[HN Gopher] Software is eating the world, all right (2024)
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Software is eating the world, all right (2024)
Author : pegasus
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-01-06 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking
| control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is
| to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible
| using automation and technology.
|
| Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of
| this discussion imho.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Not economic gains. Wealth extraction. Provide just as much
| value as needed to squeeze out the super majority of the new
| value, maybe less.
|
| Edit: We violently agree!
| pdfernhout wrote:
| The goal goes even further -- to privatize economic gains (e.g.
| advertising revenues, SaaS revenues) while socializing costs
| and risks (e.g. increasing social divisiveness by stoking
| outrage, increasing poor self-image by comparisons with
| carefully curated images by others, increasing obesity by
| always getting people to think about processed food, increasing
| depression rates by face-to-face social isolation, addiction to
| dopamine hits by hijacking the startle/novelty attention
| reflex, increasing financial distress by retail therapy, not
| paying a fair living wage to gig workers so they are
| essentially mining their cars and wardrobe and health and
| skills without replenishing them, loss of privacy by being
| tracked everywhere online, loss of security from identity theft
| from careless exposure of collected information, the potential
| for poorly-regulated hyper-competitive superhuman AI destroying
| human society as we know it, and so on).
|
| Marshall Brain's Manna shows two options for how all this may
| end: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Author is Jean-Jacques Dubray, creator of State Action Model
| (SAM) [1], since retired as of this post.
|
| [1] http://sam.js.org/
| fundad wrote:
| I searched to find out what restaurants he owned. It looks like
| the harsh realities of operating restaurants urged him to
| incorporate a company to make RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION
| SERVICES because of course.
|
| https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews.
| Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying
| servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a
| synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use
| words like "clueless and absent" when talking about a twenty-
| year-old African-American women', it is the author of the
| article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and
| bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding
| on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know.
|
| Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as
| competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of
| sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for
| example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.
| exitb wrote:
| What's important though is that we can discuss the
| appropriateness, but it doesn't matter at all. We can't bend
| the rules either way, they've been arbitrarily set by someone
| else.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| The recent resurgence of Bluesky would suggest that, on one
| of the article's main points about
| civility/toxicity/moderation, arbitrarily set rules can lead
| to an exodus and migration to greener pastures. Same is true
| of the author's own actions, e.g. with the payments provider.
| So while you cannot change a company, you can often just
| change companies.
|
| If there's a better system for reviewing businesses than
| Google Maps, by all means, I'll try it out, but the
| information it gives me as a customer (often, even if not
| always, and with all other possible caveats) is too valuable
| for me to simply stop using. Otherwise, the information
| asymmetry is a nearly complete one, unless I rely on personal
| recommendations, which is very often not feasible. It has
| served me _very_ well for what, 12-15 years now? I 'll take
| the occasional sociopath review, those are more rare than
| insinuated in the article anyway.
| avgDev wrote:
| Google reviews have been absolute miss for me.
|
| A lot of car dealerships have high reviews in my area and
| were absolute garbage. There is no way they are not gaming
| it.
|
| I've had similar experience with doctors. So much that I
| started using word of mouth again and asking physicians I
| trust for referrals.
| izacus wrote:
| The person you're responding to is talking about
| restaurants. You're talking about doctors and car
| dealerships.
| rezonant wrote:
| The original article was focused on restaurants, this sub
| thread focuses on Google reviews in general, and the
| person you are talking about never mentioned restaurants
| at all
| rozap wrote:
| I regularly frequent fantastic small businesses there there are
| a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people. Pre-
| Covid, my favorite local banh mi place had a 1 star review that
| described the woman who ran the place as angry and hard to
| understand (because, I can only assume, her english was heavily
| accented). But in reality she was the nicest old lady and was
| so happy when I came back after a few months because our office
| moved. And I've been to 4.9 star places that could only
| generously be described as mid. Obviously this is all
| anecdotal, but it also seems to be a nearly universal
| experience among my peers. Rage baiting, Yelp's blatant
| extortion of establishments to get rid of bad reviews, and all
| the other little tricks described in the article are purely due
| to these awful companies optimizing their perverse KPIs, like a
| leech whose only KPI is quantity of blood sucked.
