4 ms·

The whole 'startup/scaleup' culture (which have become the industry titans of today) - is insane and have been insane for as long as it has been a thing - the c

The whole 'startup/scaleup' culture (which have become the industry titans of today) - is insane and have been insane for as long as it has been a thing - the culture of either 'just grow and figure out how to monetize'(Social media, food delivery etc.) or 'we're selling you this technology that doesn't exist yet but going to be insanely valuable in the future (AGI, self driving)' or 'we're selling shovels to the first 2' (cloud providers, Nvidia) has been insane. I'd argue that compared to a decade. 15 years ago, relatively little value has been created. If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. Yet in this time the US has doubled its GDP, most of it owning to the top, to the tech professionals and financiers who benefited from this. And some of this money went into assets with constrained supplies, such as housing, marking up the prices adjusted for inflation, making average people that much worse off. While I do feel society is making progress, it's been a slow and steady march. Which in relative terms means slowing. Of I gave you $10 every week, by week 2, you'd double your wealth, by the end of the year, you almost didn't notice the increase. Technology accumulation is the same, I'd argue it's even worse, since building on top of existing stuff has a cost proportional to the complexity for a fixed unit of gain (and features get proportionally less valuable as you implement the most important ones first). Sorry got distracted from my main point - what happens when people stop believing that these improvements are meanigful or that technology that was priced in to produce 100x the value will come at all (and more importantly the company you're invested in will be able to caputre it)?

dangus 1y ago
> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong. You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it. 15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own. 10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release. Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old. TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday. I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.
- apercu 1y ago
  I tried that a few months ago. Just wanted a static site to replace an old WP site. It was a total disappointment. I’m not invested enough to do a write up but I tried 3 LLM models and multiple services and all I got was a bunch of dependencies and technologies that I explicitly said I didn’t want. I would has been better off using one of those build your website services for non technical people.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where? 25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whatever. That's for people that want to sell you something). You'd put it into the space your ISP gave you, or Windows actually included a personal web server. You had to be somewhat technical to use the Windows server, but it could've been made more friendly instead of being removed, and personal computers should make it easy to share a static website. We've clearly regressed since then. People think you need an engineer or AI to build basic web pages. My actual grandma was doing some of this stuff when I was a kid in the 90s, as was I. What happened to the web seems analogous to me to as if we abandoned word processors and spreadsheets and said you need a six-figure engineer to do custom programming any time you need the features of one of those things.
  - chipsrafferty 1y ago
    15 years ago I couldn't order mozzarella sticks in bed from my phone.
  - ansgri 1y ago
    100% this. At that time if one needed a simple custom database client with GUI and analytical reports, the go-to solution was MS Access and it was working well. Could even be placed on a shared drive. Now, as accepted solution, you either pay for different SaaSes, each with a fraction of functionality, or have to code a bespoke website using overcomplicated frameworks.
queenkjuul 1y ago
I actually had a lot of fun building a native .NET web frontend in VB 2005 recently lol. I thought it kind of amazing that i could just bind UI controls directly to state objects and the UI would automatically React to any changes i made. Felt very natural as a modern web dev lol. Found a lightweight .NET JSON library that was compatible all the way back to VB 2005 as well. In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97 https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97

dangus 1y ago

> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result. While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong. You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it. 15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own. 10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release. Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old. TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday. I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.

apercu 1y ago
I tried that a few months ago. Just wanted a static site to replace an old WP site. It was a total disappointment. I’m not invested enough to do a write up but I tried 3 LLM models and multiple services and all I got was a bunch of dependencies and technologies that I explicitly said I didn’t want. I would has been better off using one of those build your website services for non technical people.
ndriscoll 1y ago
I just tried it and no, you can't. I don't really even see how you could. Where is the form supposed to go? Is Grandma supposed to rent a server somewhere to do processing? Where? 25 years ago we had wysiwyg editors to build web pages, and she could just include a link to email her to have people ask her to "sign up" (the entire point of a sewing club is to socialize. You don't need an automated newsletter or whatever. That's for people that want to sell you something). You'd put it into the space your ISP gave you, or Windows actually included a personal web server. You had to be somewhat technical to use the Windows server, but it could've been made more friendly instead of being removed, and personal computers should make it easy to share a static website. We've clearly regressed since then. People think you need an engineer or AI to build basic web pages. My actual grandma was doing some of this stuff when I was a kid in the 90s, as was I. What happened to the web seems analogous to me to as if we abandoned word processors and spreadsheets and said you need a six-figure engineer to do custom programming any time you need the features of one of those things.
- chipsrafferty 1y ago
  15 years ago I couldn't order mozzarella sticks in bed from my phone.
- ansgri 1y ago
  100% this. At that time if one needed a simple custom database client with GUI and analytical reports, the go-to solution was MS Access and it was working well. Could even be placed on a shared drive. Now, as accepted solution, you either pay for different SaaSes, each with a fraction of functionality, or have to code a bespoke website using overcomplicated frameworks.

queenkjuul 1y ago

I actually had a lot of fun building a native .NET web frontend in VB 2005 recently lol. I thought it kind of amazing that i could just bind UI controls directly to state objects and the UI would automatically React to any changes i made. Felt very natural as a modern web dev lol. Found a lightweight .NET JSON library that was compatible all the way back to VB 2005 as well. In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97 https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97