4 ms·

This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to engage with the detail, and increasing

by cjs_ac 2y ago

This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to engage with the detail, and increasingly expects the world to conform to its expectations. That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements.

mschuster91 2y ago
> That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements. That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions. When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can touch. This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
  - robocat 2y ago
    Customisation has other major costs. 1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests) 2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom. 3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software. 4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim. Two examples of bad customisation requests: A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard. B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
- 6DM 2y ago
  Ironically at my company, our custom software made us too flexible. There was too many crazy left field demands that weren't really that useful. So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
  - BJones12 2y ago
    The #1 purpose of ERP software is to take the blame.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  We got one of our largest and definitely most complex customers not long ago. Being rather small, we pushed hard against any customization that we didn't feel was necessary due to business demands, and asked them to follow the way we'd successfully used with our many other customers. After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
  - floydnoel 2y ago
    sounds like a fantastic case study!
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      That is a good point I hadn't considered. I do think there are some good lessons we could share.
- BJones12 2y ago
  > every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.
cameronh90 2y ago
That "refusal" is by design. Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century. It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  This is poignant in the age of LLMs. What cultural richness are we going to lose as a result? What societal cohesion are we going to lose? What wealth inequality are we going to create?
  - Secretmapper 2y ago
    There's actually something interesting here in my opinion, which is that LLMs do not necessarily need to hinder standardization. For example, we have standardized schooling/exams, because that's the proven scalable way we can have for children - essentially a factory spitting out different grade levels/seniority. But LLMs can break this standardization by being able to tailor student needs in a scalable manner. However this takes a huge amount of action, and that's going to be the pain point in the near future as we humans tend towards the easy/greedy paths. Cultural richness - LLMs are also very bad in this regard due to the bias towards majority viewpoints. This reminds me of a recent HN thread [0] discussing how AI is hindering the adoption of new technologies. In some ways, this happens because AI tends to favor mainstream perspectives, making it biased against "new" or "fringe" viewpoints. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    We will only lose our culture if powerful people exert dominance. That's how cultures were withered throughout history, a dominant violent culture comes and pushes its wicked pursuit. It takes decades or centuries to recover your culture after it happens. Shout out to Native Americans, keep trucking, you'll get it all back (truly sorry about all this). People talk about the glory of Rome, but it was utterly vile. They either enslaved or exterminated whoever they conquered. If they had an LLM, they might keep you alive and brainwash you with it. Maybe. Per gpt: "In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort." This was done to thwart desertion. This is similar to: - PIP. - Email me what you did last week or your fired. - Blanket 10% layoffs in high profit environments - Blanket 10% cuts in general I'm less scared about AI than the culture of dominance utilizing it. We are not the only people that ever lived on planet fucking earth, everything has been done already in some other form of matter. The wicked animals you see now days in power have lived many times over in past histories, we've seen these exact people many times. We simply get hoodwinked when they seduce us with casual talk about space, science, and the world. Decent people begin to think they are just like us. Nope, they are not like us. Sometimes you just have to connect the dots and accept it. History precedes us and owns us.
drivers99 2y ago
> This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779
- waveBidder 2y ago
  if no one has ever pointed you at Seeing like a State, it's about the political and economic implications of this fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
_Algernon_ 2y ago
And this has been true since states wrought the cadastral map, last names, the metric system and taxes on us. The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).
- bobson381 2y ago
  I had a fleeting hope for a while that the sheer complexity of reality would thwart these forces, a la https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard -- but I'm increasingly worried that the explosion in performance of machine learning plus the fact that much of the world's population has willingly handed over their data in service of convenience will just make it a cakewalk. What is the modern digital equivalent to the War Machine (e.g. Deleuze) that can fight this? is it possible? Am I overreacting?
monknomo 2y ago
I saw someone saying that it is as though tech read Seeing Like a State and took the wrong lesson I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood
joe_the_user 2y ago
It's the complexity of reality sure - but that's not the only lesson. Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.

