6 ms·

The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services

177 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

tolugenius 2mo ago
Love this writeup. The temu analogy is best to describe what is going on beyond just what llms have done to software. What's closer to question is temu could only exist in the way it did (it's fast rise mainly) because of the work done by amazon prime in making fast shipping both logistically doable and the psychological default for many. So my question is what was the "amazon prime" era of software and perhaps learning what did (and did not) occur then can better understand why AI has wrought the effects it has in less than 10 years.
- mrngld 2mo ago
  Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold. So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse. But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.
  - Grombobulous 2mo ago
    Postage rates and geopolitical games aside, it’s an easy high horse to stand on to say that quality and good experience is going down the drain in favor of junk products and ad-riddled media. Not to say that having junk/ad-riddled stuff is good, but there are two sides to this coin. My feeling during my time I have spent in most lower cost of living countries including China is that people in wealthy countries regularly get ripped off on consumer goods for the mere fact that they live in a wealthy country. For many consumer goods categories they don’t gain a whole lot of additional safety or peace of mind, they’re just paying more. Anyone who has ever gotten prescription glasses made in the markets in China realizes how badly they’re getting ripped off. If you actually live in China you aren’t paying $30 for a hooded sweatshirt like you do when you walk into a Target store. That price would be insane, astronomical (unless you’re just wealthier and shopping specifically at a luxury or Western brand). Let’s take an example: a Boogie Board writing pad. At Barnes and Noble the Boogie Board Jot Kids drawing tablet is $20.99 At Temu/AliExpress, it’s $3.50 total including shipping. I.e., it’s easy for us to say that the “Netflix without ads experience” or the “smart TV without ads/spyware” is the experience we should all have. What’s harder is putting up the money to pay for those items when you’re working a real working class job. I can’t blame anyone for dropping even moderately priced SaaS subscriptions for vibecoded cheap/free alternatives. I’ve done it myself: for example, why is every notes app with a decent feature set and collaborative functionality that is outside the Apple/Google ecosystem $5-10/month? That should cost $5/year.
- runarberg 2mo ago
  As much as I hate Amazon, I think there is a simpler explanation. Europe has been relaxing their consumer protection standards for the past two decades, and EU’s consumer protection enforcement against foreign tech companies is hardly ever done today. This applies to both American and Chinese companies. TEMU only exists because they simply neglected quality of their products which their competitors were required by law to have. And then they were not punished for it as they should have been. In other words, TEMU only exists because Europe has turned into a deregulated neo-liberal paradise.
  - bobthepanda 2mo ago
    TEMU also existed because of the de minimis exception. To speed up customs processing and ease business, the US and EU had minimum package values before customs and tariff inspection occurred. TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse. --- This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.
    - runarberg 2mo ago
      There is a world, where Europe did not turn into a neo-liberal paradise as soon as the cold war ended. Where Europe straightened their labor rights (and kept their consumer protection). In that world, as people started waking up the fact that their products were largely made in sweatshops in India and China, Europe would have imposed import restriction and fined and closed companies who knowingly sold products made in sweatshops. We do not live in that world. We live in a world where Europe went fully neo-liberal as soon as the threat of communism was over. And the results were companies taking full advantage of labor markets with abhorrent lack of labor protections. European regulators and politicians could have done something about this, and decided not to. And so we have TEMU.
guhcampos 2mo ago
I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add. I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else. Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself. So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.
- epiccoleman 2mo ago
  The gambling roulette is triply annoying because it will inevitably start walking you through some flow where you're supposedly ending up with a big discount or free items or whatever-the-fuck. And if you're encountering it for the first time, you'll think "ah cool, i can get some cheap chinese gewgaws for free with the thing I actually wanted to buy." And then 10 minutes has gone by and 5 roulette spins and there's $400 worth of bullshit in your cart. And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    For sure, the ridiculous promo games are best skipped (when even possible to skip!!) as 99% of the time they're just that you win the right to get a discount on a future order based on this next order. And those discounts are always described as like "a $400 credit" ... when it's really the sum of "50 cents off of $5, $1.50 off of $10... $30 off $250" and so on, so you will have to place like 8 orders of increasingly hilarious value to "use" all of your "$400." All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
- 2mo ago
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
"Human made" is not automatically better and we need to stop pretending that it is. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
- coldbrewed 2mo ago
  Show me a fully LLM-generated database with an implement that's clear, documented, and adequately bug free. Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments. LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.
  - dsign 2mo ago
    I was arguing with a colleague today that we will never have a reason to make our AIs autonomous and sentient. But now I can't stop imagining an AI startup meeting where somebody says "LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?"" and the next second the technical founders jump in joy "...that's our way in! Let's outcompete the competition by inventing pain for AIs!"
    - htrp 2mo ago
      sounds like the torment Nexus, but someone else is being tormented.
  - alexpotato 2mo ago