|
| I was a true believer in a lot of this stuff 15 years ago, but
| from where I sit now I really agree with OP.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people_
|
| My favourite category of 1-star reviews are those left at
| obviously fine dining establishments praising the food and
| service but one starring due to price. (Same category:
| excellent food truck food, unbelievable value, one star
| because there wasn't enough seating or the water came in a
| plastic cup.)
| stopping wrote:
| This is a particular banh mi place in South Bay isn't it?
| I've been there dozens of times and seen the reviews you're
| referring to. For similar reasons I completely ignore all
| review scores because gamification ruins all signal. Same
| with the chaff driven by SEO. Synthetic information is way
| easier to produce than organic information, which means it's
| always going to be a losing battle over the long term.
| rozap wrote:
| No this was a place in the international district of
| downtown Seattle. It's not there anymore unfortunately.
|
| But yea I'm right there with you. I ignore reviews now.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >Yelp's blatant extortion of establishments to get rid of bad
| reviews
|
| Yelp has never done this. I have no idea how this myth has
| persisted this long.
| runningmike wrote:
| Great post! "The "digital revolution" is financially corrupt,
| morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a
| parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating
| the world, all right." Applies to a lot of AI develpments too
| imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium
| platform....
| oezi wrote:
| I think Anti-Trust actions or large scale technological
| revolutions is the only way we can reclaim some competition in
| the digital space. The digital monopolies are really a cancer
| of our modern age.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| How do we make this actually happen though? I've been saying
| this for nearly a decade, but I lack a proper outlet.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Yeah but they have regulatory captured our government so I
| don't see that changing soon.
| ozymandias8 wrote:
| > My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews
| written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility
| into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or
| emphatic they will be.
|
| Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red
| flags?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?_
|
| Yes. One of our juniors found a candidate's Yelp page. The
| level of awfulness on display there almost had me wondering if
| it was caricature.
|
| (If you're a founder, this works for VCs, too.)
| tarunkotia wrote:
| I will not be surprised if there is _call for startup_ to
| build this exact thing :P
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just
| turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but
| I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and
| snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are
| extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts
| all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things
| truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?
| rozap wrote:
| I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And
| I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years
| ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both?
|
| imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake
| oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective
| hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network"
| came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but
| also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people
| loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few
| rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and
| disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I
| think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special
| boys are actually quite shit.
| jochem9 wrote:
| 15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think
| Facebook still sorted by recent back then.
|
| The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change
| that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete
| more and more for our attention and engagement.
| hibikir wrote:
| At one point, a company makes changes to just get users,
| and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually
| the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all
| the efforts come from increasing profitability per user.
| That will rarely make the company's products better for
| their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins
| and minimal growth years ago.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think "algorithms" disguises something bigger: a broad
| ethos to extract value from users, instead of delivering
| value to them. Modern consumer tech sees end-users as
| resources to exploit. Between privacy violations, vendor
| lock-in, worsening functionality and interoperability, and
| unilaterally changing terms and designs, these services
| demonstrate so much contempt for the people who've come to
| rely on them.
|
| Instead of making things better, tech companies use their
| engineering prowess to impose control over people and
| reduce end-users' agency.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And people _have_ been warning about these issues back
| then already : this is what "protocols, not platforms"
| was about.
|
| (Corporations seeking monopoly is not a new story.)
| Zak wrote:
| Algorithms aren't inherently bad. An algorithm that keeps
| spam out of my email is pretty great if it works. An
| algorithm that presents a feed of things I actually want to
| see is also pretty great. I want to see life updates from
| my friends and family, especially media of their pets, but
| not sports, babies, or politics except from a couple people
| who write interesting things.
|
| That's not a tall order for a recommendation algorithm with
| a huge supply of training data. It wouldn't even need a 50%
| hit rate to make something really useful that I would
| definitely check once or twice a day and post or comment
| several times a week if even a third of my real life social
| circle used it.
