Cathartic venting for some, perhaps, but not a very insightful piece. Rehashes various mostly wrong examples and comes to a predictably lame conclusion about “capitalism”.
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Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#12This is an example of confirmation bias. It overlooks all the examples in which technology works and makes improvements to people's lives. Things like airline safety and medicine have made big advances.
But I think some of the bullshit is superfluous features that do nto do anything or seem redundant. Why is there a warning if you try to turn the volume up too loud on windows? So annoying. Or McAfee being preinstalled and then annoying popups (bloatware). In that sense, I agree with the author.
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#13Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%. Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees…
Technically yes, the working class can become capitalists by just saving their money. Practically, I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a dishonest and rude suggestion, at best. Just because anyone can become a shareholder in a company that squeezes its employees dry for profit doesn’t mean that that company isn’t a weapon in the class war.
From Wikipedia: Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%.
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#14> Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power. I assume the author is talking about the US. Genuine question: How does the software industry look in more non-capitalist countries? Is it flourishing without these issues. I bet their equivalent of…
Wasn’t the Apple Maps software pretty much correct on day one but they had a data issue for some areas?
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#15Counterexample: RaspberryPi. Little tech still has a future (but everything the author says about overhyped Big Tech outfits sounds pretty accurate). Personally I think it comes down to an over-financialized economy. Raising taxes on corporations and individuals while providing loopholes in the form of writeoffs for re-investing profits in R & D and manufacturing facility upgrades etc. is one obvious solution.
I'm not sure that's a good counterexample? It hasn't been possible to actually buy a Raspberry Pi anywhere in something like a year, though the hype rolls on.
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#16> Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power. I assume the author is talking about the US. Genuine question: How does the software industry look in more non-capitalist countries? Is it flourishing without these issues. I bet their equivalent of…
Wasn’t the Apple Maps software pretty much correct on day one but they had a data issue for some areas?
Yep, but that is all capitalism's fault! And we should change over to another economic system where their equivalent didn't even have data issues on day one.
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#17I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don't have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis/development paralysis where you don't spend your time on important stuff.
A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch: Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty good open world game (if not the messiah some people got hyped for), Apple Maps is not bad these days (especially in California), the iPhone 4 is now considered pretty revolutionary, hell even Windows Vista was not that bad after all the patches!
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#18"Too big to fail" means everything fails. In my opinion we are on the precipice of civilization collapse. The reason is that people can no longer think logically and the tools they use are increasingly becoming a hinderence. The problem crosses multiple domains, not just "Tech." Basically we have reach a point as a civilization where failure and ineptitude are increasingly not penalized.
We optimized for the short term without caring about the long term (climate, sustainability, equality, prosperity). Now everyone and everything is in debt (money, natural resources, compassion), yea I could see it all fall apart.
Falling apart could result in a temporary and tragic setback, eg a period of stagnation and hardship, perhaps some world wars and some global population decline, but a civilization collapse though is still avoidable
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#19I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don't have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis/development paralysis where you don't spend your time on important stuff. A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after thei…
> A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch
Right. His point was that these things are being released before they're fully baked. That's a problem, and one that is much more common now.
Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry
#20I don't quite know what the author's conclusion is here. Capitalism is bad? Part of the problem in my mind is that consumers don't actually punish these behaviors. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is massively profitable even though it was so shitty at launch. The same is true of many of the other examples in the list. So if companies are going to still make tons of money by cutting more and more corners, why wouldn't they?