    I've worked at many firms as a SRE/DevOps and have seen lots of human written code that fell into at least one or generally of the below patterns: - 30+ committers on <5K LOC - software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable - changes take a long time b/c there are no tests Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.
onion2k 2mo ago
A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet. TEMU doesn't sell those things. They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital from PDD Holdings, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. It's a very boring 'spend the VC bucks to get the customers' play, and when they've got the customers they'll jack up the prices and lose the customers again. It's Uber-for-cheap-stuff basically.
- andai 2mo ago
  I'm not 100% sure but I also heard China subsidizes shipping of packages, to boost their economy. I worked as a mailman a while back, most days there would be more packages in grey plastic wrap (from China) than actual mail. And you could tell that the stuff that was inside usually cost less than the shipping would have cost if you paid full price.
  - Sharlin 2mo ago
    Shipping is also subsidized by all of us on this end. International postage agreements were never intended to cover a massive unidirectional deluge of low-value packages. The costs of all the additional logistics are ultimately externalized to the taxpayer, and China totally exploits this. It’s exactly the reason the EU set a tariff for low-value parcels in particular.
    - behringer 2mo ago
      It's not hardly an exploit when the taxpayer is the one benefiting
      - Sharlin 2mo ago
        It’s a classic negative externality. Not every taxpayer partakes in this pathological consumerism.
239182 2mo ago
The US has been exporting Treasury bills and digital hot air for quite a while. LLMs are the logical conclusion of this scam, until other countries stop gambling on the US stock market with fake $1 trillion corporations. It works because the whole world's media is captured, owned and censored by US platforms and amplifies the US messaging.
- econ 2mo ago
  Haha, and the way Chinese economics are described here shows what little people know. When they invited our professors in the 80s they came back arguing China will eventually be the future. They listened to everything and started working on everything immediately. We did the yes men privatization garage sale, gutted R&D, outsourcing, abolish education, housing, medical care. All that good stuff - but at what cost?
opengrass 2mo ago
Why does Temu take the heat when Aliexpress has been around for years?
- galleywest200 2mo ago
  Temu had a Superbowl ad. Not sure AliExpress did that.
- eterm 2mo ago
  Because Temu pushed advertising hard and fast at the US market and it paid off in a big way.
- andai 2mo ago
  Temu is Temu brand AliExpress.
andai 2mo ago
> A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future ... in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.
- a1o 2mo ago
  An exception is probably cars, they are better, more expensive but uglier too.
  - jerlam 2mo ago
    Cars are slowly becoming subsidized by subscriptions and advertisements. And to some extent, costs of maintenance and gasoline.
alexpotato 2mo ago
Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products. For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase. From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!" It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business. Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it? (I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)
- tony69 2mo ago
  Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business. But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose. There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.
  - mpyne 2mo ago
    > There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly. Of course it wouldn't land on highest quality. None of us need fans which last forever. We need fans which last long enough. In the optimum scenario companies are able to build fans that do just that, but the quality would still not be highest quality compared to what would be possible. And nor should it, since it would force the consumer to pay for gold-plating they neither need nor want to pay for.
seki285 2mo ago
You choose to consume bad media, not my problem.
- ____tom____ 2mo ago
  Have you tried YouTube recently? Simply FINDING good media becomes the problem. I have no interest in AI slop, but it's everywhere. I don't choose to consume bad media, but finding good media is getting harder and harder.
  - seki285 2mo ago
    Fair, but I don't use YouTube as much anymore. Except for music and old videos it lost its purpose for me. I mostly rely on word of mouth now, a friend recommends me this art channel or that show. If I like it I forward it to another friend etc. I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
  - stickfigure 2mo ago
    I use YouTube all the time and it's great. Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns. My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.
alexpotato 2mo ago
> A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilities Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS: Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now" Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."
deleted 2mo ago
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mhitza 2mo ago
Thanks for the laugh with the netflix logo. I feel that is very apt when all their recent shows I've glanced at seem to have their scripts brought from Temu or from a genai prompt.
chachra 2mo ago
True only if the end-product is better in some way. A gourmet meal is better than Chipotle. A handmade leather bag is better than the Temu version. In software, it's harder to make out the difference; of course, better UX, faster APIs etc. can all affect the end-user experience. But who is to say that AI-generated code can't do all of that (and more!)?
sajithdilshan 2mo ago
The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same. Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago
  Wasn't there a period when the insane China tariffs started that the Chinese manufacturers of Western luxury goods threw the veil off and started selling them direct at much lower prices?
- ragall 2mo ago
  > Even the original ones are actually made in China Wrong.
- mawadev 2mo ago
  Now try to explain to me how a ten dollar drill is comparable to a makita drill
uglysnowcone 2mo ago
I agree with some points, but I don't like the take that AI/LLMs also aren't built on the backs of underpaid workers. While a lot of the training for LLMs may be unsupervised, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in AI without the support of data labelers. And on the hardware side, how many factory workers operate in unsafe conditions on a daily basis?
