> Yes, it removes the "free" internet as it was 20 years ago,
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
i had a boss. before he was my boss, he was a friend. he took me under his wing, musically speaking. he showed me new music. told me what gear he was interested in. we went to some gigs.
he used to say “the best artists have the biggest record collections”.
they’ve done their research. they developed taste. they’ve been in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re still in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re always searching for new. for unexplored. for different.
they’ve also figured out what “good artists copy, great artists steal” means.
we take small bits. small ideas. small riffs. we turn them into our own. then we repeat that N times to create “a song”. we borrow. we revere. we obsess. turning lots of little differences into a completely new work. yes it’s all derivative. but derivative originality takes a lot of fuckin’ effort to get right. to be tasteful.
this thing isn’t artistic stealing, it’s the most low-effort stealing possible. creativity, originality and more importantly taste appear nowhere here.
so, is it bad? depends on your perspective on creative endeavours being worthwhile and whether you have taste or not i guess.
edit - personally i don’t think you can polish a turd. even if you rewrite it, the memory lingers.
I studied computing at AS level in the UK (16-17 years old). I learned about: computer components (disks, memory, cpu), binary, ASCII, assembly and machine code. We programmed in Turbo Pascal. I then spent ten years doing non-computer things until I came back to a masters. I was one of the top students in my masters because i didn't need help with fundamentals. The other top student had previously made contributions to the linux kernel (even though he was a philosophy grad...).
The argument for having autonomous LLMs/Agents often ends up as "none of us need to know about assembly, why do i need to know about the code?".
It's definitely that, which is very valuable, but it's also the optionality value additionally. You had the option to launch the thing, which you wouldn't have had if you had never worked on it at all. It's notoriously difficult to properly value optionality, but it definitely has value, and often a lot of value.
No, optionality very literally has value. If I buy an option to purchase some commodities at some price, and the market moves against me, I lose the price of the option. By your logic here, the thought should be "buying the option was wrong, because it didn't go my way and I lost the price of the option". But it's often the case that actually buying that option was a good move.
The kind of optionality I'm talking about in software projects is not so clean to account as the financial instrument, but it has real value in just the same way.
> sorry, but this just sounds like a rationalisation for "we built the wrong thing".
If it were so easy to decide what the right thing is to build before you build it then business would be easy.
That's the whole reason options have value. Having 3 shippable products ready to go when you can only effectively ship 1 puts the whole team in a much better position than choosing 1, focusing everyone on it, and hoping you hit the lottery with product-market fit.
So yes, an engineer may work on something that doesn't ship. That doesn't retroactively make their effort worthless, and that's not even counting the experience gained by the endeavor which may well pay off on the next round of products to ship.
> If it were so easy to decide what the right thing is to build before you build it then business would be easy.
It's not easy. That's why it's important to be straightforward and just move on without all the navel gazing.
> ... hoping you hit the lottery with product-market fit.
There's this thing called "research" where you talk to real people, instead of guessing.
> That doesn't retroactively make their effort worthless
No-one said building the wrong thing was worthless. Life is one continuous mistake.
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we are saying mostly the same thing i'm pretty sure, especially in your other comment reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498912). although i feel you're dressing it up a little too much for my liking. i prefer being a lot more plain and direct about it (and probably a bit arsey).
ruthlessness is an asset when it comes to we built the wrong thing. ruthlessness gets us moving on faster.
> There's this thing called "research" where you talk to real people, instead of guessing.
Obviously you should talk to people.
But that doesn't lead to guarantees of product-market fit. People can describe their problems, but they usually can't describe the solution. If they already knew the solution they'd likely have already addressed the problem!
> ruthlessness is an asset when it comes to we built the wrong thing. ruthlessness gets us moving on faster.
Sure, I think we are sort of saying the same thing. I'm saying you should work on it even though it may be ruthlessly rejected later, potentially even without ever shipping.
It's part of the game and it's not worth crying over. The ruthless thing is to acknowledge the work you did, that it had value to whoever was paying you to do it, and then move on to the next thing.
