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Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have. Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases

Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have. Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before. When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity. And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.

20after4 1y ago
And now the business of wedding / portrait photographer has become hyper-competitive. Now everyone's cousin is an amateur photographer and every phone has an almost acceptable camera built in. It is much more difficult to have a profitable photography business compared to 20 years ago.
- bachmeier 1y ago
  That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them: Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer." Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year." Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?" Them: "No" and hang up the phone. The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
  - NewsaHackO 1y ago
    Definitely. What matters more is that the ability to take photos is available to more people, which is a net positive.
  - LargeWu 1y ago
    In the same breath, those photographers will complain about all the "amateurs" devaluing their services.
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    I know a couple of professional photographers and neither of them will do weddings. It seems many of the clients are as bad as the photographers.
- ath92 1y ago
  The game has definitely changed. It used to be profitable to be a photographer for hire, and that’s no longer the case. But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot. If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    > But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot. So the job qualifications went from "understand lighting, composition, camera technology" to "be hot".
dijksterhuis 1y ago
> That only made the world better Did it? people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it. people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful. people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count. it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example. so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder. someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
- thangalin 1y ago
  > people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it. There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves: * https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/740934055141812 https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/7409340551418... * https://www.facebook.com/reel/3659488930863692 https://www.facebook.com/reel/3659488930863692
  - VonTum 1y ago
    The irony! Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.
munificent 1y ago
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality. The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right. It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations. However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff. We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
- DavidPiper 1y ago
  Thank you for describing this so eloquently. Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware. If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
  - eru 1y ago
    > Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware. You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.
- test6554 1y ago
  Experts warn that at current production levels, the supply of dick pics may actually outpace demand in a couple decades.
pipes 1y ago
I thought photographers don't get paid well anymore due market saturation and few skills required to get a good photo?
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy. It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    As I said in a sibling reply: practice is much easier and so it is much easier to get good. Film was expensive and so few could afford to become good photographers. Sure everyone had a camera, many of them nice SLRs with decent lens (but probably not auto focus - for both better and worse), but it wouldn't take a lot of photos to exceed that cost in film.
- WJW 1y ago
  This implies photographers used to be paid well in the past, which isn't true. Like painting or rock music, photography has always been a winner-takes-all kind of market where a select few can get quite wealthy but the vast majority will be struggling forever.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    While photographer was never a sure path to rich and famous, professionals used to do very good business and make a good living. Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).
flashgordon 1y ago
I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).
- sarchertech 1y ago
  We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
  - flashgordon 1y ago
    Is it possible that we dont remember them precisely because they are temporary (atleast in the grand scheme of things)?
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      It think the only way that’s hiding in the data is if these downturns happen to always coincide with large economic downturns in general. Or if they are so temporary that they last less than a year.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> World will have lots more of apps, and programmers. This is actually bad for existing programmers though? Do you not see how this devalues your skills?
- bitpush 1y ago
  In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it? When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
  - dijksterhuis 1y ago
    Why does every system need to be efficient?
    - hackernoops 1y ago
      Fractional reserve lending, rehypothecation, etc.
    - lupire 1y ago
      Sorry to be that guy, but would to prefer if your computer and phone each cost $5000?
      - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
        In some ways I would, computing lost something once normal people were allowed in.
      - dijksterhuis 1y ago
        > The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff. why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases. i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient. two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again. You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots). One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
- bluGill 1y ago
  While the vast majority of photos are bad, there are still more great photos mixed in than ever before. You of course won't see them because even great photos are hid from view in all the noise, but they are still there.
deanCommie 1y ago
> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity. I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark. In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company. With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera. That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.
- bluGill 1y ago
  > In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company. Everyone in the 1970s was gifted a camera. Many of them got a nice SLR with better lens than a modern smart phone. Cameras were expensive, but within reach of most people. Film was a different story. Today you can get 35mm film rolls for about $8 (36 pictures), and $13 to develop (plus shipping!), and $10 for prints (in 1970 you needed prints for most purposes, thought slides were an option), so $31 - where I live McDonalds starts you are $16/hour, that roll of film costs almost 2 hours work - before taxes. Which is to say you couldn't afford to become skilled in 1970 unless you were rich.

