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The tech monoculture is finally breaking

jasonwillems.com

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Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#151

Post by cptskippy »

at1as wrote: post #107
cptskippy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's very contradictory. "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription." "I'm tired of distracting notifications so I'm getting Meta Ray-Ban AR glasses." What I find odd is that much of the rationale for these moves is completely absent from the article. Why is Linux growing in popularity? People are si…

> "I'm tied of Apple converting everything to services so I'll eschew the Apple Watch in favor of an analog watch and an Oura ring that requires a subscription." I wouldn't pay a subscription to Oura, especially with them moving towards a more obfuscated view of individual metrics. I'm grandfathered in to a lifetime subscription. And eagerly awaiting something comparable in the market, but reviews of competing produc…

The over arching theme of your article is "tech is fun again because we're escaping the monoculture" but there's a strong unspoken signaling of "look at how cool I am". You're saying "my tech choices signal discernment." You've got this curated counterculture vibe of being off mainstream by being on different mainstream platforms.

The shifts taking place are all reminiscent of the shift from Windows to Apple that started in the late 90s. Back in the early 2000s we had Jony Ive channeling Deiter Rams and telling us how cool Helvetica was. And the "I'm a Mac" commercials beating us over the head with metaphor.

You talk about tech consolidation as something that emerged in the 2000s that killed the fun but consolidation has always been there. Technology is about making your life easier and consolidation is a part of that. When a product can reasonably be consolidated into another product, it often is. Look no further than Swiss Army Knives, the Leatherman, Telephone answering machines, boom boxes, or countless other technology chimera. Even your Meta Ray-Bans are a combination of the Humane AI Pin and sunglasses.

You wax poetically about the need for devices to feel personal, that's always been there. It still is but refinement often is about distilling something down to it's simplest possible form and that's where we're at with Smartphones. So the degree of customization is limited to cases and colors in much the same way as a Swiss Army Knife.

We haven't escaped the monoculture. Bambu Labs is the new 3d printer monoculture. Meta is the AR monoculture. Options like Linux have always been there, they just weren't cool. Gog for example is nearly as old as Steam.

What's changed is that we've slowly moved from running code on our devices to running in the cloud, which has made the choice of device or ecosystem less relevant. Linux is emerging as an option because Apple has grown to be more like Microsoft with age and they're both stuffing tracking and ads into every corner of their platform. They're no longer cool.

To me this article reads as soft elitism with a side of mid-life crisis.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#152

Post by imiric »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #26
biophysboy wrote: post #10

My ideal situation is that AI becomes commoditized so much that it yields relatively little value for the producers and an incredible amount of value for the consumers. I don't really expect the prices to be this cheap for much longer, but my hope is that the seeds for the next generation of tech have already been sown. It would be cool if software becomes so mundane and interchangeable that tech once again distingui…

> I don't really expect the prices to be this cheap for much longer Open models are a great proxy (and scare tactic) to what we can expect. As they are already released, and won't change, you'll get basically the same capabilities in the future for current or decreasing cost (with normal hardware improvements trends). The current SotA for open models (dsv3, glm, minimax, devstral, etc) are at or above the mini versio…

I would like to live in a world where open source (not just open weights) models dominate the landscape, but I don't see that happening.

The moat is not the quality of the models, but the compute. Any open model that consumers can run will pale in performance compared to SOTA commercially hosted models. There's just no comparison. The really big open models (e.g. DeepSeek, Kimi K2) are much closer, but they're not accessible to most consumers, who still have to rely on companies to provide them.

Maybe this will change one day, but considering how this industry is artificially inflating the cost of hardware, I wouldn't bet on that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, mega-corporations are building out increasingly larger datacenters to meet the demand, and the moat grows.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#153

Post by hamdingers »

mullingitover wrote: post #116

> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use Literally the only time I've heard of anyone using these in the wild was some guy being an absolute creep and using them to secretly film women to create social media content[1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go

Many in my regular cycling group are getting them. I find the camera creepy and do not trust meta enough to put anything they make on my face, but they do provide a lot of value to wearers (gps navigation, comms, etc).

I know there are alternatives from more trustworthy companies but haven't looked into them in depth.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#154

Post by at1as »

niobe wrote: post #145

This article taught me nothing except first-world tech consumerism is out of control. Why is that interesting? Because I think it's part of why the tech bros consistently over-estimate the relvance, pace and world-changing potential of technology like LLMs. If you're drowning in tech consumerism, you see it all around and think it's _really_ important. But this is living in a silicon bubble. 90% of the planet just do…

> first-world tech consumerism is out of control ... this is living in a silicon bubble. 90% of the planet just doesn't care, is not even aware of these "toys"

The US is not really among the countries that likes tech "toys". The number of things you can buy in BestBuy, for instance, doesn't compare to a trip to Shenzen, Tokyo, HK, etc. Those items are far more likely to be throwaway than the things listed in my article (most of which are high quality and I expect can last a decade).

