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I'd rather formulate it the other way around. There are not enough smart people in computing working on the really important things. Instead they are working on

I'd rather formulate it the other way around. There are not enough smart people in computing working on the really important things. Instead they are working on what pays the most.

eu 2y ago
and what would be some important (and boring) things to focus on?
- gherkinnn 2y ago
  Not ads. I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Ad blockers :) Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to have a good Internet experience? It would have to update itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the arms race with advertisers. It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features; automatically open the chronological tab instead of the recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do anything about it.
    - Euphorbium 2y ago
      All of that war can be ended legally in a day. The solution is not technological.
    - lieks 2y ago
      Librewolf is pretty much that. Firefox with stupid features turned off, all privacy settings to the max, uBlock Origin and no other customizations.
  - partomniscient 2y ago
    I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting my attention to make me behave against my own best interests by buying something, or even just offered the opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases enriches someone else. If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful, rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise myself or the rest of humanity. There's a massive difference between making the world a better place versus making the world a better place for a select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy emphasis on the latter. And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes
    - exe34 2y ago
      do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the video without the ads. every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels, I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories of cats getting in awkward situations). I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm going to go offline and never go back online.
      - partomniscient 2y ago
        I actually pay for YouTube to not show me advertising, but I'm also a fan of UBlock Origin and yt-dlp [1], and also physical media, but I do appreciate ebooks a lot. [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
- javcasas 2y ago
  Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not great) software engineers for a year. Choose between: * Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering. * Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue. Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs. Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry). And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?
tomrod 2y ago
Yep, collaboration problems are hard to solve. What are the financial incentives in biotech to trade time for wages?
hinkley 2y ago
And building slightly special versions of things that already exist. In some ways I think we’d have more progress with fewer devs. And I don’t mean “cull the bad ones”. I mean necessity is the mother of invention. We’d have 3 CRMs and a dozen content management systems instead of dozens and thousands respectively.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is the number of developers. The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off. Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.
Terr_ 2y ago
> > doing something boring > the other way around [...] important things That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are opposites, but they aren't. There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring task of reviewing code that needs to be right or else someone dies.
briandear 2y ago
Important things pay the most. Or they aren’t important. If they aren’t valuable, they aren’t important. The market determines important. If there is something that someone thinks is important but aren’t willing to spend their own money on it, then it clearly isn’t that important.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Right, which is why oxygen isn't important, because I don't pay anything for oxygen. Praise the Market!
- Buttons840 2y ago
  The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks make less money than people writing a web page that half works. I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
- exe34 2y ago
  exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence together getting elected a second time.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    No, you just don’t get it. It’s the weave, bro. You’re just not smart enough to understand it, bro.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  This assumes people’s preferences are optimally aligned to their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that, more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None of this is actually true. There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests. This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.

I'd rather formulate it the other way around. There are not enough smart people in computing working on the really important things. Instead they are working on what pays the most.

eu 2y ago

and what would be some important (and boring) things to focus on?

gherkinnn 2y ago
Not ads. I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
- immibis 2y ago
  Ad blockers :) Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to have a good Internet experience? It would have to update itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the arms race with advertisers. It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features; automatically open the chronological tab instead of the recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do anything about it.
  - Euphorbium 2y ago
    All of that war can be ended legally in a day. The solution is not technological.
  - lieks 2y ago
    Librewolf is pretty much that. Firefox with stupid features turned off, all privacy settings to the max, uBlock Origin and no other customizations.
- partomniscient 2y ago
  I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting my attention to make me behave against my own best interests by buying something, or even just offered the opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases enriches someone else. If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful, rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise myself or the rest of humanity. There's a massive difference between making the world a better place versus making the world a better place for a select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy emphasis on the latter. And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wycjnCCgUes
  - exe34 2y ago
    do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the video without the ads. every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels, I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories of cats getting in awkward situations). I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm going to go offline and never go back online.
    - partomniscient 2y ago
      I actually pay for YouTube to not show me advertising, but I'm also a fan of UBlock Origin and yt-dlp [1], and also physical media, but I do appreciate ebooks a lot. [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
javcasas 2y ago
Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not great) software engineers for a year. Choose between: * Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering. * Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue. Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs. Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry). And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?

tomrod 2y ago

Yep, collaboration problems are hard to solve. What are the financial incentives in biotech to trade time for wages?

hinkley 2y ago

And building slightly special versions of things that already exist. In some ways I think we’d have more progress with fewer devs. And I don’t mean “cull the bad ones”. I mean necessity is the mother of invention. We’d have 3 CRMs and a dozen content management systems instead of dozens and thousands respectively.

Terr_ 2y ago
That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is the number of developers. The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off. Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.

Terr_ 2y ago

> > doing something boring > the other way around [...] important things That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are opposites, but they aren't. There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring task of reviewing code that needs to be right or else someone dies.

briandear 2y ago

Important things pay the most. Or they aren’t important. If they aren’t valuable, they aren’t important. The market determines important. If there is something that someone thinks is important but aren’t willing to spend their own money on it, then it clearly isn’t that important.

kibwen 2y ago
Right, which is why oxygen isn't important, because I don't pay anything for oxygen. Praise the Market!
Buttons840 2y ago
The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks make less money than people writing a web page that half works. I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
exe34 2y ago
exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence together getting elected a second time.
- 9dev 2y ago
  No, you just don’t get it. It’s the weave, bro. You’re just not smart enough to understand it, bro.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
This assumes people’s preferences are optimally aligned to their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that, more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None of this is actually true. There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests. This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.