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Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

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Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#41

Post by JohnFen »

ActorNightly wrote: post #37
JohnFen wrote: post #5

This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.

If you look on the opposite side of the coin, you will see that we do have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. IMO these types of failures are simply a percentage of the overall tech, and the reason they seem prominent is because there is just a huge race in tech over the past decade. If you actually want to fix it and reduce that percentage, push to replace engineers…

I'm thinking mostly about software here, not tech in general. And I'm not saying that some things aren't better. But a lot of things are worse, and the trend worries me.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#42

Post by welshwelsh »

bbor wrote: post #13
paulpauper wrote: post #3

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…

Bezos increased his wealth by $100 billion over the last decade. If all that money was evenly distributed among Amazon's 1,500,000 employees instead, they would get like $6k more every year. That might be a nice bonus to the average Amazon employee making $30,000 a year, but it would hardly be revolutionary.

I don't think 1% of people holding 32% of the wealth is that surprising or exceptional. A lot of people are in the bottom 50% because they don't save any money at all. I think these stats give people the idea that if you were to somehow take all the wealth from the top 1% and give it to the bottom 50% that this would vastly improve their situation, when in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference and would fuck up economic incentive structures.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#43

Post by BirAdam »

The author keeps saying capitalism is at fault but I’d argue the bigger issue is that the world economic system is not capitalist at all. The world economic system is debt based and not capital based. Debt is accumulated as if it were capital instead of saving for future investment. Essentially, the time order is reversed. Instead of sacrificing the present for the future, the future is sacrificed for the present. The entire economic system functions in this manner, and it perverts every signal. It encourages spending now, ROI now, and worry should never happen. Of course, this also means that debts eventually collapse and the system collapse wipes out all but the largest players, concentrating all wealth at the top. This will keep happening as long as the system is debt based.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#44

Post by maerF0x0 »

emodendroket wrote: post #34

> After the fiasco that was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 — a game estimated to cost more than 300 million dollars, including the performance of actor Keanu Reeves —, many people began to question how far the so-called late stage capitalism can go. Really? Releasing a multi-year software project worked on by many, many people that was buggy but still more or less served its purpose is someone's idea of capitalism tee…

I had to start over from the beginning 3 times due to completely main plot breaking bugs, and this was on 1.4+ versions . Still had a side quest broken.

That is not a "more or less" serving it's purpose.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#45

Post by wilg »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #40
wilg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real issue with C2077 is that so many people pre-paid for a quality game, and never received it.

That makes no sense. If you pre-order something you have no idea what the quality is. Also I played the game all the way through and it’s pretty good.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#46

Post by RachelF »

JohnFen wrote: post #5

This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.

This is one of the best articles about software and tech I have read in years!

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#47

Post by thatfrenchguy »

JohnFen wrote: post #19
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #17

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.

Here's the thing though: if you released them "when they're fully baked", would they be as good a year later? Probably not?

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#48

Post by vba616 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #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…

You can, anyone can, write all your programs with the mindset that you are given X amount of memory, and you use it as a cache or buffer like they did back when computers had 64K or whatever.

It would solve a lot of what I see as the problems of modern software. For so many years, people have pursued the false vision of a programming environment where resources can be assumed to be infinite.

The problem is, no matter how much memory you have, if you take a data structure that reasonably fits in your vast amount of memory, and then you inadvertently multiply its size, you won't have space.

Or to put it another way, all finite numbers are infinitely smaller than infinity, so the delusion that any finite number is equivalent to infinity will always bring people to grief.

Could someone please write a manifesto along the lines of "malloc considered harmful"? Just. Say. No.

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#49

Post by readthenotes1 »

mdorazio wrote: post #20

I 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 the…

He wants all software to be built at the speed of Mars probes, I guess

Re: Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

#50

Post by dangus »

You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism.

With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor.

What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve?

On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in my day page load sizes were small and now everything is bloated” take we’ve all heard a thousand times. Like, holy shit please stop my phone has a 100Mpbs+ cellular connection, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage I don’t care that websites are 7MB.

There’s nothing actionable about this monstrosity and all it can do is make you upset over a bunch of random shit you can’t control.

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