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Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context.

Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context. The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works. > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring. For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services. For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many. There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue. Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.

kryogen1c 8mo ago
It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex. Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- doctorwho42 8mo ago
  Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives. I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
  - gosub100 8mo ago
    "It's expensive af to be poor" - unknown source
  - 93po 8mo ago
    idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because 1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen 2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years 3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it. i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
    - owlstuffing 8mo ago
      Yep, and... 4. the quality gap has closed considerably e.g., the function and durability of your $8k watch and a $300 watch are effectively imperceptible The gap is closing from both ends (cheap manufacturing, access to tech, etc.)
  - shimman 8mo ago
    This might be true once in the past but even the "quality" brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same factories with the same materials, with the same business magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
    - acdha 8mo ago
      Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
  - WalterBright 8mo ago
    > wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. Other people having more money does not result in higher prices for the rest, i.e. it does not cause inflation. For example, when I was a boy steak was a rare luxury. Today, a steak dinner costs less than a TV dinner or a bag of Doritos.
SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?
- doctorwho42 8mo ago
  Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit future exploration because it increases the activation cost of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- djoldman 8mo ago
  Possibly. But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can justify no recommended changes to the current state.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    Which is why the source article did not recommend any changes to the current state.
- ghaff 8mo ago
  I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.
tuhgdetzhh 8mo ago
Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > The internet degraded editorial standards I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the newspaper editorials.
user____name 8mo ago
I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?
- djoldman 8mo ago
  Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable. There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination. Cars are a great example: * Reliable cars can also be cheap. * High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable. * Expensive cars can be dangerous. * etc.
- autoexec 8mo ago
  The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits. Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
  - the_pwner224 8mo ago
    > things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on. And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality. And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.
dijksterhuis 8mo ago
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime. then they get angry. very angry. just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future. edit — these are the hidden requirements. > For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects. now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
- encom 8mo ago
  >until something goes significantly wrong Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error. Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business. Many such cases.
  - WalterBright 8mo ago
    > Now every service demands your phone number to register That appeared as a defense against people impersonating you, i.e. two factor authentication.
    - Timon3 8mo ago
      Weird that those same services don't send a login token to the registered number.
WalterBright 8mo ago
> lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements This is what produced our high standard of living. For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.
re-thc 8mo ago
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware. Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. > Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies. > In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
- djoldman 8mo ago
  > Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
- enraged_camel 8mo ago
  >> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.
ryan_n 8mo ago
[dead]
dspillett 8mo ago
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work. > For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many. For many reasons. It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant. It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out. It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past. It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care. The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off. and so on… … … Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
- djoldman 8mo ago
  > > Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. > That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work. Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts). Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use. > It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ... Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps. > Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse? I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry. I don't see any reason to expect significant change.
c0_0p_ 8mo ago
All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.
alexpotato 8mo ago
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned: If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff. (I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
entech 8mo ago
While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment. When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages. In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore. I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility. I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.
xg15 8mo ago
> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. Yes. Which means the overall quality of things is dropping. Its nothing new or AI-specific indeed, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

kryogen1c 8mo ago

It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex. Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
doctorwho42 8mo ago
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives. I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
- gosub100 8mo ago
  "It's expensive af to be poor" - unknown source
- 93po 8mo ago
  idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because 1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen 2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years 3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it. i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
  - owlstuffing 8mo ago
    Yep, and... 4. the quality gap has closed considerably e.g., the function and durability of your $8k watch and a $300 watch are effectively imperceptible The gap is closing from both ends (cheap manufacturing, access to tech, etc.)
- shimman 8mo ago
  This might be true once in the past but even the "quality" brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same factories with the same materials, with the same business magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
  - acdha 8mo ago
    Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. Other people having more money does not result in higher prices for the rest, i.e. it does not cause inflation. For example, when I was a boy steak was a rare luxury. Today, a steak dinner costs less than a TV dinner or a bag of Doritos.

SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?

doctorwho42 8mo ago
Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit future exploration because it increases the activation cost of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
djoldman 8mo ago
Possibly. But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can justify no recommended changes to the current state.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  Which is why the source article did not recommend any changes to the current state.
ghaff 8mo ago
I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.

tuhgdetzhh 8mo ago

Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.

WalterBright 8mo ago
> Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.
WalterBright 8mo ago
> The internet degraded editorial standards I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the newspaper editorials.

user____name 8mo ago

I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?

djoldman 8mo ago
Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable. There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination. Cars are a great example: * Reliable cars can also be cheap. * High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable. * Expensive cars can be dangerous. * etc.
autoexec 8mo ago
The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits. Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
- the_pwner224 8mo ago
  > things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on. And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality. And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.

dijksterhuis 8mo ago

> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime. then they get angry. very angry. just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future. edit — these are the hidden requirements. > For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects. now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.

encom 8mo ago
>until something goes significantly wrong Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error. Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business. Many such cases.
- WalterBright 8mo ago
  > Now every service demands your phone number to register That appeared as a defense against people impersonating you, i.e. two factor authentication.
  - Timon3 8mo ago
    Weird that those same services don't send a login token to the registered number.

WalterBright 8mo ago

> lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements This is what produced our high standard of living. For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.

re-thc 8mo ago

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware. Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. > Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies. > In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?

djoldman 8mo ago
> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
enraged_camel 8mo ago
>> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price. This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.

ryan_n 8mo ago

[dead]

dspillett 8mo ago

> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work. > For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many. For many reasons. It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant. It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out. It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past. It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care. The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off. and so on… … … Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?

djoldman 8mo ago
> > Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. > That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work. Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts). Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use. > It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ... Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps. > Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse? I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry. I don't see any reason to expect significant change.

c0_0p_ 8mo ago

All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.

alexpotato 8mo ago

> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned: If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff. (I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).

entech 8mo ago

While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment. When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages. In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore. I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility. I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.

xg15 8mo ago

> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. Yes. Which means the overall quality of things is dropping. Its nothing new or AI-specific indeed, but that doesn't make it a good thing.