4y ago
    I'm no expert with LEDs' technical bits, but I purchased LIFX bulbs which were pretty expensive and they've lasted for almost a decade now.
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      I've had the opposite experience. I find that LIFX bulbs fail far too often considering the price tag, however I've yet to find anything else that can match up to them when they work. So I just keep buying them.
  - throwuwu 4y ago
    Forget about premium, what the hell are impoverished people supposed to do?
    - zaroth 4y ago
eschneider 4y ago
This seems like an excellent business opportunity.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > This seems like an excellent business opportunity. Consumer education is rarely an excellent business opportunity. Consumers are very good at comparing prices, and "incandescent watt equivalent" labels provide an understandable comparator for light output. Beyond that, the statistics become much less meaningful. Consumers typically don't read colour temperature ratings (in black-body Kelvin), but instead follow "warm white / soft white / cool white" descriptors. Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting. CRI is a step worse. It is a higher-is-better indicator, but there's no intuitive connection for a consumer. Is a CRI of 80 bad? Is 95 better enough to be worth double the price? Worse yet, CRI is a summary statistic that can gloss over less-measured color reproduction difficulties, and worst yet not all bulbs even publish CRI numbers on the box. My local hardware store is happy to sell you its store-brand generics, none of which have CRI numbers. Flicker is another step into the unknown. No bulbs that I'm aware of publish flicker numbers, even the otherwise respected names like Philips. If you consider this a 'business opportunity', you're left with an unverifiable claim that your bulbs are uniquely better than the competition. Sadly, for now good LED lighting really is the domain of the expensive professional or the hobbyist who spends their spare time tracking down reviews or building custom lighting rigs.
  - eschneider 4y ago
    I expect the 'premium' light bulb market is similar to the mechanical keyboard market. Good products and good prices will find a small but dedicated market and build a good rep. Do it right, and eventually your best customers will tell their friends to 'just buy brand "X"' and you can expand from there. Is this a good plan to take over the bulb market? No. But a good product could be a nice, sustainable business.
  - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    > Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to it, but I don't understand how it's viewed as okay. I walked through a house on a home show and despite being listed for 800k+ (in Iowa), they had a couple mismatches.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/ https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/ The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale. > We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
- causality0 4y ago
  Is there anything decent in the middle? Somewhere between one dollar bulbs and eighteen dollar bulbs?
  - pkulak 4y ago
    I've been happy with my Cree leds. I can't seem to find them online, only Home Depot.
    - nevir 4y ago
      Home Depot has an exclusively agreement with em
  - jghn 4y ago
    I used to buy Cree bulbs. But they they sold the brand and were changed to be the same mass market schlock as the other bulbs, except with a name brand that implies quality.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.
- 4y ago
notatoad 4y ago
just because somebody decides to geek out about LED bulbs, does't mean all those stats that are theoretically measurable actually make a difference. the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.
- _rs 4y ago
  > are flicker free to my eyes Very rarely will bulbs visibly flicker in my experience. What happens instead is after several hours I'll start to get headaches and feel fatigue without knowing exactly where it's coming from. Since I replaced my Hue bulbs (which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even) I've felt so much better at home
  - elcritch 4y ago
    I second the A19 and other bulbs from Ikea. I live right next to an Ikea and it turns out their bulbs are pretty good. Even the housing feels better than Phillips or others. I used to have an expensive Phillips light alarm and it flickered like no other. Especially if you lower the dimming you'll tend to see more flickering or just notice an "ick" feeling with crappier bulbs.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    >which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even all bulbs have some flicker, and the fact that it resonates with your phone screen's refresh rate or your camera sensor's sample rate doesn't really mean anything.
    - 4y ago
mturmon 4y ago
I fully agree, and would add that imposition of these artificial limits seems to be a fundamental side-effect of capitalism. "Good old-fashioned" incandescents were also subject to a multi-decade scam to limit their lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel It's manifesting slightly differently this time around, but it's the same principle.
Johnny555 4y ago
rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.
susanasj 4y ago
"cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer." that's just this stage of capitalism unfortunately. Take an airplane trip and you will experience similar effects.
jklinger410 4y ago
This is a trend that has spread into every aspect of specifically American society. Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence. Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials. Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave. Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.
hinkley 4y ago
I can sell a million devices that cost me $4 apiece, or I can sell 1.5 million devices that cost me $3 apiece. That only stops if I have a competitor selling $4.60 bulbs that take away all of my customers. As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
markdestouches 4y ago
> This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.
verisimi 4y ago
They are poor by design! You want repeat customers of course!
dredmorbius 4y ago
It's a variant of the Market for Lemons problem: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons> Discussed numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons> To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required: - Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality. - Expensive quality assessment. - Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both. You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above). This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products. Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others. There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk). As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.
dang 4y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372444 - it's fine, but I'm trying to prune things so the thread isn't so top heavy.

