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Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

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21–30 of 109 posts

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#21

Counterexample: 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 don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#22
post #19

I 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.

I think there’s a good argument to be made it’s not a problem at all.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#23
post #21

Counterexample: 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 don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.

There's ZERO reason to buy one right now, but when they're at their normal price, they are fun toys.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#24
If "bullshit" means this, then that's what you'd expect from "fake it til you make it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

But I think the author really just means software failures. The truth is that we make software to just barely work, knowing we can fix it later. But apparently the author somehow hasn't been exposed to software ever.

Further, I think the author is angry and knows something isn't right in the world and is railing on the software industry. I think (hope) that's misplaced anger, but the author is probably right to be angry about . . . something.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#25
post #19

I 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.

If they ultimately succeeded, this seems like very poor evidence that it's a problem.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#26
post #22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think there’s a good argument to be made it’s not a problem at all.

You don't see a problem with releasing unfinished work? When has that ever been acceptable in any discipline?

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#27
post #13

Well, 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…

Bob creating wealth does not imply he took from someone else. Capitalism works by creating wealth, not by redistributing it to themselves.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#28
post #21

Counterexample: 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 don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.

The price and stock are from current supply problems. I have dozens from when you could get them on sale. The lack of case is for tinkerers to make their own, although there's an official one you can buy now too. Binary blobs are a valid complaint, but machine code will be easily reversed engineered by transformer models in a year or two.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#29
"In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft's new terminal [32]."

"In the article Software Disenchantment, author Nikita Prokopov exposes how bad software has become commonplace in our daily lives [35]. From programs that get incredibly bigger and slower with each new version, offering little or nothing more in return, to the fact that they get worse as they are used, to the most complete chaos that is the software development process.

For example, when creating an empty (!) project in npm for web development more than 50,000 files are downloaded, taking about 350 MB. This house of cards is so fragile that it gives rise to situations that are, to say the least, embarrassing. In 2016, an npm library called Left-pad, downloaded about 2 million times a month, was removed from the repository by its author, resulting in many web projects around the world crashing, including large corporations, forcing npm to revert the deletion [36]. The library, which contained 10 trivial lines, could be implemented in a few minutes even by programming students."

Some, but not all, developers get defensive when the issue of "bloat" is raised.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34842863

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s a good argument to be made it’s not a problem at all.

You don't see a problem with releasing unfinished work? When has that ever been acceptable in any discipline?

It’s typically in the eye of the beholder what “finished” means. With stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 I’m not at all fussed by there being bugs in a complicated video game. But most of the complaining about the game was feature requests. Maybe those elements make you like the thing less, but it’s not necessarily incomplete. You’re rarely gonna ship something perfect.
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