Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

joanwestenberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 204 posts

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#141

Post by keiferski »

leocgcd wrote: post #135
sirspacey wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular misconception. Tech has always been built in the face of massive distrust, mischaracterization, and dismissiveness - especially by media outlets. PR was not how tech overcame that. It was charismatic founders (who often broke the rules of PR at the time) and massive break-throughs in adoption by winning customers over directly. It’s honestly amusing that so many believe that marketers were the reaso…

Charismatic founders are PR lol. Steve Jobs was a market strategist. >To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value. Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was…

I think the single best argument against this viewpoint is to just look outside. People are obsessed with iPhones because they're a superior product, not because they were sucked into a PR campaign filled with Justin Long ads.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#142

Post by raxxorraxor »

cen4 wrote: post #10
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently: 1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make…

Well people have discovered you can make cash irrespective of the quality of tech you pump out. Two routes have been discovered and milked to high heaven - Financial engineering - this is where if you accumulate more capital and faster than the next guy you win. Add to that globalization ie arbitrage on interest rates/tax rates/forex/labor cost/rent/real estate/govt regulation in generating capital. Demand engineerin…

Most people failed to make tech their own. They wanted the lazy ready-to-use solutions and now others determine the degrees of freedom they can have.

Honestly if you did make tech work for you, not too much has changed. But yes, since people always opt for the easy solution, more engineers will supply their demands.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#143

Post by lucianbr »

keiferski wrote: post #141
leocgcd wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charismatic founders are PR lol. Steve Jobs was a market strategist. >To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value. Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was…

I think the single best argument against this viewpoint is to just look outside. People are obsessed with iPhones because they're a superior product, not because they were sucked into a PR campaign filled with Justin Long ads.

What I can see by just loooking outside is that people are obsessed with iPhones. Why they are obsessed is definitely not obvious at a glance. Could be quality, could be PR, could be something else.

You just think your opinion of something is the obvious truth and anyone not seeing it is blind.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#144

Post by majewsky »

poincaredisk wrote: post #131
ryandrake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love computers and software. When the next great thing came out, I’d be an enthusiastic early adopter, and enjoyed the new powers the technology gave me. Now, whenever something new comes out, my first thought is: “how is this thing going to suck up my personal data and monetize me?” And my second thought is “how is this going to wreck some part of life and/or humanity and turn it into profits for the rich?…

>You can’t be a techno-optimist anymore. You can be, we're just getting old. LLMs are very exciting! WASI (and a bit older WebAssembly) is a bold idea! Rust is a breath of fresh air and ancient tools are finally being rewritten! Edge computing may change the way we write programs! Hardware is finally ready for VR! Now, I'm quite sceptical and pessimistic about all of the above. But I think this says more about me tha…

> LLMs are very exciting

This just goes back to your grandparent comment: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Also, I'm not particularly excited about my day job becoming about fixing up half-broken scripts that other people pump out with LLMs.

> WASM/WASI is a bold idea

I will admit that I have not looked into this a lot, but how is WASM substantially different from other bytecode interpreters like the JVM?

> Rust is a breath of fresh air

Finally something that I agree about.

> and ancient tools are finally being rewritten

But as someone in their 30s who has now personally witnessed several hype cycles, I am increasingly frustrated by the observation that most things billed as "progress" are either "change for the sake of change" or "reinventing technologies that existed decades ago under different names" (e.g. JVM -> WASI or FreeBSD jails -> Linux containers).

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#145

Post by genewitch »

dmurray wrote: post #107
genewitch wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300. Personally, I prefer 720p. It's easy to play on any device, the file sizes are much smaller, and the quality is fine. I don't need 4K for most content and save it for exceptional visuals like Godfrey Reggio's Trilogy or Yojimbo — one of the…

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300. This sounds way too much - prohibitive, in fact, when cheap all-you-can-eat dubiously-legal IPTV services exist. On the one hand, AWS quote something similar as an estimate ($12,000 for 10 hours for 10,000 viewers at 1080p) [0]. All but a…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0

my source for the part you quoted - apparently this is in their dashboard? it could be a third party site. I no longer have access to a twitch account (as an aside i blame starlink and not using gmail) so i can't verify if streamers on the platform have access to those tools.

And the pricing seemed about right. You can't tell but i am napkin-ing this right now: twitch recommends 4500kbps for 1080p30 on the uplink side, which fans out to 40gbit. per second. So maybe you can get that for $5000/month; or you can get 10gbit links in four places. Receive bits, transcode, stream. how hard

wait transcode?

A certain very large media company was paying a third party $250,000 per month for transcoding, on three 24x7 streams. I'm not saying that spend was necessary, because it isn't, just that it is a pain point.

anyhow that video shows $0.132 per half-viewer-hour (or something) at 1080p - probably 60fps. Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#146

Post by keiferski »

lucianbr wrote: post #143
keiferski wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the single best argument against this viewpoint is to just look outside. People are obsessed with iPhones because they're a superior product, not because they were sucked into a PR campaign filled with Justin Long ads.

What I can see by just loooking outside is that people are obsessed with iPhones. Why they are obsessed is definitely not obvious at a glance. Could be quality, could be PR, could be something else. You just think your opinion of something is the obvious truth and anyone not seeing it is blind.

iPhones are used so widely around the world by such a dominant percentage of the population. That it's due to a PR campaign seems extremely unlikely to me. The best advertising in the world doesn't have a fraction of that kind of reach.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#147

Post by surgical_fire »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently: 1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make…

> The 90s were peak humanity

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.

I was a teenager during the 90's, and I do have fond memories of things from that decade, but it would do well to keep your nostalgia in check.

Even when we restrict ourselves to the realm of tech, a lot of things back then sucked horribly. Large tech companies already showed their rent-seeking tendencies, there was crazy hype for shit ideas (the dotcom bubble popped for a reason).

In fact, I think that the current mindset of people being increasingly jaded, skeptical, and mistrusting of tech is healthy. It shows that at least some people are learning their lessons, even if this mindset is somewhat restricted to bubbles like this.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#149

Post by flohofwoe »

dudul wrote: post #140
flohofwoe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then Was there? I remember the 90s as an intermittent software dark age we had to crawl out for the next decade until things started to improve around 2010. The unbearable OOP hype, turds like CORBA and Itanium, UML, "Enterprise scale" software development with Java, the first big VR hype cycle, the worst of the desktop operating systems won (Windows), and I…

You're talking about how it was to be in tech as opposed to using the tech - what the parent meant I think. From the consumer's point of view, the parent is completely right. In the 90s/early 00s there was a real feeling that tech was trying to improve your life and make it easier without necessarily controlling every aspects of it.

That's actually a very good point! Things always looked worse when you know how the sausage gets made.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#150

Post by tim333 »

genewitch wrote: post #112
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and advertising killed everything off. Google is directly responsible for making tech and the world shitty. They started the whole making money of your attention thing and then everyone sort of just followed it. Not to mention the whole SEO industry that pushed off smaller, high quality websites for gargantuan mess of word salad articles. And finally now the present generation of developers are slavishly solvi…

my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 an…

>nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements

Well you can do ctrl shift J or similar in the browser and start typing javascript, or open the terminal. It is all a bit more complicated than BASIC in the old days though.

Post reply on HN