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Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

economist.com

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Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#71

Post by LPisGood »

joe_mamba wrote: post #65
dakiol wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc) Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start…

>These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). I'm a mid programmer at best, like compared to top guys in the industry, who built stuff like OpenClaw or those prodigy 16 year-old coders who became millionaires, and yet I don't fear the LLM assisted coding future. I'm at peace knowing that I will adapt to the LLM programming world using…

I haven’t looked at OpenClaw but I get the impression anyone could build it. It doesn’t do anything technically impressive, does it?

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#72

Post by apsurd »

dakiol wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.

Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag). It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to…

All is not lost though is it? We can invest our efforts into local models and frontier competitors.

I'm not blind, I have Claude pro (not max) and Cursor subscription. But I'm really hesitant to go balls to the wall on the most powerful models because it isn't sustainable; I don't want it to be. So how much can I get from the older models, the smaller, cheaper ones that will hopefully inevitably be commoditized. I think the harness improvements are making headway. I continue to think Cursor Composer 2 is more than adequate.

Then again if one believes it's a race to the singularity, then that's another story. I don't.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#73

Post by pembrook »

tardedmeme wrote: post #56
pembrook wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is an addiction. Nothing is an addiction. Instead of jumping down a semantic rabbit hole, it might be more useful to look at specifics since obviously its a spectrum. I can say with certainty that opioids are addictive. I can also say with certainty that doomscrolling is pretty far on the opposite end of that spectrum. I have yet to meet someone who would steal copper pipes off of an abandoned building or…

So, buried within this extended mostly-non-answer, it seems your definition of an addiction is something that drives someone to steal copper pipes.

Litigating the semantics of a word doesn't get us anywhere closer to defining the limits of personal responsibility.

You'd like the goalposts to sit closer so its easier to offload responsibility onto abstract external entities.

I'm arguing this doesn't change who has to be the one to close the app, shut off the TV, turn off the video game, close the bag of candy and take risks in the real world.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#74

Post by joe_mamba »

LPisGood wrote: post #71
joe_mamba wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). I'm a mid programmer at best, like compared to top guys in the industry, who built stuff like OpenClaw or those prodigy 16 year-old coders who became millionaires, and yet I don't fear the LLM assisted coding future. I'm at peace knowing that I will adapt to the LLM programming world using…

I haven’t looked at OpenClaw but I get the impression anyone could build it. It doesn’t do anything technically impressive, does it?

>anyone could build it

Then why hasn't anyone else done it before?

With hindsight, it's always easy to say anyone could have done it too, but there's more to product success than just coding and shipping an app out the door.

The first iPhone was built using COTS(commercial off the shelf) parts that Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also had access to, and SW tools they also had access to, yet Apple won and buried the other companies because their end-product was way more popular with the customer base. I'm sure engineers from Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola also said "we could have done exactly the same thing with the right leadership" when they saw that.

I also say "I could have done that" when I see how the maker of Flappy Bird became a multi millionaire, or how any other top 100 AppStore slop app has 100+ million downloads.

Coding skills are dime a dozen these days. A lot of people can do 95% of these things now. The differentiator between failure and success, comes with the 5% rest: network effects, market know-how, promotion, timing, outreach, UI, UX, luck, etc.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#75

Post by dakiol »

securicat wrote: post #67
dakiol wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc) Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start…

As if Claude and Instagram are remotely similar products. But again, these products make it incredibly easy to cancel. If work requires that you use it, make the next job you get not require it or just use it on the job.

I see engineers addicted to Claude the same way non-tech people (friends of mine) are addicted to instagram. At the end it's all the same: making multibillion dollar companies richer every day

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#76

Post by [deleted] »

toasty228 wrote: post #70
securicat wrote: post #44

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted What works for you, and me actually, doesn't work for most people, humans are complex things

[deleted]

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#77

Post by ryandrake »

cortesoft wrote: post #12

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

> How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

I don't know how you'd write it in a law either, but if you're in a meeting at your tech company, and the product owner or tech lead uses language like "We need to get users to do..." and "We need to incentivize..." and "It should be easy to do X and hard to do Y..." then do whatever is in your power to steer/stop. You're not really building a product users want, you're pushing a behavior-modification scheme onto users.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#78

Post by securicat »

toasty228 wrote: post #70
securicat wrote: post #44

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted What works for you, and me actually, doesn't work for most people, humans are complex things

That’s pretty insensitive to people suffering from mental illness. To compare sitting and doomscrolling on social media with something that’s chemically out of balance in a persons body is… a choice.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#79

Post by securicat »

afavour wrote: post #69
securicat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally. There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed. From inside the company that _makes the product_. Now, would it be inconvenient to stop, sure, but people need better self control. Put that cookie down!

> No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally. That's a straw man argument. I never said they were. > There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed. What percentage of the population do you think are in the habit of reading academic studies about the effects of the products they use? It all feels reminiscent of cigarette smoking. The damage was very well known yet people continued to…

I never said you did say that.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#80

Post by y0eswddl »

cortesoft wrote: post #12

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

dark patterns are pretty well documented and understood at this point. I don't think identifying them is all that hard.

Infinite scroll is one obvious one. As well as forcing algorithmic feeds of accounts we don't follow.

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