Magicrafter13 2mo ago
One of the only people I've seen who gets it, and has a sane take on the matter. I've been trying to write my own article on a very similar subject for a while now, and it's always hard to put these things into words. I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.
ls-a 2mo ago
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Sarkie 2mo ago
First unicode hostname I've seen?
RigelKentaurus 2mo ago
Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly. For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid. But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.
- brazukadev 2mo ago
  not sure if I got your point but you are saying that people can't discern a bad app/system from a good one?
  - RigelKentaurus 2mo ago
    I'm saying that people can't discern between human- and AI-built apps, because the vast majority of human-built apps are not any better than AI-built ones.
cynicalsecurity 2mo ago
The article makes absolutely no sense. AI works better than humans. The quality of AI output depends on request. Higher quality request produces high quality output and vice versa. The article completely misses the point. Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.
iugtmkbdfil834 2mo ago
I personally keep going back and forth on this, partially because I am seeing examples that cut both ways. On the one hand, I am mildly concerned a seemingly permanently raised floor, because I can already see ( and I already heard once or twice ) how now I should have x amount the output. I am saying seemingly, because we just had a meeting where higher ups are clearly concerned about the token cost so some form of 'more with less' is coming. I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits. The question to me is what happens in the middle.
Dependance 2mo ago
Wow, what the hell was that javascript tab change ? Not sure if I hated or loved it, but that was the first time I have seen that.
- moritzwarhier 2mo ago
  visibilitychange API, and websites are allowed to modify their own title and favicon programatically. Favicon can be part of the DOM ever since icons via ~~meta~~ link tags were introduced, because they can be more hi-res than the default favicon.ico file. I've never thought about the ability to swap it dynamically though, although I've seen some site do that before. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilitychange_event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/title https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ti... https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon
beloch 2mo ago
"The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days." -------- While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes. The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price. The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated. TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.
- mattmcal 2mo ago
  I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.
  - Sprocklem 2mo ago
    Me too. My understanding is that clothing manufacturing is basically impossible to automate with our current level of technology, due to the difficulty of manipulating fabric.
    - pineapplepizza6 2mo ago
      I think T-shirts are automated, that's why they're so cheap. Because it's a very simple construction.
nubg 2mo ago
good article, mostly because i have a feeling it was 100% hand written. thanks for not using ai. makes it much more authentic
m3047 2mo ago
"Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away. Edits: "two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm. Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.
amelius 2mo ago
We need to get commerce out of social media. Anything "social" should not have to do with commerce. There are no billboards in a church, so why should there be ads in places where people socialize? Having ads on sports fields is bad enough already.
ragall 2mo ago
Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.
m463 2mo ago
I'm pretty sure the "temu-fication" of software happened in 2007 when the iphone came out. Software used to cost $39.99 or $199.99 or more. then the app store. ...and small crappy phone apps drove quality software away from 9.99 to 4.99 to 99¢ to free (with ads, and under-the-covers theft of your contacts, your photos and bookmarks and eventually every possible other thing)
- mawadev 2mo ago
  Very true, but it was more "functional" back then and I'm not talking about software quality, but dark patterns/enshittification obstructing it. Now you have dark patterns and decreasing quality. Where exactly is the value in trying to squeeze every penny out of something while moving the costs into an area that nobody can track and if pushed, will do plausible deniability on?
- zem 2mo ago
  there was cheap shareware earlier, it just didn't have as much reach
mawadev 2mo ago
The netflix example hits hard. I don't want to advertise the chinese pendant to it, but basically it has 2 minute "movies" with AI generated scenes that you can scroll like netflix. The amount of raw energy that went into producing this slop is just insane. We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans
- inigyou 2mo ago
  There are Western shorts netflixes too. I don't want to give them publicity by naming them.
deleted 2mo ago
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thn-gap 2mo ago
I agree with the article, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while now as well. I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost. So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.
dtagames 2mo ago
The real punchline here is saved for the end of the article. It has nothing to do with Temu and everything to do with dumbing-down the population. If people get used to relying on free or cheap AI-generated content, their overall intellectual capacity and ability to act in the world will be lower.
graceful6800 2mo ago
Americans will do and say literally anything to avoid admitting capitalism was a horrible, terrible mistake.
- m000 2mo ago
  Yes, hardly anyone notices that TEMU is the downstream result of corporate greed over many years. Western brands outsource production to China to maximize profits -> less jobs, stagnating job market -> depressed wages across the board -> people no longer able to afford paying a premium for buying a Western brand (still made in China) -> TEMU comes and offers comparable quality at a fair price -> Boo hoo! TEMU bad! Evil China!
sota_pop 2mo ago
I think what you call “TEMU-Fication” is more widely and classically known as “commoditization”. The article was a nice read, but I was having a hard time understanding why attempt to coin a new word when the exact phenomenon is already (very very) well known.