|
| An algorithm that presents me a feed of things I sometimes
| can't look away from even though I don't really want to see
| them is harmful, like an addictive drug.
| foobarian wrote:
| > The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in
| order to build something that is wildly popular and
| disruptive...and this was something to live up to?
|
| I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more
| inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at
| least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a
| modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around
| your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz
| kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The
| role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed
| countless possibilities for computers to make life better.
| Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding
| on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type
| of thing.
|
| I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes.
| Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that
| there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every
| single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per
| generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy
| asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of
| this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have
| plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given
| to the rich.
|
| Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| In fact Zuck _was_ a hero back then, as was Elon.
|
| People with power tend to change. With being in power, their
| perspective on the world shifts, often for the worse.
|
| Zuck originally wanted fully free speech, this is in fact
| what everyone wanted in that time. Then appeared the massive
| abuse in the unavoidable echo chambers. Zuck was hence forced
| to be the judge between good and bad speech/content, up to
| being in court. The filtering had to happen with advanced
| algorithms since fully manual was impossible to pull off. The
| funding happened by advertising, so the move to algorithms
| upping engagement was only logical.
|
| Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being
| bullied at the playground, via the acceleration of electrical
| transport, up to buying the world's biggest software
| playground and obtaining a large part of world's
| communication and transport hardware infrastructure. He's
| more convinced than ever of the power of capitalism, for the
| good and the bad.
| estebank wrote:
| > Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd
| being bullied at the playground
|
| Elon wasn't bullied. He was pushed down a flight of stairs
| by one kid after Elon made fun of that kid's father's
| suicide.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| We were not at the site when it happened. I only recall
| the various sources that I read and try to make a
| consistent/plausible model and narrative. I never met
| Elon nor Zuck in person.
| estebank wrote:
| I wasn't there, but the source is elon's father.
| c0balt wrote:
| > the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a
| hero
|
| The word/ genre is a protagonist as antihero. An antihero is
| nice in fiction, we sympathize with them to some degree over
| their flaws and challenges. The problem is that a billionaire
| very much has an outsized impact.
| xnx wrote:
| Things have definitely gotten worse. I view SaaS subscriptions
| as the primary culprit. Even here on HN, most "side-projects"
| are attempts at recurring revenue through paid subscriptions
| instead of contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly
| all software is built from in terms of languages and
| libraries).
| billy99k wrote:
| "Even here on HN, most "side-projects" are attempts at
| recurring revenue through paid subscriptions instead of
| contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly all
| software is built from in terms of languages and libraries)."
|
| Shared libraries generally don't make money. HN has always
| been about startups and making products/services.
|
| I predicted this would happen decades ago. Piracy was
| accepted in the tech community and became so widespread, it
| made it nearly impossible to make a living selling the
| software anymore, so businesses made their move when Internet
| speeds got faster and now make everything into a service
| (that can't be pirated).
| Zak wrote:
| HN was briefly called "Startup News".
|
| I remember the popular prediction of software going
| service-based, probably delivered via a web browser or
| something like one in the late 1990s and being disturbed at
| the prospect of being unable to pirate things. How else was
| I going to get software as a broke teenager?
| devjab wrote:
| I think parts of our industry has gotten worse, but I also
| think there are a lot of opportunities to do some really great
| (and fun) work. I work in the green energy industry and I like
| working with software for solar plant equipment. I hope I can
| eventually pick up a little more on the electrical engineering
| side of things and get into farming robots.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I also do work in the financial aspects of
| it and that'... Well, useless is too strong a word, but in the
| grand scheme of things it's frankly useless. There is so much
| ridiculous leglislation that can be digitized, some of it is
| stupid. Like how you can get various tax benefits if you split
| what you and I think of as a single solar farm into 100 smaller
| companies. How to game the various financial tariffs, how to
| figure out the optimal direction for solar cells based on
| market data. That sort of stuff. Then there is the reasonable
| parts, like how Italy has an agency which requires all money
| transactions to go through them as an anti-mafia thing (sorry I
| can't be more clear on that part I didn't make it). Over all
| though, it's fun to work with stuff that has a real world use.
