15 ms·

Software is eating the world, all right (2024)

184 points by pegasus 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 2y ago
When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible using automation and technology. Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Not economic gains. Wealth extraction. Provide just as much value as needed to squeeze out the super majority of the new value, maybe less. Edit: We violently agree!
- pdfernhout 2y ago
  The goal goes even further -- to privatize economic gains (e.g. advertising revenues, SaaS revenues) while socializing costs and risks (e.g. increasing social divisiveness by stoking outrage, increasing poor self-image by comparisons with carefully curated images by others, increasing obesity by always getting people to think about processed food, increasing depression rates by face-to-face social isolation, addiction to dopamine hits by hijacking the startle/novelty attention reflex, increasing financial distress by retail therapy, not paying a fair living wage to gig workers so they are essentially mining their cars and wardrobe and health and skills without replenishing them, loss of privacy by being tracked everywhere online, loss of security from identity theft from careless exposure of collected information, the potential for poorly-regulated hyper-competitive superhuman AI destroying human society as we know it, and so on). Marshall Brain's Manna shows two options for how all this may end: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
turtleyacht 2y ago
Author is Jean-Jacques Dubray, creator of State Action Model (SAM) [1], since retired as of this post. [1] http://sam.js.org/ http://sam.js.org/
- fundad 2y ago
  I searched to find out what restaurants he owned. It looks like the harsh realities of operating restaurants urged him to incorporate a company to make RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION SERVICES because of course. https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc
kspacewalk2 2y ago
The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews. Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use words like “clueless and absent” when talking about a twenty-year-old African-American women', it is the author of the article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know. Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.
- exitb 2y ago
  What’s important though is that we can discuss the appropriateness, but it doesn’t matter at all. We can’t bend the rules either way, they’ve been arbitrarily set by someone else.
  - kspacewalk2 2y ago
    The recent resurgence of Bluesky would suggest that, on one of the article's main points about civility/toxicity/moderation, arbitrarily set rules can lead to an exodus and migration to greener pastures. Same is true of the author's own actions, e.g. with the payments provider. So while you cannot change a company, you can often just change companies. If there's a better system for reviewing businesses than Google Maps, by all means, I'll try it out, but the information it gives me as a customer (often, even if not always, and with all other possible caveats) is too valuable for me to simply stop using. Otherwise, the information asymmetry is a nearly complete one, unless I rely on personal recommendations, which is very often not feasible. It has served me very well for what, 12-15 years now? I'll take the occasional sociopath review, those are more rare than insinuated in the article anyway.
    - avgDev 2y ago
      Google reviews have been absolute miss for me. A lot of car dealerships have high reviews in my area and were absolute garbage. There is no way they are not gaming it. I've had similar experience with doctors. So much that I started using word of mouth again and asking physicians I trust for referrals.
runningmike 2y ago
Great post! “The “digital revolution” is financially corrupt, morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating the world, all right.” Applies to a lot of AI develpments too imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium platform….
- oezi 2y ago
  I think Anti-Trust actions or large scale technological revolutions is the only way we can reclaim some competition in the digital space. The digital monopolies are really a cancer of our modern age.
  - nixpulvis 2y ago
    How do we make this actually happen though? I've been saying this for nearly a decade, but I lack a proper outlet.
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    Yeah but they have regulatory captured our government so I don't see that changing soon.
ozymandias8 2y ago
> My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or emphatic they will be. Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags? Yes. One of our juniors found a candidate's Yelp page. The level of awfulness on display there almost had me wondering if it was caricature. (If you're a founder, this works for VCs, too.)
  - tarunkotia 2y ago
    I will not be surprised if there is call for startup to build this exact thing :P
sydbarrett74 2y ago
I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?
- rozap 2y ago
  I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both? imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
  - jochem9 2y ago
    15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think Facebook still sorted by recent back then. The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.
    - hibikir 2y ago
      At one point, a company makes changes to just get users, and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all the efforts come from increasing profitability per user. That will rarely make the company's products better for their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins and minimal growth years ago.
BrenBarn 2y ago
It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption", and against the individuals who run them.)
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users. But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord model but come up with something better.
- throwiruriti 2y ago
  > how willing tech people I find it disgusting how "tech people" are blamed for this. It is like blaming plumbers in Pentagon for stuff in Iraq. Management takes billions, there are politicians, judges, all sorts of regulatory bodies... Everyone is happy to ignore monopoly, get rich, grab more power, and push their agenda. But we have to blame tech people!
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    I'd say its more like blaming soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines,... for stuff in Iraq. If the plumbers in the Pentagon stopped working the war could simply roll merrily on, but if the cogs in the machine go on strike that's another story.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    We were told it would be different and world changing because tech people with their high ideals were liberating us from all these captured institutions. We literally know and are friends with the people that were working at all of these places. So yes, 'tech people'.
- nixpulvis 2y ago
  I used to think I'd be part of the solution, but I honestly don't know where to apply pressure anymore. Go into policy? Go into reporting? Wait decades to build my influence at a company like Google? It all feels untenable.
safog 2y ago
Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  You are incredibly naive to think so. The companies behind those services optimize only to make money, not to provide better value to the users. They only have to provide the minimum amount of value to keep users hooked. Small competitors can be either bought or smothered by your weight.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    POS systems and credit card terminals were a nightmare for restaurants before cloud based challengers appeared.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  On a long enough timeline, probably. But we're talking about decades here. Are you content with things sucking horribly for most of the duration of these cycles ? And this also assumes that we are not moving to a different kind of society (as posited by cyberpunk) : a much more stable system, where corporations are able to capture enough power that only whole society collapse events are able to get rid of most of them.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> sure enough, they had closed us This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that) and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an hour. But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes. Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird, because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order is the only one waiting for pickup.