by cjs_ac 2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

> That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements. That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions. When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can touch. This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
- robocat 2y ago
  Customisation has other major costs. 1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests) 2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom. 3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software. 4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim. Two examples of bad customisation requests: A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard. B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
6DM 2y ago
Ironically at my company, our custom software made us too flexible. There was too many crazy left field demands that weren't really that useful. So when it came time to think about next steps. There was real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
- BJones12 2y ago
  The #1 purpose of ERP software is to take the blame.
magicalhippo 2y ago
We got one of our largest and definitely most complex customers not long ago. Being rather small, we pushed hard against any customization that we didn't feel was necessary due to business demands, and asked them to follow the way we'd successfully used with our many other customers. After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced them to rethink how they worked but the result was much better and more optimized processes.
- floydnoel 2y ago
  sounds like a fantastic case study!
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    That is a good point I hadn't considered. I do think there are some good lessons we could share.
BJones12 2y ago
> every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with industry-standard software workflows.

cameronh90 2y ago

That "refusal" is by design. Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first standardised screw threads in the 19th century. It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.

tmpz22 2y ago
This is poignant in the age of LLMs. What cultural richness are we going to lose as a result? What societal cohesion are we going to lose? What wealth inequality are we going to create?
- Secretmapper 2y ago
  There's actually something interesting here in my opinion, which is that LLMs do not necessarily need to hinder standardization. For example, we have standardized schooling/exams, because that's the proven scalable way we can have for children - essentially a factory spitting out different grade levels/seniority. But LLMs can break this standardization by being able to tailor student needs in a scalable manner. However this takes a huge amount of action, and that's going to be the pain point in the near future as we humans tend towards the easy/greedy paths. Cultural richness - LLMs are also very bad in this regard due to the bias towards majority viewpoints. This reminds me of a recent HN thread [0] discussing how AI is hindering the adoption of new technologies. In some ways, this happens because AI tends to favor mainstream perspectives, making it biased against "new" or "fringe" viewpoints. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  We will only lose our culture if powerful people exert dominance. That's how cultures were withered throughout history, a dominant violent culture comes and pushes its wicked pursuit. It takes decades or centuries to recover your culture after it happens. Shout out to Native Americans, keep trucking, you'll get it all back (truly sorry about all this). People talk about the glory of Rome, but it was utterly vile. They either enslaved or exterminated whoever they conquered. If they had an LLM, they might keep you alive and brainwash you with it. Maybe. Per gpt: "In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort." This was done to thwart desertion. This is similar to: - PIP. - Email me what you did last week or your fired. - Blanket 10% layoffs in high profit environments - Blanket 10% cuts in general I'm less scared about AI than the culture of dominance utilizing it. We are not the only people that ever lived on planet fucking earth, everything has been done already in some other form of matter. The wicked animals you see now days in power have lived many times over in past histories, we've seen these exact people many times. We simply get hoodwinked when they seduce us with casual talk about space, science, and the world. Decent people begin to think they are just like us. Nope, they are not like us. Sometimes you just have to connect the dots and accept it. History precedes us and owns us.

drivers99 2y ago

> This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779

waveBidder 2y ago
if no one has ever pointed you at Seeing like a State, it's about the political and economic implications of this fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

_Algernon_ 2y ago

And this has been true since states wrought the cadastral map, last names, the metric system and taxes on us. The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions, selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile foreign powers).

bobson381 2y ago
I had a fleeting hope for a while that the sheer complexity of reality would thwart these forces, a la https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard -- but I'm increasingly worried that the explosion in performance of machine learning plus the fact that much of the world's population has willingly handed over their data in service of convenience will just make it a cakewalk. What is the modern digital equivalent to the War Machine (e.g. Deleuze) that can fight this? is it possible? Am I overreacting?

monknomo 2y ago

I saw someone saying that it is as though tech read Seeing Like a State and took the wrong lesson I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is falling into the same trap as described in the book where efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these types of things is not properly understood

joe_the_user 2y ago

It's the complexity of reality sure - but that's not the only lesson. Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate protocols if those protocols are specified and the users believe in the mission/purpose of the site/organization/association.