177 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

Love this writeup. The temu analogy is best to describe what is going on beyond just what llms have done to software. What's closer to question is temu could only exist in the way it did (it's fast rise mainly) because of the work done by amazon prime in making fast shipping both logistically doable and the psychological default for many. So my question is what was the "amazon prime" era of software and perhaps learning what did (and did not) occur then can better understand why AI has wrought the effects it has in less than 10 years.

mrngld 2mo ago
Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold. So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse. But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.
- Grombobulous 2mo ago
  Postage rates and geopolitical games aside, it’s an easy high horse to stand on to say that quality and good experience is going down the drain in favor of junk products and ad-riddled media. Not to say that having junk/ad-riddled stuff is good, but there are two sides to this coin. My feeling during my time I have spent in most lower cost of living countries including China is that people in wealthy countries regularly get ripped off on consumer goods for the mere fact that they live in a wealthy country. For many consumer goods categories they don’t gain a whole lot of additional safety or peace of mind, they’re just paying more. Anyone who has ever gotten prescription glasses made in the markets in China realizes how badly they’re getting ripped off. If you actually live in China you aren’t paying $30 for a hooded sweatshirt like you do when you walk into a Target store. That price would be insane, astronomical (unless you’re just wealthier and shopping specifically at a luxury or Western brand). Let’s take an example: a Boogie Board writing pad. At Barnes and Noble the Boogie Board Jot Kids drawing tablet is $20.99 At Temu/AliExpress, it’s $3.50 total including shipping. I.e., it’s easy for us to say that the “Netflix without ads experience” or the “smart TV without ads/spyware” is the experience we should all have. What’s harder is putting up the money to pay for those items when you’re working a real working class job. I can’t blame anyone for dropping even moderately priced SaaS subscriptions for vibecoded cheap/free alternatives. I’ve done it myself: for example, why is every notes app with a decent feature set and collaborative functionality that is outside the Apple/Google ecosystem $5-10/month? That should cost $5/year.
runarberg 2mo ago
As much as I hate Amazon, I think there is a simpler explanation. Europe has been relaxing their consumer protection standards for the past two decades, and EU’s consumer protection enforcement against foreign tech companies is hardly ever done today. This applies to both American and Chinese companies. TEMU only exists because they simply neglected quality of their products which their competitors were required by law to have. And then they were not punished for it as they should have been. In other words, TEMU only exists because Europe has turned into a deregulated neo-liberal paradise.
- bobthepanda 2mo ago
  TEMU also existed because of the de minimis exception. To speed up customs processing and ease business, the US and EU had minimum package values before customs and tariff inspection occurred. TEMU and Shein just kind of took it and ran with it by shipping $5 shirts en masse. --- This also only really happened because China's whole export oriented policy relies on keeping workers underpaid via capital control. Workers get their bank accounts at uncompetitive rates and that capital is used to fund manufacturing expansion. The normal thing that happens as a country gets richer is that workers earn more, start buying more of their domestic surplus and their export advantage goes away. However, the current thinking promoted by Xi is that consumption is just capitalist decadence, and so Chinese consumers can't buy the ever increasing goods surplus even if they wanted to. And China is also dealing with internal deflation now due to the massive confidence shock after the property bust.
  - runarberg 2mo ago
    There is a world, where Europe did not turn into a neo-liberal paradise as soon as the cold war ended. Where Europe straightened their labor rights (and kept their consumer protection). In that world, as people started waking up the fact that their products were largely made in sweatshops in India and China, Europe would have imposed import restriction and fined and closed companies who knowingly sold products made in sweatshops. We do not live in that world. We live in a world where Europe went fully neo-liberal as soon as the threat of communism was over. And the results were companies taking full advantage of labor markets with abhorrent lack of labor protections. European regulators and politicians could have done something about this, and decided not to. And so we have TEMU.