- rezonant 2y ago
  It might be due to this "feature", but there are a few additional quirks to how the modern food delivery system works for restaurants. First, it is not uncommon to restrict online ordering based on busyness in the kitchen, and that would include in person dining. They might still take orders by phone call because the additional friction slows still slows down the order velocity a lot. Second, a lot of restaurants operate _one tablet per food app_, and it's very cumbersome to do this (you'll see a wall with like 4-5 android tablets attached to it). This invites human error, ie an employee may easily forget to activate a service. This second part is slowly getting better, though.
cjs_ac 2y ago
I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic employees - computers. These electronic employees are very good at following very simple instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be handled in the way that the software engineers planned for. The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber, DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning Chesterton's fences. Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up days). In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that they're cool. (On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook, then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of market positioning.)
- 3739574849 2y ago
  This seems like it breaks down when you consider a lot of the regulations are ideological. Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers. The main lesson if anything seems to be that there's little benefit to preemptively handicapping yourself with that sort of thing because society will impose it anyway.
  - 2y ago
breadwinner 2y ago
I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.
- feznyng 2y ago
  He’s an effective accelerationist which makes him a pretty good figurehead to aim the rhetoric of this article at.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Venture capital demanding YoY growth in revenue is a major (if not the major) driving force behind this person's complaints.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry. ?! He's the longest-serving member on Meta's board, and is a named partner at a prominent and prolific VC fund[1]. Maybe he's not the emperor, but he's at minimum, a duke and/or king-maker in software industry nobility. 1. https://a16z.com/portfolio/ https://a16z.com/portfolio/
buryat 2y ago
We need to start going into the real world by delivering products and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems like a good step forward.
Animats 2y ago
Don't run a restaurant. Especially don't run a kitchen which exists to fill orders controlled by someone else. Nobody seems to want to start a dry cleaning shop. That's a business with good margins, not too much capital investment, and a low failure rate.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Wait, really? Dry cleaning? How do I get started?
  - machomaster 2y ago
    1. Find people who need to launder money. 2. Profit.
petermcneeley 2y ago
Just the tiniest tip of a megalithic iceberg.
carlosjobim 2y ago
The author needs medicine for his soul. (The medicine is humility) It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc. "I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..." That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before I reached it. As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want. The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to have anything to do with these digital platforms. Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant, you can pay your staff more if you want to. The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the author puts it. Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you borrow from relatives and spouses.
- larodi 2y ago
  It is the bias that being good at computing automatically gives you an advantage with somebody else’s algorithms. Or that they see you better as one of their own. After being successful in IT one thinks one can approach arbitrary areas of snail mail life better than the rest, but it’s more complicated than that. Having have the rare opportunity to fail in a way the author write about I can relate the feeling, but no Marc can unwind where we are and it needs solid ideologies to change the status quo. This not a green field anymore in many areas and particularly with who gets peoples’ attention.
robocat 2y ago
A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article was specific to software. Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will. The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs. He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect armchair critic.
numpad0 2y ago
The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular people, in conjunction with that software automation affects everyone. I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option). I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields as the field of software. That must be why and how software is eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of a modern society.
ozim 2y ago
Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to software companies. So author is right basically that’s extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would say. It sucks just like article describes.
hintymad 2y ago
What I'm not sure about is whether the problems that author mentioned were intrinsic to the software systems, or they were fixable. Many of the problems were caused by incompetent product managers, per the author's speculation. I was wondering if such incompetence (or malice for the sake of argument) is rooted in human nature and therefore can't be fixed, or companies can still iteratively remove such pains. If such problems are part of the human nature, then wouldn't they manifest themselves in other systems even if we don't use software?
anal_reactor 2y ago
The curse of growing up during good times is that when things slightly change for the worse, it's the worst you've ever seen in your life. Yes. Some things suck. But other things are amazing. Chill out. It's going to be fine. Personally, I think that the eshittification of the internet will lead to renaissance of offline life, just wait for it.
machomaster 2y ago
The author totally lost me at: 1. examples of the Yelp reviews. Nothing wrong with complimenting someone using the word "sweet". If that's the worst example he came up with, then I am skeptical about the fairness of his overall analysis. 2. complaining about tipping. Your kind of greedy business owners who are not paying their workers living wages and are trying to put social pressure on innocent customers are displaying the exact same behavior that is eating the world, Jean-Jacques.
ndneighbor 2y ago
Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand. I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as. If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so. The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with. Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.
SergeAx 2y ago
The interesting thing here is that he gets exactly what was written in the article he argues with. The software will eat as much of your margin as it can. There should be a small font remark, "regardless of its quality".

