4 ms·

You're just getting older and looking at the past with rose colored glasses. No one is going backwards in capability. It is about how accessible and cheap the t

You're just getting older and looking at the past with rose colored glasses. No one is going backwards in capability. It is about how accessible and cheap the thing is. In the 90's, a license to install Maya or 3D Studio Max, or Lightwave was extremely expensive, those products were not promoted nor available to the general public. They would cost tens of thousands of dollars, for the software alone, not to mention the hardware. Today it is a commodity. So we are flooded with low effort productions. With that being said, we have more capability than ever, at the cheapest cost ever. Whether businesses use that wisely is a different story. There will always be outliers. I see many comments with people who derived value from whatever they perceived as something uncommon and unique they could do. Now AI has made those skills a commodity. So they lose their motivation since it becomes harder to attain some sort of adoration. In any case, going forward, no matter what, there will be those who adopt the new tools and use them passionately to create things that are above and beyond the average. And folks will be on HN reminiscing about those people, 30 years from now.

yubblegum 2y ago
Boeing calls to say hello...
- Art9681 2y ago
  All I know is more often than not, when I travel by air, I am more than likely going to be in a Boeing aircraft. I also know more planes fly today than ever. So it is no surprise that in a hyper connected world where everyone with a phone and a camera can document every single failure in any service or product, that it would be perceived that things are going backwards. If we had this in the 80's or 90's it wouldn't be much different. Did our quality and capability get worse or did everyone become a journalist that can document every flaw and distribute it globally in minutes? Hmmm....
  - yubblegum 2y ago
    Hmmm... OK, Airbus calls to say hi, too.
  - SecretDreams 2y ago
    QC hasn't scaled with volume and robustness introduced by better engineers (now retired) has been peeled back by juniors and managers that didn't understand the designs in the first place and are chasing mass and profit instead.
    - trollbridge 2y ago
      QC is one of the first things to get cut. In software eventually customers punish you when your software is so bad that they can’t really use it at all. Aircraft used to be regulated, but Boeing somehow carved out “self regulation”. It’s the same problem as how washing machines don’t last as long as they did 20 years ago.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Our capabilities didn't get worse. Management caused a shift in culture to make things worse by cheaper. We call it enshittification these days, but it'd decades in the making. All this discussion assumes that Boeing engineers didn't catch this stuff and weren't banging the alarm bells over how these completely failed inspection. The problem was the people in power ignored it. This is an entirely social issue constructed by business demands, not one lacking expertise nor standards.
- anon-3988 2y ago
  Yea lets take that flight with airplanes from 30 years ago shall we
  - bronco21016 2y ago
    Check the registration on the next aircraft you take a ride on ;) 30 years may be a stretch but 20-25 certainly isn't.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      Counter-intuitively this is especially true with international flights... The main stressor for a plane is not like a car, where it's miles driven/flown. Its in pressurization/depressurization. And so a plane doing domestic skips an hour or two away will wear out way faster than one doing transatlantic trips, and so you're more likely to see the shiny new plane on a short domestic trip than on a big international one. Incidentally this also applies similarly to risk issues. The biggest risk in a flight is not in flying, but in takeoff/landing. This is why the commonly cited deaths/mile metric is not only misleading but completely disingenuous by the people/organizations that release it, knowing full well that the vast majority of people don't understand this. If some person replaced their car with a plane (and could somehow land/take off anywhere), their overall risk of death in transit would be significantly higher than if they were using e.g. a car. 'Air travel being safer than cars' relies on this misleading and meaningless death/miles statistic.
      - laszlojamf 2y ago
        This is really interesting! Never thought of that. Do you have a source for these facts?
      - MaPi_ 2y ago