guhcampos 2mo ago

I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add. I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else. Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself. So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.

epiccoleman 2mo ago
The gambling roulette is triply annoying because it will inevitably start walking you through some flow where you're supposedly ending up with a big discount or free items or whatever-the-fuck. And if you're encountering it for the first time, you'll think "ah cool, i can get some cheap chinese gewgaws for free with the thing I actually wanted to buy." And then 10 minutes has gone by and 5 roulette spins and there's $400 worth of bullshit in your cart. And the thing is, Temu - I was going to buy something from you. I saw an ad or whatever and thought "sure, I'll pay $13 for that keyboard." But then you get pulled into the dopamine labyrinth hell-realm and by the time you're out they've wasted 15 minutes of your time and you don't even remember what you came in for.
- xp84 2mo ago
  For sure, the ridiculous promo games are best skipped (when even possible to skip!!) as 99% of the time they're just that you win the right to get a discount on a future order based on this next order. And those discounts are always described as like "a $400 credit" ... when it's really the sum of "50 cents off of $5, $1.50 off of $10... $30 off $250" and so on, so you will have to place like 8 orders of increasingly hilarious value to "use" all of your "$400." All that said, there have been a decent number of things that I bought from them which I've found incredibly useful. Just like, phone stands, ODBII reader, sticky notepads that look like Windows 95 Notepad windows, teeny tiny wireless earbuds I use while sleeping, etc.
2mo ago

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

"Human made" is not automatically better and we need to stop pretending that it is. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

coldbrewed 2mo ago
Show me a fully LLM-generated database with an implement that's clear, documented, and adequately bug free. Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments. LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.
- dsign 2mo ago
  I was arguing with a colleague today that we will never have a reason to make our AIs autonomous and sentient. But now I can't stop imagining an AI startup meeting where somebody says "LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?"" and the next second the technical founders jump in joy "...that's our way in! Let's outcompete the competition by inventing pain for AIs!"
  - htrp 2mo ago
    sounds like the torment Nexus, but someone else is being tormented.
- alexpotato 2mo ago
  I've worked at many firms as a SRE/DevOps and have seen lots of human written code that fell into at least one or generally of the below patterns: - 30+ committers on <5K LOC - software is robust/rock solid but the code is essentially unreadable - changes take a long time b/c there are no tests Whenever folks mention that LLMs write buggy code I think of the above.

onion2k 2mo ago

A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet. TEMU doesn't sell those things. They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital from PDD Holdings, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. It's a very boring 'spend the VC bucks to get the customers' play, and when they've got the customers they'll jack up the prices and lose the customers again. It's Uber-for-cheap-stuff basically.

andai 2mo ago
I'm not 100% sure but I also heard China subsidizes shipping of packages, to boost their economy. I worked as a mailman a while back, most days there would be more packages in grey plastic wrap (from China) than actual mail. And you could tell that the stuff that was inside usually cost less than the shipping would have cost if you paid full price.
- Sharlin 2mo ago
  Shipping is also subsidized by all of us on this end. International postage agreements were never intended to cover a massive unidirectional deluge of low-value packages. The costs of all the additional logistics are ultimately externalized to the taxpayer, and China totally exploits this. It’s exactly the reason the EU set a tariff for low-value parcels in particular.
  - behringer 2mo ago
    It's not hardly an exploit when the taxpayer is the one benefiting
    - Sharlin 2mo ago
      It’s a classic negative externality. Not every taxpayer partakes in this pathological consumerism.