184 points by pegasus 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible using automation and technology. Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
Not economic gains. Wealth extraction. Provide just as much value as needed to squeeze out the super majority of the new value, maybe less. Edit: We violently agree!
pdfernhout 2y ago
The goal goes even further -- to privatize economic gains (e.g. advertising revenues, SaaS revenues) while socializing costs and risks (e.g. increasing social divisiveness by stoking outrage, increasing poor self-image by comparisons with carefully curated images by others, increasing obesity by always getting people to think about processed food, increasing depression rates by face-to-face social isolation, addiction to dopamine hits by hijacking the startle/novelty attention reflex, increasing financial distress by retail therapy, not paying a fair living wage to gig workers so they are essentially mining their cars and wardrobe and health and skills without replenishing them, loss of privacy by being tracked everywhere online, loss of security from identity theft from careless exposure of collected information, the potential for poorly-regulated hyper-competitive superhuman AI destroying human society as we know it, and so on). Marshall Brain's Manna shows two options for how all this may end: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna

turtleyacht 2y ago

Author is Jean-Jacques Dubray, creator of State Action Model (SAM) [1], since retired as of this post. [1] http://sam.js.org/ http://sam.js.org/

fundad 2y ago
I searched to find out what restaurants he owned. It looks like the harsh realities of operating restaurants urged him to incorporate a company to make RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION SERVICES because of course. https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc

kspacewalk2 2y ago

The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews. Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use words like “clueless and absent” when talking about a twenty-year-old African-American women', it is the author of the article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know. Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.