throwaway173738 4y ago

The problem is, as always, the MBAs.

rusk 4y ago
It’s not MBAs place to set public policy though is it? If it’s the MBA’s fault at all it’s because they’re doing their job which is optimising the product to the market. If the markets not optimising the right things then that’s a failure in the market. Maybe the market is being manipulated somehow has it was for the old incandescent bulbs - but that’s not necessarily the fault of the management tier … some economise regulate for consumer value … some for profit
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  The problem is that people have a limited amount of caring and markets are really good at taking advantage of consumer ignorance. If you care about color rendering but don't know what color rendering is, you can't shop for it (and if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet).
  - rusk 4y ago
    Sounds like issues that could be solved by some market regulation - rules about labelling - etc etc but to many that would be tantamount communism
    - raintrees 4y ago
      Instead of force, maybe voluntary? Publish/promote a set of standard measurements for consumers, then let consumers drive the manufacturers. "The Market" will follow the consumer if the consumer is strongly inclined about its desires - I think we have seen this play out in other consumer electronics niches... When I was a teen, I wanted an alligator on my shirt, and not too long after I started seeing simulacra shirts... Enough of a demand for more than one entity to mimic it...
  - mcronce 4y ago
    > if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet This drives me absolutely insane. When we were shopping for a TV for the living room a few years ago I wanted a 120Hz display. Finding one was a pain in the ass because all anybody wanted to list in marketing material was the backlight strobe rate; you had to dig and dig to find the panel rate. No, I don't care that you can flash the backlight at a thousand Hz, I want an actual panel that's well synchronized with 24FPS content, and I don't want to spend hours of research to figure out which displays have one.
  - kansface 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm back to wanting a curated shopping experience. I don't want the cheapest thing. I don't want multiple options- thats worse than nothing. I don't want to worry about counterfeits or knockoffs. I don't want to do research, consult the relevant /r and then look through comment history to see who is paid to say what. I want a store to have an opinion and stock high quality stuff. I would happily pay a premium to offload decision making.
- roughly 4y ago
  It remains the case that you don't discard your identity as a person or personal responsibility when taking a job somewhere, and the purpose of an MBA for the last 40 years has been to produce crappier products for less money while charging consumers the same amount. It's not the MBAs place to set public policy, but it's also broadly an admission of some kind of serious cultural failure to say we need public policy to prevent a large group of people from stripping everything they get their hands on down to the studs for short-term gain, and it doesn't say great things about that group of people, either.
Havoc 4y ago
Painfully broad generalisation
greggsy 4y ago
I have an MBA. It’s not mine or any of my peer’s jobs to provide crap products to ends users - thats up to shareholders to decide.
- SargeDebian 4y ago
  How does that work? The head of engineering gets a unit cost reduction target and then they call some shareholders to come review some proposals for which option works best? Do they show up with a printed certificate showing they own at least one share?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Public companies are required to hold annual meetings with shareholders where they vote for board members and bring up proposals. Shareholders may choose to vote for board member with views about managing the business that they agree with. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-shareholders-vote.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
- Phlarp 4y ago
  Pass that buck on down the line.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  So what would you say you do here?
- transcriptase 4y ago
  It’s your job to decide whether to make the world slightly worse and make an extra dollar, or maintain/improve quality while finding efficiencies elsewhere. The second option may be more difficult but let’s not pretend there aren’t companies that choose it and succeed.
  - greggsy 4y ago
    That’s a very ignorant perspective. For me, it’s rarely about efficiency, and almost always about improving outcomes for workers and users. Micromanaging efficacy to maximise profit is an economists job. If the general public wants a cheap, bad product, they can do so, but they rarely have the inside knowledge to discern quality. Marketing is responsible for telling miseducating them.
dyno12345 4y ago
it doesn't take a degree to figure out when consumers are only comparing prices when shopping
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

taneq 4y ago

Cost optimization IS the limits of the technology. All the nice things you mention are the result of large amounts of work by exceptional people. This costs money. Most of them require higher-spec components, or more design time, or more complicated fabrication and assembly. These things also cost money. Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).

marcellus23 4y ago
Are there companies out there creating premium LED bulbs without these problems?
- bradstewart 4y ago
  Yes. Philips has and Waveform have pretty decent midrange bulbs. Ketra has really, really high quality stuff.
- drorco 4y ago
  I'm no expert with LEDs' technical bits, but I purchased LIFX bulbs which were pretty expensive and they've lasted for almost a decade now.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    I've had the opposite experience. I find that LIFX bulbs fail far too often considering the price tag, however I've yet to find anything else that can match up to them when they work. So I just keep buying them.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  Forget about premium, what the hell are impoverished people supposed to do?
  - zaroth 4y ago

eschneider 4y ago

This seems like an excellent business opportunity.