I don't understand why you interpret "we should recognize that it's worth paying for optionality and sometimes we decide not to exercise the option and that's normal and fine" as naval gazing. I think it's the opposite, that feeling butt hurt about the projects you work on not shipping is what is naval gazing.
To me all your "I prefer being plain and direct" just sounds like someone who hasn't thought much about why building the wrong thing is not worthless, and why those continuous mistakes in life are worthwhile, and isn't really interested in thinking about things at more than the surface level.
It does seem like you aren't really disagreeing with us here. But you're just saying "don't make me think about why we agree about this!"
> It does seem like you aren't really disagreeing with us here.
I'm not.
> But you're just saying "don't make me think about why we agree about this!"
My position is that you're overcomplicating it with business doublespeak.
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edit
> someone who hasn't thought much about why building the wrong thing is not worthless, and why those continuous mistakes in life are worthwhile, and isn't really interested in thinking about things at more than the surface level.
I have just spent the last two years writing over a thousand pages of very heavy introspective stuff about a bunch of stuff i've done, and things that have happened to me, over the last thirty years.
"surface level" is most definitely not the person you're speaking to.
Yes I understand that. The tendency of engineers to willfully refuse to understand what's going on in their businesses and scoff at the things they are refusing to understand by dismissing them as "overcomplicated" and "business doublespeak" is what my comment that started this thread was about.
Did you see the part in my big story time comment where i convinced the ceo his business strategy was wrong? do you think i did that with a flippant and dismissive comment?
Shouldn't companies figure this out before wasting tens of millions in budget + working hours? All I'm reading is that corporations are not taxed enough if they are okay with such opulent waste.
Knowing what to build (and that it hasn't already been built or bought elsewhere in the company) requires bits of information / person-to-person networking / visibility into the state of the company that not all managers or VPs have.
In fact, most people don't have that knowledge, because they're busy with existing or "local" problems , or because they didn't know to ask Davis the DBA or Kris the Kafka Cluster Manger or Alex from accounting if we have <resource> our team can plug into and use. "Oh, yeah, El has one under their desk they kick occasionally, ask them to hook you up!"
If you solve this problem in a turnkey way Fortune 500 companies will write you very large checks to help them prevent such duplicate waste, and will in turn become the 15th system they need to integrate....
That XKCD joke about "how 14 standards becomes 15 standards" also applies to the class of "one system to integrate with and report from all other systems"
ceo had invested £1 million to build a data analytics platform. "democratising data analytics" in a very specific domain. essentially, competing with someone like databricks in a niche. although they had never heard of databricks before i showed up.
For that million pounds they got a job scheduler written in pure django with a halfway finished react frontend. the whole thing was constantly broken. there were multiple race conditions throughout the product. i joined well after the million pounds was all gone. three years after i joined i had fixed the worst of the problems by rewriting massive swathes of the thing.
i eventually convinced the ceo they'd been doing the wrong thing all this time -- they should focus on analytics + specific domain consultancy services instead of software products.
the major failure was no-one ever moved on from idea V1. they never moved to idea V2. which meant they never got to idea V3. instead, everyone spent a hell of a lot of time talking about how great V1 was going to be, and how they planned to build V1 and what V1 would look like, check out this status update about our progress on V1, check out this mock up on what V1 is going to look like etc. they had an agile consultant come in to tell them how to be more agile. a scrum-master to tell them how to scrum.
3 months after joining was the first time i mentioned apache airflow. they literally could have just stuck a nice frontend on top of it and written a backend data transfer library. job done. very cheap idea V1. unfortunately, the previous team of django developers could only see their trusty django hammer. edit -- and i should add their big £1 million budget too.
multiply the budget by 10x or more. exact same thing at some big corpo. bigger budget = room for more bullshit.
Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was <500.
This obscene waste actually isn't health for society nor the economy.
I disagree, especially if we are talking about potentially hundreds of billions in waste. How much better would say software be if instead of Meta wasting $100billion on Reality Labs we gave one time $100,000 grants to open source developers? That would be helping over 1,000,000 open source developers that are actually writing useful helpful software for others.
Instead we had a corporate jobs program that benefited no one outside of Meta's offices.