239182 2mo ago

The US has been exporting Treasury bills and digital hot air for quite a while. LLMs are the logical conclusion of this scam, until other countries stop gambling on the US stock market with fake $1 trillion corporations. It works because the whole world's media is captured, owned and censored by US platforms and amplifies the US messaging.

econ 2mo ago
Haha, and the way Chinese economics are described here shows what little people know. When they invited our professors in the 80s they came back arguing China will eventually be the future. They listened to everything and started working on everything immediately. We did the yes men privatization garage sale, gutted R&D, outsourcing, abolish education, housing, medical care. All that good stuff - but at what cost?

opengrass 2mo ago

Why does Temu take the heat when Aliexpress has been around for years?

galleywest200 2mo ago
Temu had a Superbowl ad. Not sure AliExpress did that.
eterm 2mo ago
Because Temu pushed advertising hard and fast at the US market and it paid off in a big way.
andai 2mo ago
Temu is Temu brand AliExpress.

andai 2mo ago

> A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future ... in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse Isn't that just true about most things over the past century or so? They left out "staggeringly uglier" though.

a1o 2mo ago
An exception is probably cars, they are better, more expensive but uglier too.
- jerlam 2mo ago
  Cars are slowly becoming subsidized by subscriptions and advertisements. And to some extent, costs of maintenance and gasoline.

alexpotato 2mo ago

Quality products are amazing but I do get the downside of building very durable products. For example, we have a Vornado fan in my house that is probably from the early 2000s. It still works perfectly even though we've left it running 24/7 for weeks in humid or dusty environments (e.g. to help air dry a wet basement). In terms of money paid/hours used, we got an amazing deal on the purchase. From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post. It reminds me of the joke "Did you hear about the company that made lightbulbs that lasted 30 years? They went out of business!" It makes sense that manufacturers would start to lower quality at a slightly faster rate than they lower the price as this means that folks still feel happy with the purchase. Sure, the fan doesn't last as long due to what is essentially planned obsolescence but the company does get to stay in business. Temu/Shein etc are just the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning. If you are going to wear a shirt for the one summer where it's in style, why would you spend a large amount of money on it? And in turn, why would the company selling it spend a lot of money making it? (I should add, this is purely an economical argument and ignores the working conditions/health effects/etc)

tony69 2mo ago
Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business. But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose. There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.
- mpyne 2mo ago
  > There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly. Of course it wouldn't land on highest quality. None of us need fans which last forever. We need fans which last long enough. In the optimum scenario companies are able to build fans that do just that, but the quality would still not be highest quality compared to what would be possible. And nor should it, since it would force the consumer to pay for gold-plating they neither need nor want to pay for.

seki285 2mo ago

You choose to consume bad media, not my problem.

____tom____ 2mo ago
Have you tried YouTube recently? Simply FINDING good media becomes the problem. I have no interest in AI slop, but it's everywhere. I don't choose to consume bad media, but finding good media is getting harder and harder.
- seki285 2mo ago
  Fair, but I don't use YouTube as much anymore. Except for music and old videos it lost its purpose for me. I mostly rely on word of mouth now, a friend recommends me this art channel or that show. If I like it I forward it to another friend etc. I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
- stickfigure 2mo ago
  I use YouTube all the time and it's great. Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns. My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.

alexpotato 2mo ago

> A 2025 Veracode report found that approximately 45% of AI-generated code samples failed security tests and contained critical vulnerabilities Co-worker of mine who was excellent at both system design AND coding and I were chatting about LLMS: Him: "I guess coding will just be a hobby now" Me: "Coding def feels that way but software engineering as a profession is still alive and well."