20after4 1y ago

And now the business of wedding / portrait photographer has become hyper-competitive. Now everyone's cousin is an amateur photographer and every phone has an almost acceptable camera built in. It is much more difficult to have a profitable photography business compared to 20 years ago.

bachmeier 1y ago
That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them: Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer." Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year." Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?" Them: "No" and hang up the phone. The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
- NewsaHackO 1y ago
  Definitely. What matters more is that the ability to take photos is available to more people, which is a net positive.
- LargeWu 1y ago
  In the same breath, those photographers will complain about all the "amateurs" devaluing their services.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  I know a couple of professional photographers and neither of them will do weddings. It seems many of the clients are as bad as the photographers.
ath92 1y ago
The game has definitely changed. It used to be profitable to be a photographer for hire, and that’s no longer the case. But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot. If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  > But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot. So the job qualifications went from "understand lighting, composition, camera technology" to "be hot".

dijksterhuis 1y ago

> That only made the world better Did it? people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it. people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful. people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count. it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example. so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder. someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.

thangalin 1y ago
> people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it. There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves: * https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/740934055141812 https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/7409340551418... * https://www.facebook.com/reel/3659488930863692 https://www.facebook.com/reel/3659488930863692
- VonTum 1y ago
  The irony! Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.

munificent 1y ago

> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality. The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right. It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations. However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff. We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.

DavidPiper 1y ago
Thank you for describing this so eloquently. Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware. If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
- eru 1y ago
  > Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware. You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.
test6554 1y ago
Experts warn that at current production levels, the supply of dick pics may actually outpace demand in a couple decades.

pipes 1y ago

I thought photographers don't get paid well anymore due market saturation and few skills required to get a good photo?

kjkjadksj 1y ago
It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy. It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
- bluGill 1y ago
  As I said in a sibling reply: practice is much easier and so it is much easier to get good. Film was expensive and so few could afford to become good photographers. Sure everyone had a camera, many of them nice SLRs with decent lens (but probably not auto focus - for both better and worse), but it wouldn't take a lot of photos to exceed that cost in film.
WJW 1y ago
This implies photographers used to be paid well in the past, which isn't true. Like painting or rock music, photography has always been a winner-takes-all kind of market where a select few can get quite wealthy but the vast majority will be struggling forever.
- bluGill 1y ago
  While photographer was never a sure path to rich and famous, professionals used to do very good business and make a good living. Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).

flashgordon 1y ago

I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).

sarchertech 1y ago
We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
- flashgordon 1y ago
  Is it possible that we dont remember them precisely because they are temporary (atleast in the grand scheme of things)?
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    It think the only way that’s hiding in the data is if these downturns happen to always coincide with large economic downturns in general. Or if they are so temporary that they last less than a year.

bluefirebrand 1y ago

> World will have lots more of apps, and programmers. This is actually bad for existing programmers though? Do you not see how this devalues your skills?

bitpush 1y ago
In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it? When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
- dijksterhuis 1y ago
  Why does every system need to be efficient?
  - hackernoops 1y ago
    Fractional reserve lending, rehypothecation, etc.
  - lupire 1y ago
    Sorry to be that guy, but would to prefer if your computer and phone each cost $5000?
    - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
      In some ways I would, computing lost something once normal people were allowed in.
    - dijksterhuis 1y ago
      > The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff. why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases. i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient. two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again. You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots). One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)

bluGill 1y ago
While the vast majority of photos are bad, there are still more great photos mixed in than ever before. You of course won't see them because even great photos are hid from view in all the noise, but they are still there.

deanCommie 1y ago

> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity. I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark. In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company. With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera. That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.

bluGill 1y ago
> In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company. Everyone in the 1970s was gifted a camera. Many of them got a nice SLR with better lens than a modern smart phone. Cameras were expensive, but within reach of most people. Film was a different story. Today you can get 35mm film rolls for about $8 (36 pictures), and $13 to develop (plus shipping!), and $10 for prints (in 1970 you needed prints for most purposes, thought slides were an option), so $31 - where I live McDonalds starts you are $16/hour, that roll of film costs almost 2 hours work - before taxes. Which is to say you couldn't afford to become skilled in 1970 unless you were rich.