Software engineering projects expand to fill the deadlines you set for them (usually going over). Same thing for budget. You'll waste a bunch of a million pound budget. People are forced to get creative and thrifty with a £20k budget.
> The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
Yes. The metaverse bullshit comes to mind. Something no-one wanted or needed, and exorbitant amounts of money spent on it.
Not the same. Every corporation I've worked at (several dozen in my career across the F500) has had numerous stories about obscene waste in regards to building things in software.
Waste at all levels. I've worked at insurance companies that spent $100million on development where only 200 customers signed up (estimated to be 20,000 at start). I've worked at telecoms that spent $25 million developing internal tools that no one used. I've worked at big tech where entire teams sole purpose is to control a single widget on a UI page.
This isn't even on the procurement side. Recently left a company where a single org was paying $10,000 a month on licenses when only 12 devs existed. I've seen organizations waste tens of millions of salesforce licenses that no one uses.
I'm sorry but the waste is rampant. SMB's can afford to waste tens of millions of failures, but modern US corporations can because there is no real competition in US markets. Just monopolies abusing each other.
I'm sure scientists would love the chance to have stupid budgets and make stupid things.
It is true that businesses tend to have more money than scientists so the numbers are bigger, but scientists pursue failed experiments that are "waste" in just this same way.
"It only got 200 users" is the business version of the null hypothesis.
No, it's best to manage your software delivery organization to reduce the cost and time of experiments so that you can quickly and cheaply figure out what to build... and then build that.
But there will still necessarily be things that you build that don't ship, and that's inherent to the problem domain.
> practicing and writing about machine learning ... full stack developer ... digital revolution.
my mum, a boomer now in her 70s, would have no bloody clue what you're talking about. she used to work helping out a guy who was doing punchcard programming back when she was young. she ain't dumb. if i broke it down into normal human english words, she'd probably get a sort of idea (or at least nod along to humour me).
i've lost count of the number of conversations i've had with my dad, late 70s boomer, where he complains that they've changed the UI. "It's all different and i don't understand, why did they have to change it? I don't know where anything is now." he's been moaning about things like this for over a decade now (so since his late 60s).
there are definitely technically not-very-literate 60 year olds and the general point about older folks, whether that's >60 or >70, is very real:
older people exist who don't have a clue about SPAs/PWAs, and chances are they're either asking their offspring for help (my mum does this), trying to phone someone instead (my mum does this) or just walking away from it (my mum does this).
i'm no fan of the politician, but scams like this one are increasing at a significant rate and are a lot harder for non-technically minded people to spot, think your grandmother etc
also: grok CSAM; plundering massive swathes of copyrighted material / intellectual property; making electricity more expensive for regular folks; increasing global carbon footprint building massive data centres; destroying a whole swathe of entry level jobs for recent grads (not just software junior roles); circular funding deals to keep the bubble (scam) alive, while positioning the large companies as necessary for govt. work so when the bubble bursts tax payers will have to bail them out; people with mental health issues being left to run riot with the tool; suicides; the degradation of human knowledge workers using their knowledge (the muscle atrophies when you don't use it cos "ai said yes") ...
social media is not, and never was the "free internet" we all get nostalgic about. maybe the first couple of years was something tangential, but that died very quickly. since then it's been a nightmare-ish hellscape of surveillance, manipulation and hate.
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access, but arguing against any law to be against that just seems like straight up anarchism to me.
anyone claiming something like that is happening here is just spreading paranoiac FUD via a cheap and lazy straw man. if UK law starts requiring me to provide ID just to read rust crate documentation or connect to the internet then that is an issue. i would be very unhappy about it. but that is not happening here.
let's not be drama queens about it.
> Honestly, treating social media, porn, and other things as drugs would probably even be the right step.
i've asserted for a very long bloody time that major social media platforms, not the internet in general, should require government ID verification of some sort to have an account. would likely make it far easier for the police to prosecute a lot of the nasty shit that only happens on those platforms.
having said that, these platforms are designed to prioritise engagement and angry, toxic and hate-filled people click more. so it's the platform's fault but as ever they're not cleaning up their mess.
if folks on HN wanna blame someone or get angry then get angry at the platforms for letting it get to where we are today. it's their own fucking faults.
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