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What could have been

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Re: What could have been

#111

Post by Nevermark »

Let's see.

1. Unwanted but coercive upgrades.

2. Delivering genuinely upgraded complexity and incoherence, under the cloak of new feature theatre.

3. In a context where customers just wish they could keep using what they have already paid for. Without paying again.

4. But they have to, because of artificially introduced cross-user new-version incompatibilities and strategically scheduled bit rot.

5. All so a company can keep extracting money from people it is no longer actually serving.

This is very similar to enshittification. Customers invest (time, money, data), in something they love. Their common investment has been transmogrified into a dairy, er, prison. And now they are all milked by all the dark patterns and milk pumps their supplier/master can insert between the users and water, users and grass, users and the midden, er, I mean into every remaining useful part of the service. While they shamelessly and unconvincingly claim to still be their hope, light and beloved benefactor.

Encrapification? No...

Fucked-up-grades? Choose which ever silla-bic em-fassis you prefer. (Sorry for the saucy stout boldness, to you of youth and gentle heart. But the point of crass terms is to not let targets off the verbial hook, with a weak or cute euphemism.)

Quickbooks, anyone? The list is long.

Re: What could have been

#113

Post by taikahessu »

tylerflick wrote: post #102
socalgal2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way All software is this way. The only way something gets fixed is if someone decides it's a priority to fix it over all the other things they could be doing. Plenty of open source project have tons of issues. In both commercial and open source software they don't get fixed because the stack of things to do is larger than the amount of time there is to do them.

All hardware eventually fails, all software eventually works.

Interesting take.

Also interesting would be to compare the qualities between them.

From my experience software has much much bigger probability of ending as eventually working, but not fixing the problem it was set out to do in the first place aka "building the right thing vs building it right". Which I guess is somewhat related to OP's dilemma.

Re: What could have been

#114

Post by genewitch »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #51
Gigachad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IoT wasn't exactly a waste of money. If anything, the problem was that companies didn't spend enough doing it properly or securely. People genuinely do want their security cameras online with an app they can view away from home. It just needs to be done securely and privately.

I want a Wireguard-like solution - preferably with an open source Home Assistant plugin - rather than yet-another-subscriber-lockin-on-company-servers. Investors want otherwise.

synology has surveillance station, synology supports wireguard (tailscale, too), there's ios and android surveillance station apps.

The software that the synology uses on the backend is open source, so you could set this all up with proxmox or a debian server or something, too.

you need to ensure your cameras support either direct access inside the network, or onvif or something like that. IDK, i don't use it anymore, but i did for a good long while, with wifi and wired IP cameras. My synology had a "license" for 12 cameras, but lightning took it out (something about a bunch of ethernet cables in trees), and my new synology doesn't have enough licenses to bother with.

anyhow, just thought you should know - "software" "NVR" is available, and has been for over a decade.

Re: What could have been

#115

Post by ares623 »

nine_k wrote: post #91
bji9jhff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later. They would have been better off. Those pyramids are epitomes of white elephants.

Consider the income from tourists coming to see the pyramids. People traveled to Giza for this purpose for millennia, too. This was not the original intent of the construction though.

Trickle down economics does work. It just takes millenia to feel the effects.

Re: What could have been

#116

Post by genewitch »

layer8 wrote: post #79
garbanz0 wrote: post #52

is more maintenance work on old software really the highest aspiration of the tech industry?

What's the alternative? Churning out new software for the same use cases until Kingdom come because maintaining and improving older software is somehow icky?

Let's make a startup that is just to do PR on long-standing ignored issues that really would fix things.

It would be philanthropy (not-for-profit), but i imagine if you get a few big names behind it (some around here, some not), you could probably have a fair group of developers, translators, UI experts, API experts, hardware bug experts, etc. Like a Think Tank that outputs bugfixes and incremental improvements to software. The sort that reduce electricity usage - you could get some government funding out of that, i bet. How much did Britain pay for those "delete old emails to save water" marketeering?

I guess the downside is meta, google, microsoft, et al will benefit the most, but whatever.

Also someone the other day mentioned something like this, where users could subscribe for $50 to pursue legal avenues - sorry i don't have the link, but:

> What we actually need is a Consumer Protection Alliance that is made by and funded by people who want protection from this and are willing to pay for the lawyers needed to run all of the cases and bring these cases before a judge over and over and over again until they win.

> This would mean people like you and me and a million others of us paying $20-$50/month out of pocket to hire people to sue companies that do this [...]

Re: What could have been

#117

Post by ares623 »

Yhippa wrote: post #67
emp17344 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course fairly quick progress was made - a truly astounding amount of money was poured into this industry in a short timeframe. The thing is, now it’s clear that AI isn’t really valuable enough to justify investment on the same scale anymore.

It feels like after people were still flush with cash at the end of the pandemic, reality hit and as people were profit taking from the market, LLMs seemed to emerge from the æther as the next best thing to glom on to. So now the hive mind dumped all their money into that and we are riding an incredible bubble. So cheap gaming hardware in the future (similar to when telecoms over invested in transcontinental undersea…

Quantum computing?

Re: What could have been

#118

Post by ares623 »

Yhippa wrote: post #69
jay_kyburz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a massive AI skeptic, and I think the amount of money being spent is astonishing, but I really don't want to go back to searching the web the old way. Asking Gemini _is_ just much better at finding you the answers you need, _and_ providing links for you to verify that information. It will be a sad day when they start injecting ads, I really hope the foss alternatives catch up.

I still don't trust the non-determinism of current LLMs. I feel like I can't trust the results unless they are very simple ones.

Yeah. Everyone keeps comparing it to higher level languages.

But higher level languages were deterministic and reliable, allowing users to offload the cognitive load of the lower levels to the computer.

With LLMs you can’t fully offload the load, you need to keep a close eye on it which kind of defeats the purpose (IMO)

Re: What could have been

#119

Post by jay_kyburz »

ares623 wrote: post #118
Yhippa wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't trust the non-determinism of current LLMs. I feel like I can't trust the results unless they are very simple ones.

Yeah. Everyone keeps comparing it to higher level languages. But higher level languages were deterministic and reliable, allowing users to offload the cognitive load of the lower levels to the computer. With LLMs you can’t fully offload the load, you need to keep a close eye on it which kind of defeats the purpose (IMO)

It's not really all that different from trusting some random post on stack overflow. You always needed to be a little skeptical.

I'm asking the AI things that are easy to verify, and often ask it to provide web references. It's working well for me.

I don't ask it about niche topics. I occasionally ask it about myself or my games and it's always funny. It's a good reminder how wrong the AIs can be.

Re: What could have been

#120

Post by nicoburns »

signatoremo wrote: post #100
nicoburns wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be much better if we invested in meaningful things directly. So much time and effort is being put into making things AI shaped for investors. The elephant in the room is that capital would likely be better directed if it was less concentrated.

If a million families each has a $1,000 to invest in new business, how would you envision the money to be invested collectively? what would be the process?

The money would distributed mostly as people purchasing things rather than as upfront investment (although it's far from unheard of for startup capital to come from people's local communities where those communities have the resources to enable this). It would be harder to start a business, but easier to maintain a sustainable business model built on actual demand.
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