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mhitza 2mo ago

Thanks for the laugh with the netflix logo. I feel that is very apt when all their recent shows I've glanced at seem to have their scripts brought from Temu or from a genai prompt.

chachra 2mo ago

True only if the end-product is better in some way. A gourmet meal is better than Chipotle. A handmade leather bag is better than the Temu version. In software, it's harder to make out the difference; of course, better UX, faster APIs etc. can all affect the end-user experience. But who is to say that AI-generated code can't do all of that (and more!)?

sajithdilshan 2mo ago

The whole premise of the post is that if something is cheap, then it has to be of bad quality. However, that’s not the case most of the time. One example is the knock off luxury bags made in China. Even the original ones are actually made in China, but people pay a premium for the brand name, but quality wise both are same. Same goes for the software. Before AI there were so many buggy, ugly, un-user friendly software. Remember Windows ME? Not all vibe coded software is bad, in fact I’ve vibe coded two projects and use them for free where I previously had to pay 20$ per month for the original one and both projects I vibe coded are working without any issue at all.

HeyLaughingBoy 2mo ago
Wasn't there a period when the insane China tariffs started that the Chinese manufacturers of Western luxury goods threw the veil off and started selling them direct at much lower prices?
ragall 2mo ago
> Even the original ones are actually made in China Wrong.
mawadev 2mo ago
Now try to explain to me how a ten dollar drill is comparable to a makita drill

uglysnowcone 2mo ago

I agree with some points, but I don't like the take that AI/LLMs also aren't built on the backs of underpaid workers. While a lot of the training for LLMs may be unsupervised, we wouldn't have gotten to this point in AI without the support of data labelers. And on the hardware side, how many factory workers operate in unsafe conditions on a daily basis?

Magicrafter13 2mo ago

One of the only people I've seen who gets it, and has a sane take on the matter. I've been trying to write my own article on a very similar subject for a while now, and it's always hard to put these things into words. I yearn for humanity to stop being so greedy and always looking for the cheapest crap they can get, so they can pretend to be rich by having a lot of stuff. Particularly people in countries like America (where I live), are too comfortable, and pretend to live above their means (not necessarily consciously) by partaking of low quality mass produced goods.

ls-a 2mo ago

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cindyllm 2mo ago
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Sarkie 2mo ago

First unicode hostname I've seen?

RigelKentaurus 2mo ago

Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly. For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid. But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.

brazukadev 2mo ago
not sure if I got your point but you are saying that people can't discern a bad app/system from a good one?
- RigelKentaurus 2mo ago
  I'm saying that people can't discern between human- and AI-built apps, because the vast majority of human-built apps are not any better than AI-built ones.

cynicalsecurity 2mo ago

The article makes absolutely no sense. AI works better than humans. The quality of AI output depends on request. Higher quality request produces high quality output and vice versa. The article completely misses the point. Beware of the TEMU-fication of AI requests. Some crappy services like Loveable are the violators here.

iugtmkbdfil834 2mo ago

I personally keep going back and forth on this, partially because I am seeing examples that cut both ways. On the one hand, I am mildly concerned a seemingly permanently raised floor, because I can already see ( and I already heard once or twice ) how now I should have x amount the output. I am saying seemingly, because we just had a meeting where higher ups are clearly concerned about the token cost so some form of 'more with less' is coming. I am not saying some variant of temufication won't happen. If you look at openai's build week projects, you will see a fascinating array of things, but, also otherwise familiar patterns not completely dissimilar to 'calculator plays yankee doodle(but now llm interprets your next move)'. I guess what I am saying is that some things won't change: interested people will remain interested and use new tooling to its limits. The question to me is what happens in the middle.

Dependance 2mo ago

Wow, what the hell was that javascript tab change ? Not sure if I hated or loved it, but that was the first time I have seen that.

moritzwarhier 2mo ago
visibilitychange API, and websites are allowed to modify their own title and favicon programatically. Favicon can be part of the DOM ever since icons via ~~meta~~ link tags were introduced, because they can be more hi-res than the default favicon.ico file. I've never thought about the ability to swap it dynamically though, although I've seen some site do that before. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilitychange_event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/title https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ti... https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon

beloch 2mo ago

"The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days." -------- While it may be true in some rare instances, for the vast majority of products its more likely to be fantasy that exists only in stereotypes. The truth is why American attempts to onshore manufacturing and make it even cheaper with automation have failed miserably. The truth is that Chinese manufacturing is as automated as is possible with cutting edge technology. They build cars in factory's that don't even have lighting until finished cars reach the quality control area. This is why the North American auto sector relies on crushing tariff's and outright import bans to force North Americans to buy North American autos. Without those, you could buy a Chinese car that's better than what you drive for half the price. The factory cranking out the one-dollar-shoes Temu sells is likely entirely automated. TEMU sells what was made with the LLM-ification of manufacturing.