        Sure, replacing the car with a plane for your grocery shopping would be probably more dangerous, but do you have any data at what distances do the risks flip? When I see those statistics I think about flights like Austria to Finland and I imagine that is indeed safer by plane.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  This is an excellent example. The 737 used to crash a LOT MORE than it does now, and even the version with MCAS is a safer airplane than your average 1990s jetliner (which was also probably a 737, which is kind of my point)[1]. So it's a slightly less safe (in the grand scheme of things) airliner that's vastly more fuel efficient and cheaper to run than any in the past. Obviously this is of no comfort to the families of the people who died in the crash! But to suggest that Boeing has somehow regressed decades in technical capabilities is just plain wrong. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    When you look at how type acceptance works, all Boeing planes are going to be a "737". When you actually look at the 737 MAX and compare it to earlier aircraft, it's pretty obvious that they've created a whole new aircraft. Hence MCAS trying to pretend like that didn't happen & dead people.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Thanks for that list/link. It's so easy to forget how awful the past was.
  - oxfordmale 2y ago
    The problem isn't that Boeing is less safe; it is that the company's culture shifted to the extent that technical staff could no longer report perceived safety issues.
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    This is an excellent example of design failure. So in reality, yes, Boeing has regressed as 90s Boeing would never have released a plane like that.
    - 2y ago
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
But for example Toy Story (1995) had a budget of 30 million. Today's Disney box office flops have budgets closer to 250 million.
- jkaptur 2y ago
  I think that’s the rose colored glasses again. What made you choose Toy Story as an example rather than Waterworld or Cutthroat Island?
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Because the thread was discussing CG becoming a commodity and Toy Story was the first thing that popped into mind for 90s CG; I have a vague recollection that it was the first feature-length full-CG film. I only checked its production budget while writing my comment.
    - ipsum2 2y ago
      You're illustrating his point, that you're using survivorship bias to cherrypick good CGI movies from the 90s.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Actually, I picked the first CGI movie from the 90s, and it just happened to be good and very cheap. But more importantly, the other half of my point was that $250 million ought to be enough to pay for a high effort production. It's not like "well Blender is free now so of course theatres are flooded with amateur CG films since their production has been commoditized".
        milesrout 2y ago
        But it wasn't very good. It was good for the time but if something of that quality came out today it would be a joke.
        2y ago
somenameforme 2y ago
This is a tangent, but I don't think the cost of things like 3DS or Maya were ever major barriers to entry. They were widely available for 'free' download. I think the companies involved were basically using this as what would eventually become the modern 'free for entities with less than $xxx annual revenue' license as there was seemingly less than 0 effort to ever enforce their copyrights. To say nothing of the countless commercial books available for both, which simply would not have had a market if it was only selling to people who had real licenses for the software.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
If it's a commodity why is everything worse in quality? Commodification doesn't explain drop in objective metrics like performance, security, and complexity. It doesn't even explain the decline in stuff like customer satisfaction. I don't think talent is the problem either. There's a lot more talent now than in the 90's.
- dkislyuk 2y ago
  I think commodification is directly tied to a perceived drop in quality. For example, if the barriers to making a video game keep going down, there will be far more attempts, and per Sturgeon's law, the majority will be of low quality. And we have a recency bias where we over-index on the last few releases that we've seen, and we only remember the good stuff from a generation or two ago. But for every multitude of low-effort, AI-generated video games out there, we still get gems like Factorio and Valheim.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Surgeon's paw was true in the 90's and is true in the '20s. There's not much point in comparing the crap to the crap. The only big difference is that it is easier to see the bottom of the barrel in your most popular storefronts with a click l(even on "curated" ones these days woth PSN and the eShop) instead of going out of your way to find some shareware from a Geocity that barely functioned. Thing is those high profile disasters are still supposedly the "cream of the crop". That's why they get compared to the cream of before. Popular examples are easier to exemplify as well instead of taking the time to explain what Blinx the Cat or Midnight Club are (examples of good but not genre-defining entries)