exitb 2y ago
What’s important though is that we can discuss the appropriateness, but it doesn’t matter at all. We can’t bend the rules either way, they’ve been arbitrarily set by someone else.
- kspacewalk2 2y ago
  The recent resurgence of Bluesky would suggest that, on one of the article's main points about civility/toxicity/moderation, arbitrarily set rules can lead to an exodus and migration to greener pastures. Same is true of the author's own actions, e.g. with the payments provider. So while you cannot change a company, you can often just change companies. If there's a better system for reviewing businesses than Google Maps, by all means, I'll try it out, but the information it gives me as a customer (often, even if not always, and with all other possible caveats) is too valuable for me to simply stop using. Otherwise, the information asymmetry is a nearly complete one, unless I rely on personal recommendations, which is very often not feasible. It has served me very well for what, 12-15 years now? I'll take the occasional sociopath review, those are more rare than insinuated in the article anyway.
  - avgDev 2y ago
    Google reviews have been absolute miss for me. A lot of car dealerships have high reviews in my area and were absolute garbage. There is no way they are not gaming it. I've had similar experience with doctors. So much that I started using word of mouth again and asking physicians I trust for referrals.

runningmike 2y ago

Great post! “The “digital revolution” is financially corrupt, morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating the world, all right.” Applies to a lot of AI develpments too imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium platform….

oezi 2y ago
I think Anti-Trust actions or large scale technological revolutions is the only way we can reclaim some competition in the digital space. The digital monopolies are really a cancer of our modern age.
- nixpulvis 2y ago
  How do we make this actually happen though? I've been saying this for nearly a decade, but I lack a proper outlet.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Yeah but they have regulatory captured our government so I don't see that changing soon.

ozymandias8 2y ago

> My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or emphatic they will be. Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags? Yes. One of our juniors found a candidate's Yelp page. The level of awfulness on display there almost had me wondering if it was caricature. (If you're a founder, this works for VCs, too.)
- tarunkotia 2y ago
  I will not be surprised if there is call for startup to build this exact thing :P

sydbarrett74 2y ago

I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?

rozap 2y ago
I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both? imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
- jochem9 2y ago
  15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think Facebook still sorted by recent back then. The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    At one point, a company makes changes to just get users, and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all the efforts come from increasing profitability per user. That will rarely make the company's products better for their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins and minimal growth years ago.

BrenBarn 2y ago

It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption", and against the individuals who run them.)

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users. But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord model but come up with something better.

throwiruriti 2y ago
> how willing tech people I find it disgusting how "tech people" are blamed for this. It is like blaming plumbers in Pentagon for stuff in Iraq. Management takes billions, there are politicians, judges, all sorts of regulatory bodies... Everyone is happy to ignore monopoly, get rich, grab more power, and push their agenda. But we have to blame tech people!
- tmtvl 2y ago
  I'd say its more like blaming soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines,... for stuff in Iraq. If the plumbers in the Pentagon stopped working the war could simply roll merrily on, but if the cogs in the machine go on strike that's another story.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  We were told it would be different and world changing because tech people with their high ideals were liberating us from all these captured institutions. We literally know and are friends with the people that were working at all of these places. So yes, 'tech people'.
nixpulvis 2y ago
I used to think I'd be part of the solution, but I honestly don't know where to apply pressure anymore. Go into policy? Go into reporting? Wait decades to build my influence at a company like Google? It all feels untenable.

safog 2y ago

Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.

surgical_fire 2y ago
You are incredibly naive to think so. The companies behind those services optimize only to make money, not to provide better value to the users. They only have to provide the minimum amount of value to keep users hooked. Small competitors can be either bought or smothered by your weight.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  POS systems and credit card terminals were a nightmare for restaurants before cloud based challengers appeared.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
On a long enough timeline, probably. But we're talking about decades here. Are you content with things sucking horribly for most of the duration of these cycles ? And this also assumes that we are not moving to a different kind of society (as posited by cyberpunk) : a much more stable system, where corporations are able to capture enough power that only whole society collapse events are able to get rid of most of them.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

> sure enough, they had closed us This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that) and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an hour. But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes. Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird, because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order is the only one waiting for pickup.

rezonant 2y ago
It might be due to this "feature", but there are a few additional quirks to how the modern food delivery system works for restaurants. First, it is not uncommon to restrict online ordering based on busyness in the kitchen, and that would include in person dining. They might still take orders by phone call because the additional friction slows still slows down the order velocity a lot. Second, a lot of restaurants operate _one tablet per food app_, and it's very cumbersome to do this (you'll see a wall with like 4-5 android tablets attached to it). This invites human error, ie an employee may easily forget to activate a service. This second part is slowly getting better, though.

cjs_ac 2y ago

I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic employees - computers. These electronic employees are very good at following very simple instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be handled in the way that the software engineers planned for. The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber, DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning Chesterton's fences. Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up days). In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that they're cool. (On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook, then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of market positioning.)