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| In Denmark the electricity price is calculated per hour for
| consumers, allowing us to move tumble drying, dishwashing and
| laundry to times, when it's cheaper to use power (= more
| renewable energy in the grid). This obviously requires some
| digital solutions to work and I think it's a great example
| where digitalization drives value in other sectors (in this
| case the power sector).
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I don't have your answers, but it has been a very long time
| that I lacked the enthusiasm you seem to have had.
|
| I used to be hyped about the Internet in particular and
| technology as a whole in the early to mid 2000s, before I
| started to work professionally as a developer.
|
| Ever since this illusion was shattered. I understood that
| everyone was just interested in making money, lots of it and as
| quickly as possible. There was no concern of how good something
| would be for the world as whole, only a vague shrug on that of
| something was successful it was inherently good.
|
| I don't feel better or worse for it. _I know it 's a job but
| someone's gotta do it_.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| In my career, engineering went from lucrative, upper middle
| class to a potentially explosive wealth-building apparatus.
|
| Once people became aware of that, they began to _strive_ for
| it. Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful,
| upper middle class life.
|
| Their hunger for more created a subculture of grinding and
| speculation. As the playing field grew feom office computers
| to everyone's phones, the old school capitalists dove in and
| catalyzed it all.
|
| To the point where the wellbeing of our young, the
| environment, the jobs we created- none if it mattered
| anymore. The goal was to get perversely rich and dominate the
| subculture, dissolving the real culture with it.
|
| Can we ever get back on track?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I don't think it's always been this way. Perhaps capitalism is
| destined to end up here eventually, but I think it's been
| functional enough for most of our lives. I wouldn't even say it
| got really bad until very recently, but that could change from
| one person's perception to another's. I'm happy I got to live
| most of my life in the era when it wasn't like this.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| When you write software is the thing you are writing something
| you would ever want to pay for out of pocket even with inside
| knowledge? The answer to that question determines the degree of
| bullshit you are peddling.
|
| As a JavaScript developer the answer about 90% of the time is I
| would rather just write it myself. Exceptions include JellyFin,
| PiHole, Node.js, Mealie, Libre Office, and some other things.
| Those things are free, but I would buy I license if they
| weren't. These things are exceptions not because they are big,
| but because I am happy with the quality of product. They have
| not given me cause to find a replacement. There is so much
| software that I cannot say this for.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The cure for that, for me, was easy (but sucked).
|
| No one wanted to hire me, so I started writing software for
| organizations that help people, for free.
|
| I feel that my software Makes A Difference. It doesn't make
| money, but it acts as a force multiplier, for people that help
| people.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| How do you pay the bills?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm retired.
|
| Fortunately, I had invested wisely, and live humbly, so I
| can handle it.
|
| The reason no one wants to hire me, is because I "aged out"
| of the tech industry.
|
| At 55, I was "radioactive."
|
| I would have been happy to put in at least ten more years,
| but c'est la vie...
| ericmcer wrote:
| Computers have inundated life so thoroughly now that it feels
| less clean to be writing software. If people enjoy a 30 min TV
| show you made that feels great, but if they are watching 10
| hours of tv a day then it feels more problematic.
|
| My personal relationship with phones/computers/tv has degraded
| in the past 20 years as well, its hard to feel good about
| building software when I am trying to cut computer/phone usage
| out of my own life.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going
| to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to
| forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly
| enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against
| companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption",
| and against the individuals who run them.)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so
| much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users.
|
| But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how
| willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and
| destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that
| scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self
| reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully
| we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord
| model but come up with something better.
| throwiruriti wrote:
| > how willing tech people
|
| I find it disgusting how "tech people" are blamed for this. It
| is like blaming plumbers in Pentagon for stuff in Iraq.
| Management takes billions, there are politicians, judges, all
| sorts of regulatory bodies...
|
| Everyone is happy to ignore monopoly, get rich, grab more
| power, and push their agenda. But we have to blame tech people!
