Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win.
Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)
How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.
In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.
These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.
And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o
Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.
I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.
but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.
People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.
I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.
Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.
While someone does have to be the first to experiment I think you've implied a bit of a false dichotomy here. Experimentation can be good for sure, but it also doesn't have to involve such extremes. Sucks for the people left who now have to make up for the fact that someone's experiment didn't work out so well.
I think that as an employee it’s good to have a clear failure case study to point to from a large and credible organisation that this idea your boss has to fire everyone and just LLM everything isn’t going to work the way you expect it to.
The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.
I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.
Makes no sense - why would Salesforce's customers care if the company is using AI or not, other than when it impacts them (the customer) such as worse customer service.
This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.
If you consider the extent to which our economy has become financialized, then you see these decisions have little to do with providing a product for customers but rather a stock for investors.
they contribute very little except of course that without jobs their products have created 14.8647% of US population would starve to death. HN seems like a perfect place where people upvote stupid shit like some of the most successful companies in the history of mankind contributing nothing to society. bravo!! :)
A bold statement. Who knew so many US citizen owed their food to an internet company! And not even Google or Amazon. Seems a reach, by maybe two or three decimal places.
When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out.
The article talks extensively about how these monuments were used for timekeeping. Marking the seasons allowed people to predict animal migrations and plan agricultural activities.
It seems that you are the one who has forgotten the practical uses of these artifacts.
Tech really went downhill since Alphabet started using machine learning to help the oil industry find more deposits.
It created a feedback loop where datacenters increase both energy consumption and energy production. "AI" is just the current upshot. Energy use is exploding and its being fed by an exploding increase in oil production enabled by the very computer clusters that consume most of the excess production.
The global warming death spiral has begun. Brace for impact.
I see it this way: simpler code can be smaller, say half the size. It takes half the time to write (at the most), half the time to read, half the time to compile and execute. That already gives it an eight-fold advantage.
You better have a good reason for spending the time and money to do more that the simple solution. Engineering is all about money spent for results. Not cleverness, except indirectly.
The job, in the modern world, is to close tickets. The code quality is negotiable, because the entire automated software process doesn't measure code quality, just statistics.
That's why I refuse to take part in it. But I'm an old-world craftsman by now, and I understand nobody wants to pay for working, well-thought-out code any more. They don't want a Chesterfield; they want plywood and glue.
I woke up and had a thought the software engineering isn't a serious engineering field if they actually fully shipped llms and expect everyone to use them. What do you expect quality wise from a profession that says that this is okay?
Imagine if normal engineering did that. Engineers invent a "blobby" thing that glues things together. It has amazing properties that increase productivity but sometimes it just stops working for some reason and comes off. It's totally random and because of how blobby is produced there is no way to tell when it's going to work or not, contrary to the typical material. Anyway we're going to use blobby to build everything from schools, to bridges, to airplanes now.
You and me both, and for many of the same reasons.
I would point out that in your OPs comment, Luddites get the stereotypical dismissal as anti-tech, which is far far from the reality of demanding good conditions for workers.
For the modern s/w engineer, being granted the time and resources for adequate testing could be considered a "worker's rights" issue. In that context the Luddite allegation could be accurate.
Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.
It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.
There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.
Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with.
And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.
I mean, showing the texture of the underlying stone is how the vast majority of statues from classical antiquity are displayed, and indeed how most pastiches are created.
(and half the objection to the paint jobs comes from the fact we've come to incorrectly associate decorative elements from the classical period with the colours of bare stone)
Associating them with garishly and almost certainly inaccurately (based on pretty much all the indirect evidence we have) painted sculptures doesn't seem like much of an improvement, though?
Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone.
Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.
I once saw a meme of a quote somewhere that said "if the only penalty for a crime is a fine, then it's only a deterrent for poor people" or something to that effect.
Fines should be percentage of stock price. Applied to the owners of stock. Next time there is dividend or stock is transacted fine is collected. Still limits the liability to price of stock, but fully incentives stock owners to make sure the leadership will do their best to avoid fines.
A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.
That's why, in Finland, the income of the offender is used to determine the fine (including for speeding). The largest fines for speeding are over 100.€. This is a very effective way to deter the bad behavior by rich people.
Before WWII America was content with it's own company and business. Then we found ourselves holding the big stick and everybody looking to us to solve their problems.
If we go back to being peers, so what? Rich people who've capitalized on the favored position will cry and complain (and spend billions trying to keep control) but the world will go on.
I read somewhere that the sentiment in Europe after WW2 was that Soviet had a bigger impact than the US. But narrative has shifted over time. I'd guess Churchill saw the US as a last resort, not the goto fixer. Happy to be corrected by someone who knows history, thouogh.
It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)
How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.
In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.
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