3739574849 2y ago
This seems like it breaks down when you consider a lot of the regulations are ideological. Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers. The main lesson if anything seems to be that there's little benefit to preemptively handicapping yourself with that sort of thing because society will impose it anyway.
- 2y ago

breadwinner 2y ago

I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.

feznyng 2y ago
He’s an effective accelerationist which makes him a pretty good figurehead to aim the rhetoric of this article at.
plagiarist 2y ago
Venture capital demanding YoY growth in revenue is a major (if not the major) driving force behind this person's complaints.
sangnoir 2y ago
> He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry. ?! He's the longest-serving member on Meta's board, and is a named partner at a prominent and prolific VC fund[1]. Maybe he's not the emperor, but he's at minimum, a duke and/or king-maker in software industry nobility. 1. https://a16z.com/portfolio/ https://a16z.com/portfolio/

buryat 2y ago

We need to start going into the real world by delivering products and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems like a good step forward.

Animats 2y ago

Don't run a restaurant. Especially don't run a kitchen which exists to fill orders controlled by someone else. Nobody seems to want to start a dry cleaning shop. That's a business with good margins, not too much capital investment, and a low failure rate.

plagiarist 2y ago
Wait, really? Dry cleaning? How do I get started?
- machomaster 2y ago
  1. Find people who need to launder money. 2. Profit.

petermcneeley 2y ago

Just the tiniest tip of a megalithic iceberg.

carlosjobim 2y ago

The author needs medicine for his soul. (The medicine is humility) It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc. "I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..." That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before I reached it. As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want. The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to have anything to do with these digital platforms. Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant, you can pay your staff more if you want to. The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the author puts it. Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you borrow from relatives and spouses.

larodi 2y ago
It is the bias that being good at computing automatically gives you an advantage with somebody else’s algorithms. Or that they see you better as one of their own. After being successful in IT one thinks one can approach arbitrary areas of snail mail life better than the rest, but it’s more complicated than that. Having have the rare opportunity to fail in a way the author write about I can relate the feeling, but no Marc can unwind where we are and it needs solid ideologies to change the status quo. This not a green field anymore in many areas and particularly with who gets peoples’ attention.

robocat 2y ago

A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article was specific to software. Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will. The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs. He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect armchair critic.

numpad0 2y ago

The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular people, in conjunction with that software automation affects everyone. I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option). I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields as the field of software. That must be why and how software is eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of a modern society.

ozim 2y ago

Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to software companies. So author is right basically that’s extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would say. It sucks just like article describes.

hintymad 2y ago

What I'm not sure about is whether the problems that author mentioned were intrinsic to the software systems, or they were fixable. Many of the problems were caused by incompetent product managers, per the author's speculation. I was wondering if such incompetence (or malice for the sake of argument) is rooted in human nature and therefore can't be fixed, or companies can still iteratively remove such pains. If such problems are part of the human nature, then wouldn't they manifest themselves in other systems even if we don't use software?

anal_reactor 2y ago

The curse of growing up during good times is that when things slightly change for the worse, it's the worst you've ever seen in your life. Yes. Some things suck. But other things are amazing. Chill out. It's going to be fine. Personally, I think that the eshittification of the internet will lead to renaissance of offline life, just wait for it.

machomaster 2y ago

The author totally lost me at: 1. examples of the Yelp reviews. Nothing wrong with complimenting someone using the word "sweet". If that's the worst example he came up with, then I am skeptical about the fairness of his overall analysis. 2. complaining about tipping. Your kind of greedy business owners who are not paying their workers living wages and are trying to put social pressure on innocent customers are displaying the exact same behavior that is eating the world, Jean-Jacques.

ndneighbor 2y ago

Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand. I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as. If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so. The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with. Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.

SergeAx 2y ago

The interesting thing here is that he gets exactly what was written in the article he argues with. The software will eat as much of your margin as it can. There should be a small font remark, "regardless of its quality".