| tmtvl wrote:
| I'd say its more like blaming soldiers, airmen, sailors,
| marines,... for stuff in Iraq. If the plumbers in the
| Pentagon stopped working the war could simply roll merrily
| on, but if the cogs in the machine go on strike that's
| another story.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I used to think I'd be part of the solution, but I honestly
| don't know where to apply pressure anymore. Go into policy? Go
| into reporting? Wait decades to build my influence at a company
| like Google? It all feels untenable.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You have a sphere of influence which is a function of your
| resources (your resources being the aggregate of fiat,
| assets, your ability, your network, etc). Do good for those
| who can fit within your sphere. Attempt to grow your sphere.
| When you pass, you will have done what you can with what you
| have for those you could. That is the most we can ask of
| ourselves in the brief period in which we exist.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I don't want to just be an influencer. I want to put in the
| work actually fixing things. We don't have a shortage of
| outrage and opinion, we have a lack of productive outlets
| for these feelings.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Apologies, by influence I meant action or what you can
| control, things you can do (not social influencer or
| simply words). Helpful feedback, appreciate it.
|
| "Take action people around you need."
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I get that, but I'm looking for more tangible advice. No
| offense; what you're saying is generally good advice.
| Clubber wrote:
| I would suggest writing a FOSS solution to a proprietary
| software system. FOSS is the great equalizer. It's hard to
| compete with free.
|
| EDIT: For concrete examples, see what the author complained
| about, there are some good pain points to attack.
| dogline wrote:
| Isn't this is same lament as "Eternal September" when AOL
| joined Usenet?
|
| Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm not sure how to leverage
| this fact for an improvement. Hacker News is good because it's
| also a "self selecting group", and it won't be pretty if that
| ever changes.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Engineers have lost almost all our leverage. Even if you are a
| top 20% engineer (which would make you very talented by 1990s
| standards) you have limited employment opportunities. The
| education system completely revamped itself and has been
| cranking out CS grads. Engineers are no longer calling the
| shots, big corps have the situation under their thumb again.
| safog wrote:
| Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of
| value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism
| still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money
| disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single
| vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| You are incredibly naive to think so. The companies behind
| those services optimize only to make money, not to provide
| better value to the users.
|
| They only have to provide the minimum amount of value to keep
| users hooked. Small competitors can be either bought or
| smothered by your weight.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| On a long enough timeline, probably. But we're talking about
| decades here. Are you content with things sucking horribly for
| most of the duration of these cycles ?
|
| And this also assumes that we are not moving to a different
| kind of society (as posited by cyberpunk) : a much more stable
| system, where corporations are able to capture enough power
| that only whole society collapse events are able to get rid of
| most of them.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > sure enough, they had closed us
|
| This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local
| restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that)
| and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me
| that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next
| day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an
| hour.
|
| But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and
| usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes.
|
| Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird,
| because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every
| time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order
| is the only one waiting for pickup.
| rezonant wrote:
| It might be due to this "feature", but there are a few
| additional quirks to how the modern food delivery system works
| for restaurants. First, it is not uncommon to restrict online
| ordering based on busyness in the kitchen, and that would
| include in person dining. They might still take orders by phone
| call because the additional friction slows still slows down the
| order velocity a lot. Second, a lot of restaurants operate _one
| tablet per food app_, and it's very cumbersome to do this
| (you'll see a wall with like 4-5 android tablets attached to
| it). This invites human error, ie an employee may easily forget
| to activate a service. This second part is slowly getting
| better, though.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When
| you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't
| followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic
| employees - computers.
|
| These electronic employees are very good at following very simple
| instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers
| of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be
| handled in the way that the software engineers planned for.
|
| The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided
| markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by
| governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber,
| DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This
| resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly
| putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out
| that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were
| actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned
| properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning
| Chesterton's fences.
|
| Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating
| apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their
| users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding
| their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the
| uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up
| days).
|
| In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal
| with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with
| them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on
| the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps
| suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from
| that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that
| they're cool.
|
| (On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average
| pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook,
| then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of
| market positioning.)
