I wrote this analogy to explain this situation to my Facebook friends: Hypothetical cooking analogy for the non-techies: Back in the day, if you wanted to cook

I wrote this analogy to explain this situation to my Facebook friends: Hypothetical cooking analogy for the non-techies: Back in the day, if you wanted to cook up a fancy meal, there was only one butcher in town, and he did things the "right" way. He only used one variety of beef, because it was the "best", and he only sold the "best" cut of that beef. Similarly, there was only one farmer, who only sold the "right" crops, because they had the "right" flavor. When you wanted to cook a fancy meal, you didn't really have any decisions to make, because there was only the "One True Way": one "correct" cut of meat, one "correct" vegetable selection, etc. Since then, an explosion of variety has occurred. However, perhaps we have swung too far in the other direction. Rather than choosing among the 6 different makers of pasta sauce, you now must choose among 6 varieties of pasta sauce from each of the six makers. This way lies decision fatigue. However, the community of grocers got together and came up with an ingenious artificial intelligence agent built into a pick-packer system. Now, you don't need to even know a single brand name of pasta sauce. You can simply arrive at the store, tell the system what recipe you are following, tell it that you prefer your tomatoes from Spain, your beef the organic grass-fed variety, and your garlic from the Mediterranean, but you'll take whatever variety of pasta is local and most fresh. The system then assembles your grocery cart automatically for you, and you can choose to remain blissfully ignorant of all of the decision-fatigue inducing choices which occurred under the hood. However, if you are of the crotchety-old-man sort, and you "Only buy my rib-eyes from Lambert and Sons, because he's the only butcher who does it right", you can of course choose not to use the AI pick-packer, and you can take it upon yourself to select the "best of breed" ingredients for your meal, and pretend that the explosion of variety never happened. So here's the deal. Poul-Henning Kamp wrote an article lamenting the fact that the explosion of variety happened and that the AI pick-packer was invented, because now everything is a giant mess, and back in his day, there was only one right way to do it, dammit.