> I think it's part of why the tech bros consistently over-estimate the relvance, pace and world-changing potential of technology like LLMs

I think the opposite is happening. A year ago it was sacrilege to state that an LLM would not lead to AGI. Today that's pretty uncontroversial to say that and most discussions center around 2nd order impacts of current capabilities on employment, education, etc.

> Technology does change the world eventually, but the latest pair of smart goggles or a slightly better camera on your personal surveillance device does not.

You can judge the product uncharitably, but I prefer to judge the outcome. Shared with my family many travel videos from my Rayban Metas. Provides a much more intimate perspective, like you're actually at the Swiss Alps, which just isn't a perspective you get from a smart phone. And this was not an upgrade, per se, it was me entering a new category that simply didn't exist before. My other cameras are not recent (Canon 6D - 12 years old, iPhone 12 - 5 years old).

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#155

Post by at1as »

lbrito wrote: post #71

Strong disagree. While I share the 90s nostalgia, the trend of just relaunching everything is a sad reminder of how bad tech is today, not an exciting new development

I think if there's a trend towards purpose driven devices, those can evolve at a faster rate than our consolidated everything phones. So eventually we'll see something exciting based upon it's novelty and merits.

We'll see!

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#156

Post by alephnerd »

pretzellogician wrote: post #83
alephnerd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services It's simpler than that - retro is an (a e s t h e t i c) Those of us who are Zillenials, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha were still in elementary school or not around when those products were mainstream. I…

Your points about nostalgia marketing are quite valid. But fyi, the Venture Brothers creators (Publick, born 1967, and Hammer, born 1971) are firmly in Gen X.

U right! Great show nonetheless!

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#157

Post by NetOpWibby »

californical wrote: post #95
Aurornis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s I could see how many people would assume this, but it’s actually false. There’s actually a big selection of dedicated audio players that do the job very well now. The battery life and audio quality are extremely good because there’s a niche market for them with a lot of competition. If you th…

I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS specific to only playing songs and podcasts, and maybe movies, which I can sync with my computer (maybe with rsync or whatever else). No apps. The only option that I could find was an iPod cl…

Pretty sure I know what music player you're talking about because I have the same requirement.

Sony's modern Walkman is an Android device. No thanks.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#158

Post by at1as »

jonny_eh wrote: post #150

> Art Deco is in vogue Is it? I wish it was, but what is the author referencing?

People seem to be increasingly interested in it for interior design. I've seen this reported in a few places, Pinterest being one of those sources https://bestreviews.com/articles/home/decor/pinterest-fall-2...

There's also, of course, the aggressive A16Z Art Deco rebranding. But we can put that one to the side.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#159

Post by jasonfarnon »

sylens wrote: post #29

I think the author is correct to a point but I don't believe the examples they've chosen provide the best support for their case. Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services. You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software po…

"Gen Z buying iPods and people buying N64 games again is not evidence of the monoculture breaking apart - it's a retreat into the past for the enlightened few because their needs are not being met by modern goods and services."

That seems like a charitable interpretation to me. Maybe it's just a retro fashion trend that is even at its peak a tiny blip in the market, like back in the 90s when bell bottoms were "in". Give it a few years and we'll see.

Re: The tech monoculture is finally breaking

#160

Post by imiric »

at1as wrote: post #123
imiric wrote: post #51

> Antitrust pressure has slowed consolidation, opened app distribution, killed the anti-competitive iMessage and AirDrop moats, and made big tech cautious about horizontal expansion. Huh? In what reality is this remotely true? It certainly isn't in the one I live in. The Big 6 control all media in the US, and mergers happen all the time (WBD->Netflix->Paramount?). Google owns web search and web browsing; Amazon owns…

> The Big 6 control all media in the US, and mergers happen all the time Media has not been in a healthy state for quite some time. For a long time that had little to nothing to do with tech. With streaming these days and tech companies buying studios, that's unfortunately no longer the case. I didn't call that out directly in the article, but I agree there's cause for concern and there's probably good reason to stri…

Well, I appreciate your optimism, but do think it's misplaced.

We live in an increasingly polarized world, with rising political tensions and climate-related problems. Technology has played a major role in adding fuel to the fire, if not being directly responsible for our current unstable situation. Wealth and power are increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a few megalo+plutomaniacs. Advertising dominates all our communication channels, and along with social media, is the greatest brainwashing machine ever invented. "AI" is marketed as the solution to our problems, when in reality it's devaluing human work and flooding us even more in disinformation and propaganda.

But, hey, at least we can buy some VR headsets to distract us from all of this.

By any measure, these are all dystopian signs, which only seem to be growing stronger. I guess we all have a picture from books and movies that dystopia is something that's clearly visible, oppressive, etc. It's likely that it can be difficult to see if you gradually transition into it. Boiling frogs, and all that.

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