| 3739574849 wrote:
| This seems like it breaks down when you consider a lot of the
| regulations are ideological. Doordash was a better service
| before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has
| become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more
| expensive for customers. The main lesson if anything seems to
| be that there's little benefit to preemptively handicapping
| yourself with that sort of thing because society will impose it
| anyway.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in
| it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less
| accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for
| customers...
|
| Maybe you're not totally wrong...but that statement almost
| sounds like when a young person ventures off on their own to
| get their very first apartment...and has a job that allows
| them to afford only up to a maximum of USD$100 rent per month
| (I'm using low figure for ease)...but then this same person
| did not think to budget additional monthly costs like
| electricity, water, heating, etc...and of course blows way
| past their hard limit of $100/month....and then this same
| person cries that they didn't know about facts of life like
| paying for electricity, water, etc...or how businesses cry
| because they didn't think that they might have to conform
| with typical/normal regulations/costs of doing business and
| such...and that *that unexpected cost** is what is ruining
| them. ;-)
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not management. It's lawmaking without any control.
| Typical management can't blatantly defy laws because the public
| will grow suspicions and law enforcement will eventually
| intervene(or the public will in form of a violent uprising).
| But law enforcement has little to no leverages against
| software, which makes code law.
| breadwinner wrote:
| I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that
| it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the
| companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software
| industry.
| feznyng wrote:
| He's an effective accelerationist which makes him a pretty good
| figurehead to aim the rhetoric of this article at.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Venture capital demanding YoY growth in revenue is a major (if
| not the major) driving force behind this person's complaints.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not
| some emperor of the software industry.
|
| ?! He's the longest-serving member on Meta's board, and is a
| named partner at a prolific VC fund[1]. Maybe he's not _the_
| emperor, but he 's at minimum, a duke and/or king-maker in
| software industry nobility.
|
| 1. https://a16z.com/portfolio/
| buryat wrote:
| We need to start going into the real world by delivering products
| and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real
| world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how
| much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money
| is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't
| exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems
| like a good step forward.
| Animats wrote:
| Don't run a restaurant. Especially don't run a kitchen which
| exists to fill orders controlled by someone else.
|
| Nobody seems to want to start a dry cleaning shop. That's a
| business with good margins, not too much capital investment, and
| a low failure rate.
| plagiarist wrote:
| Wait, really? Dry cleaning? How do I get started?
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Just the tiniest tip of a megalithic iceberg.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The author has needs a cure for his soul. (The cure is humility)
|
| It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in
| his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality
| business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists
| himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown
| out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc.
|
| "I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my
| Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..."
|
| That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before
| I reached it.
|
| As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on
| Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want.
| The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to
| have anything to do with these digital platforms.
|
| Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant,
| you can pay your staff more if you want to.
|
| The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a
| hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in
| the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a
| review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also
| sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their
| service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the
| author puts it.
|
| Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and
| skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other
| occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose
| your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you
| borrow from relatives and spouses.
| larodi wrote:
| It is the bias that being good at computing automatically gives
| you an advantage with somebody else's algorithms. Or that they
| see you better as one of their own.
|
| After being successful in IT one thinks one can approach
| arbitrary areas of snail mail life better than the rest, but
| it's more complicated than that.
|
| Having have the rare opportunity to fail in a way the author
| write about I can relate the feeling, but no Marc can unwind
| where we are and it needs solid ideologies to change the status
| quo. This not a green field anymore in many areas and
| particularly with who gets peoples' attention.
| robocat wrote:
| A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article
| was specific to software.
|
| Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically
| preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that
| will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the
| geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to
| encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will.
|
| The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is
| actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how
| businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs.
|
| He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems
| - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect
| armchair critic.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular
| people, in conjunction with that software automation affects
| everyone.
|
| I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers
| and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is
| extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules
| of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be
| deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have
| internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will
| of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software
| engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option).
|
| I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for
| technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields
| as the field of software. That must be why and how software is
| eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of
| a modern society.
| ozim wrote:
| Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you
| either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to
| software companies. So author is right basically that's
| extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would
| say. It sucks just like article describes.
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