mattmcal 2mo ago
I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.
- Sprocklem 2mo ago
  Me too. My understanding is that clothing manufacturing is basically impossible to automate with our current level of technology, due to the difficulty of manipulating fabric.
  - pineapplepizza6 2mo ago
    I think T-shirts are automated, that's why they're so cheap. Because it's a very simple construction.

nubg 2mo ago

good article, mostly because i have a feeling it was 100% hand written. thanks for not using ai. makes it much more authentic

m3047 2mo ago

"Please disable JavaScript by default and only enable on websites you trust. You have been warned." Random overlays if you click away. Edits: "two-dollar dresses": read that as "two-dollar diseases". Hrm. Regarding the books on AWS, this has been a recognized money-laundering conduit for a number of years now.

amelius 2mo ago

We need to get commerce out of social media. Anything "social" should not have to do with commerce. There are no billboards in a church, so why should there be ads in places where people socialize? Having ads on sports fields is bad enough already.

ragall 2mo ago

Consider that it used to be said that nowadays there is not much class difference in consumption between low, middle, and upper clases in the US, in that the same items are practically available to all. Well, that won't be true shortly, and when only a minority will be able to afford "real" items, made exclusively and entirely by humans, I doubt that democracy will be able to survive, because contempt and animosity between the two groups will inevitably ensue, and democracy can't survive that.

m463 2mo ago

I'm pretty sure the "temu-fication" of software happened in 2007 when the iphone came out. Software used to cost $39.99 or $199.99 or more. then the app store. ...and small crappy phone apps drove quality software away from 9.99 to 4.99 to 99¢ to free (with ads, and under-the-covers theft of your contacts, your photos and bookmarks and eventually every possible other thing)

mawadev 2mo ago
Very true, but it was more "functional" back then and I'm not talking about software quality, but dark patterns/enshittification obstructing it. Now you have dark patterns and decreasing quality. Where exactly is the value in trying to squeeze every penny out of something while moving the costs into an area that nobody can track and if pushed, will do plausible deniability on?
zem 2mo ago
there was cheap shareware earlier, it just didn't have as much reach

mawadev 2mo ago

The netflix example hits hard. I don't want to advertise the chinese pendant to it, but basically it has 2 minute "movies" with AI generated scenes that you can scroll like netflix. The amount of raw energy that went into producing this slop is just insane. We went from "shorts" to movie "shorts", its going to be a dire decade for attention spans

inigyou 2mo ago
There are Western shorts netflixes too. I don't want to give them publicity by naming them.

deleted 2mo ago

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thn-gap 2mo ago

I agree with the article, and it's something that I've been thinking for a while now as well. I think however that the article is missing a big point, and that is that the cheap manufacturing from Temu/Shein work greatly because the steal and copy design from other people. So it's not just that AI will make production very cheap, it's that it's making it quite trivial to copy design and ideas from others at almost 0 cost. So it's not just the product market that gets spammed by slop. It's that new creative human designs get hindered because anything great that you create, will be instantly stolen and copied.

dtagames 2mo ago

The real punchline here is saved for the end of the article. It has nothing to do with Temu and everything to do with dumbing-down the population. If people get used to relying on free or cheap AI-generated content, their overall intellectual capacity and ability to act in the world will be lower.

graceful6800 2mo ago

Americans will do and say literally anything to avoid admitting capitalism was a horrible, terrible mistake.

m000 2mo ago
Yes, hardly anyone notices that TEMU is the downstream result of corporate greed over many years. Western brands outsource production to China to maximize profits -> less jobs, stagnating job market -> depressed wages across the board -> people no longer able to afford paying a premium for buying a Western brand (still made in China) -> TEMU comes and offers comparable quality at a fair price -> Boo hoo! TEMU bad! Evil China!

sota_pop 2mo ago

I think what you call “TEMU-Fication” is more widely and classically known as “commoditization”. The article was a nice read, but I was having a hard time understanding why attempt to coin a new word when the exact phenomenon is already (very very) well known.