Majromax 4y ago
> This seems like an excellent business opportunity. Consumer education is rarely an excellent business opportunity. Consumers are very good at comparing prices, and "incandescent watt equivalent" labels provide an understandable comparator for light output. Beyond that, the statistics become much less meaningful. Consumers typically don't read colour temperature ratings (in black-body Kelvin), but instead follow "warm white / soft white / cool white" descriptors. Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting. CRI is a step worse. It is a higher-is-better indicator, but there's no intuitive connection for a consumer. Is a CRI of 80 bad? Is 95 better enough to be worth double the price? Worse yet, CRI is a summary statistic that can gloss over less-measured color reproduction difficulties, and worst yet not all bulbs even publish CRI numbers on the box. My local hardware store is happy to sell you its store-brand generics, none of which have CRI numbers. Flicker is another step into the unknown. No bulbs that I'm aware of publish flicker numbers, even the otherwise respected names like Philips. If you consider this a 'business opportunity', you're left with an unverifiable claim that your bulbs are uniquely better than the competition. Sadly, for now good LED lighting really is the domain of the expensive professional or the hobbyist who spends their spare time tracking down reviews or building custom lighting rigs.
- eschneider 4y ago
  I expect the 'premium' light bulb market is similar to the mechanical keyboard market. Good products and good prices will find a small but dedicated market and build a good rep. Do it right, and eventually your best customers will tell their friends to 'just buy brand "X"' and you can expand from there. Is this a good plan to take over the bulb market? No. But a good product could be a nice, sustainable business.
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  > Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to it, but I don't understand how it's viewed as okay. I walked through a house on a home show and despite being listed for 800k+ (in Iowa), they had a couple mismatches.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/ https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/ The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale. > We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.

causality0 4y ago
Is there anything decent in the middle? Somewhere between one dollar bulbs and eighteen dollar bulbs?
- pkulak 4y ago
  I've been happy with my Cree leds. I can't seem to find them online, only Home Depot.
  - nevir 4y ago
    Home Depot has an exclusively agreement with em
- jghn 4y ago
  I used to buy Cree bulbs. But they they sold the brand and were changed to be the same mass market schlock as the other bulbs, except with a name brand that implies quality.
soulofmischief 4y ago
99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.
4y ago

notatoad 4y ago

just because somebody decides to geek out about LED bulbs, does't mean all those stats that are theoretically measurable actually make a difference. the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.

_rs 4y ago
> are flicker free to my eyes Very rarely will bulbs visibly flicker in my experience. What happens instead is after several hours I'll start to get headaches and feel fatigue without knowing exactly where it's coming from. Since I replaced my Hue bulbs (which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even) I've felt so much better at home
- elcritch 4y ago
  I second the A19 and other bulbs from Ikea. I live right next to an Ikea and it turns out their bulbs are pretty good. Even the housing feels better than Phillips or others. I used to have an expensive Phillips light alarm and it flickered like no other. Especially if you lower the dimming you'll tend to see more flickering or just notice an "ick" feeling with crappier bulbs.
- notatoad 4y ago
  >which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even all bulbs have some flicker, and the fact that it resonates with your phone screen's refresh rate or your camera sensor's sample rate doesn't really mean anything.
  - 4y ago

mturmon 4y ago

I fully agree, and would add that imposition of these artificial limits seems to be a fundamental side-effect of capitalism. "Good old-fashioned" incandescents were also subject to a multi-decade scam to limit their lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel It's manifesting slightly differently this time around, but it's the same principle.

Johnny555 4y ago

rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.

susanasj 4y ago

"cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer." that's just this stage of capitalism unfortunately. Take an airplane trip and you will experience similar effects.

jklinger410 4y ago

This is a trend that has spread into every aspect of specifically American society. Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence. Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials. Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave. Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.

hinkley 4y ago

I can sell a million devices that cost me $4 apiece, or I can sell 1.5 million devices that cost me $3 apiece. That only stops if I have a competitor selling $4.60 bulbs that take away all of my customers. As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.

markdestouches 4y ago

> This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.

verisimi 4y ago

They are poor by design! You want repeat customers of course!

dredmorbius 4y ago

It's a variant of the Market for Lemons problem: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons> Discussed numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons> To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required: - Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality. - Expensive quality assessment. - Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both. You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above). This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products. Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others. There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk). As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.

dang 4y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35372444 - it's fine, but I'm trying to prune things so the thread isn't so top heavy.