yubblegum 2y ago

Boeing calls to say hello...

Art9681 2y ago
All I know is more often than not, when I travel by air, I am more than likely going to be in a Boeing aircraft. I also know more planes fly today than ever. So it is no surprise that in a hyper connected world where everyone with a phone and a camera can document every single failure in any service or product, that it would be perceived that things are going backwards. If we had this in the 80's or 90's it wouldn't be much different. Did our quality and capability get worse or did everyone become a journalist that can document every flaw and distribute it globally in minutes? Hmmm....
- yubblegum 2y ago
  Hmmm... OK, Airbus calls to say hi, too.
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  QC hasn't scaled with volume and robustness introduced by better engineers (now retired) has been peeled back by juniors and managers that didn't understand the designs in the first place and are chasing mass and profit instead.
  - trollbridge 2y ago
    QC is one of the first things to get cut. In software eventually customers punish you when your software is so bad that they can’t really use it at all. Aircraft used to be regulated, but Boeing somehow carved out “self regulation”. It’s the same problem as how washing machines don’t last as long as they did 20 years ago.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Our capabilities didn't get worse. Management caused a shift in culture to make things worse by cheaper. We call it enshittification these days, but it'd decades in the making. All this discussion assumes that Boeing engineers didn't catch this stuff and weren't banging the alarm bells over how these completely failed inspection. The problem was the people in power ignored it. This is an entirely social issue constructed by business demands, not one lacking expertise nor standards.
anon-3988 2y ago
Yea lets take that flight with airplanes from 30 years ago shall we
- bronco21016 2y ago
  Check the registration on the next aircraft you take a ride on ;) 30 years may be a stretch but 20-25 certainly isn't.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Counter-intuitively this is especially true with international flights... The main stressor for a plane is not like a car, where it's miles driven/flown. Its in pressurization/depressurization. And so a plane doing domestic skips an hour or two away will wear out way faster than one doing transatlantic trips, and so you're more likely to see the shiny new plane on a short domestic trip than on a big international one. Incidentally this also applies similarly to risk issues. The biggest risk in a flight is not in flying, but in takeoff/landing. This is why the commonly cited deaths/mile metric is not only misleading but completely disingenuous by the people/organizations that release it, knowing full well that the vast majority of people don't understand this. If some person replaced their car with a plane (and could somehow land/take off anywhere), their overall risk of death in transit would be significantly higher than if they were using e.g. a car. 'Air travel being safer than cars' relies on this misleading and meaningless death/miles statistic.
    - laszlojamf 2y ago
      This is really interesting! Never thought of that. Do you have a source for these facts?
    - MaPi_ 2y ago
      Sure, replacing the car with a plane for your grocery shopping would be probably more dangerous, but do you have any data at what distances do the risks flip? When I see those statistics I think about flights like Austria to Finland and I imagine that is indeed safer by plane.
SR2Z 2y ago
This is an excellent example. The 737 used to crash a LOT MORE than it does now, and even the version with MCAS is a safer airplane than your average 1990s jetliner (which was also probably a 737, which is kind of my point)[1]. So it's a slightly less safe (in the grand scheme of things) airliner that's vastly more fuel efficient and cheaper to run than any in the past. Obviously this is of no comfort to the families of the people who died in the crash! But to suggest that Boeing has somehow regressed decades in technical capabilities is just plain wrong. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  When you look at how type acceptance works, all Boeing planes are going to be a "737". When you actually look at the 737 MAX and compare it to earlier aircraft, it's pretty obvious that they've created a whole new aircraft. Hence MCAS trying to pretend like that didn't happen & dead people.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Thanks for that list/link. It's so easy to forget how awful the past was.
- oxfordmale 2y ago
  The problem isn't that Boeing is less safe; it is that the company's culture shifted to the extent that technical staff could no longer report perceived safety issues.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  This is an excellent example of design failure. So in reality, yes, Boeing has regressed as 90s Boeing would never have released a plane like that.
  - 2y ago

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

But for example Toy Story (1995) had a budget of 30 million. Today's Disney box office flops have budgets closer to 250 million.

jkaptur 2y ago
I think that’s the rose colored glasses again. What made you choose Toy Story as an example rather than Waterworld or Cutthroat Island?
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Because the thread was discussing CG becoming a commodity and Toy Story was the first thing that popped into mind for 90s CG; I have a vague recollection that it was the first feature-length full-CG film. I only checked its production budget while writing my comment.
  - ipsum2 2y ago
    You're illustrating his point, that you're using survivorship bias to cherrypick good CGI movies from the 90s.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Actually, I picked the first CGI movie from the 90s, and it just happened to be good and very cheap. But more importantly, the other half of my point was that $250 million ought to be enough to pay for a high effort production. It's not like "well Blender is free now so of course theatres are flooded with amateur CG films since their production has been commoditized".
      - milesrout 2y ago
        But it wasn't very good. It was good for the time but if something of that quality came out today it would be a joke.
      - 2y ago

somenameforme 2y ago

This is a tangent, but I don't think the cost of things like 3DS or Maya were ever major barriers to entry. They were widely available for 'free' download. I think the companies involved were basically using this as what would eventually become the modern 'free for entities with less than $xxx annual revenue' license as there was seemingly less than 0 effort to ever enforce their copyrights. To say nothing of the countless commercial books available for both, which simply would not have had a market if it was only selling to people who had real licenses for the software.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

If it's a commodity why is everything worse in quality? Commodification doesn't explain drop in objective metrics like performance, security, and complexity. It doesn't even explain the decline in stuff like customer satisfaction. I don't think talent is the problem either. There's a lot more talent now than in the 90's.

dkislyuk 2y ago
I think commodification is directly tied to a perceived drop in quality. For example, if the barriers to making a video game keep going down, there will be far more attempts, and per Sturgeon's law, the majority will be of low quality. And we have a recency bias where we over-index on the last few releases that we've seen, and we only remember the good stuff from a generation or two ago. But for every multitude of low-effort, AI-generated video games out there, we still get gems like Factorio and Valheim.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Surgeon's paw was true in the 90's and is true in the '20s. There's not much point in comparing the crap to the crap. The only big difference is that it is easier to see the bottom of the barrel in your most popular storefronts with a click l(even on "curated" ones these days woth PSN and the eShop) instead of going out of your way to find some shareware from a Geocity that barely functioned. Thing is those high profile disasters are still supposedly the "cream of the crop". That's why they get compared to the cream of before. Popular examples are easier to exemplify as well instead of taking the time to explain what Blinx the Cat or Midnight Club are (examples of good but not genre-defining entries)