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Some things just take time

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Re: Some things just take time

#111

Post by DrewADesign »

keiferski wrote: post #106

One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.” An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play…

I have no problem with people treating advanced tech like a math problem. I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved. It’s just so sad and most people resent it being shoved down their throats by tech companies abusing their societal leverage.

Re: Some things just take time

#112

Post by overfeed »

nabbed wrote: post #102
Chris_Newton wrote: post #60

With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough off course, increasing speed becomes counterproductive and it ends up taking longer to get where we want to be. I’ve been noticing that this simple reality explains almost all of bot…

>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.

> I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing,

A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many shallow features that are brittle.

Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.

Re: Some things just take time

#113

Post by cambrianentropy »

titanomachy wrote: post #6

> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.

I clicked the back button exactly when I got to that line haha.

Re: Some things just take time

#114

Post by chrisweekly »

Ezra wrote: post #108
gopalv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. This is a real problem when the "direction" == "good feedback" from a customer standpoint. Before we had a product person for every ~20 people generating code and now we're all product people, the machines are writing the code (not all of it, but enough of it that I will -1 a ~4000 line PR and ask someone to start…

This is the article you referred to: https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-hidden-danger-of-shippi...

Thanks! Great link.

Re: Some things just take time

#115

Post by loandbehold »

keiferski wrote: post #106

One of my favorite ideas from Nietzsche [1] is that civilizations take millennia to “digest” or integrate concepts. It seems a little obvious, maybe, until you look at the modern world and realize the baseline assumption is something like, “every problem is just a question of resources.” An example being the common attitude that [advanced tech] is just a math problem to be solved, and not a process that needs to play…

Knowledge is a distilled experience.

Re: Some things just take time

#116

Post by ghywertelling »

wazHFsRy wrote: post #74

Sounds familiar, for most of my life I have tried to remove all "friction" from life – applying that engineering mindset to make everything as efficient as possible. Only then I realized that life somehow is about that "friction".

All of our current systems are currently designed keeping in mind the restrictions of costs and human working speed. What if we remove those friction using software, The remaning friction will be all due to physical reality. Then humanity's focus will shift in removing friction in physical domain. Currently it takes some time for a support person to triage a bug request, what if that flow takes seconds now.

Think about the analogy of transaction speed of money transfer vs actual delivery of good. With AI, we would make all digital tasks instantaneous, but the physical world will hum along at its own speed unless we speed it up with dark factories and what not.

Re: Some things just take time

#117

Post by bambax »

> Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that.

This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an unacceptable waste of money and energy.

And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure many more miracles happen every day.

Re: Some things just take time

#118

Post by aantix »

Everyone is obsessed with speed.

But no one wants to go out of their house.

Social connections. Trust. Facetime. All matter more than ever.

Want a moatable software business? Know your customers on a personal level. Have a personal relationship. Know the people that sign the contracts, know their kids names, where they vacationed last winter, their favorite local restaurant.

Get out of the house.

Re: Some things just take time

#119

Post by Ylpertnodi »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #109

We value human ingenuity and effort. If there was a button "create an Oscar-worty movie" anyone could press it would make a paradox. The trick is that this won't render film industry useless, since we watch movies only when we believe they're worth our time, which is not true for zero-effort content.

Isn't it only of late that the Oscars panel have to watch the films?

Re: Some things just take time

#120

Post by ICodeSometimes »

It's worth noting that just because something takes time doesn't mean it's automatically worth doing.

Vibe slop-ing at supersonic speeds and waiting years to grow aren't the only options, there's something in between where you have enough signal to keep going and enough speed to not waste years on the wrong thing.

I feel that today's VCs have completely disregarded the middle and are focused on getting as big as possible as fast as possible without regard to the effect it's having on the ecosystem.

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