Software is eating the world, all right (2024)
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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.
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.
Instead of making things better, tech companies use their engineering prowess to impose control over people and reduce end-users' agency.
(Corporations seeking monopoly is not a new story.)
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.
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
Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part.
Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline.
Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972.
Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying.
Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.
Or else what.
<reaches for expletive>
<checks handle>
Sigh, never mind.
Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after.
Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.
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.
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.
(I'm not taking credit. I was militantly pro free speech at the time, the anti-free-speech position was mostly held by Christian Conservatives and other fun-free types. Free speech was borderline _sexy_).
What I don't think Zuck or any of his peers realised was what they were connecting. Sure, connect all the bright young things on college campuses, and maybe their nice extended families, good things will happen.
I don't think he'd have done it if he knew just how much of the population was deplorable, deplorable-adjacent or highly susceptible to being turned that way.
And I don't recall ever seeing that discussed at the time. "But if we connect all the people... you realise we're connecting all the angry, ugly, bitter, nasty, broken ones too. And have you considered just how many of those there are?"
The first time I saw a fellow student post something utterly irrelevant (to our local group's real lives) rage bait thing into the then-new FB feed I knew we were in trouble. Surely, FB and Zuck must have had an idea what was going on.
Then I deleted my account and successfully ignored all of the generic, commercial asocial media fads that happened afterwards (at least to the degree they're directly ignorable). Feels nice to have it all pass me by.
Mixing online and real life in this uncontrolled manner and scale was a huge mistake for our collective moral and mental health.
And for the record: I don't blame him for everything that happened, but he certainly helped open the doors to a much more unpleasant VC-powered internet and we're struggling to reboot the cultural forces that made the time before it so great.
The concept of a social graph was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from the Winklevoss twins.
Zuck's talent is unabashed brashness and chutzpah. He thinks the rules simply don't apply to him. He is not an original thinker, but rather very intellectually derivative. The fact that he grew up wealthy opened many doors for him, even despite the Winklevoss twins' sentiment that he comes from new money and is thus irremediably beneath them, and even worse in their WASPy blueblood minds, Jewish new money. ('How dare a Jew steal our idea!') Shady actors all around, with not an admirable figure amongst them.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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?
Ironically, this is was what I chased, and what I found. I never wanted to have a destructive amount of money, just enough to have a house and raise a family.
A lot of people in this industry just wanted to make money very quickly to retire early though. There is something unhealthy that comes with it, I think.
> Can we ever get back on track?
I am very pessimistic about it. Not without heavy government regulation, and it is a can of worms of its own.
We are never going back to the environment we had around the 90s and early 2000s. There was a naivety in the air back then, some healthy gleeful contrarianism. After the dot com bust, it was unclear for a while how many things could even be monetized. There was a pervasive desire to build things for the sake of it.
What we have now kinda sucks, and it is probably only gonna get worse.
People wanting to go back to a simpler, smaller internet -to this mythical prelapsarian era - are in my opinion just nostalgic about how things felt back then. But there is no going back, tragically.
Then again, it is difficult to see how an empire would fall when you are witnessing it at the height of its power, even if that height is on the eve of its downfall.
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.
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.
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...
I won’t go into detail, as that is sort of the way we work. We don’t really talk about our work at the level of press, radio, and film.
Otherwise, finding volunteer opportunities is usually fairly straightforward. Find a cause that personally motivates you, and look for organizations in that context.
The whole thing about “volunteer,” though, is that it is synonymous with “unpaid,” and that’s a dirty word, with this crowd.
Also, working with these types of orgs can be maddening.
When there’s no money to be made, ego becomes the currency, so status games abound.
And, when people don’t pay for something, they often treat it like crap.
That means that we have to find our own motivation, and have a thick skin. If we are doing something that we truly believe in, then it makes it worthwhile. If we aren’t motivated by the cause, it can be rather demoralizing.
In my case, I stay focused on the people that my work helps.
Ah. Get it, now.
Nope. Not that way, but cheers.
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.
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.
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!
So yes, 'tech people'.
"Take action people around you need."
EDIT: For concrete examples, see what the author complained about, there are some good pain points to attack.
How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI? How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
Oh, I thought you were looking to do something for the good of humanity. I'm afraid all the paying jobs are antithetical to that goal to varying degrees.
>How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI?
Work on your own model, or at least a framework where other people can make their own models. The biggest issue with AI right now is it's expensive to run locally, thus entrenching cloud interests. I suspect that unless hardware gets insanely cheaper that we'll have domain specific models to serve that purpose.
>How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
Ghostery did a pretty good job with this. So much so that the advertising companies are struggling with ad blockers. For broken links, perhaps a wayback machine plugin that renders the latest historical version of said hyperlink.
>How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
The only models I know of that work is freeware / premiumware and/or support contracts.
>What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
You (we) aren't powerless, but perhaps overmatched. The nice thing is tech can really disrupt entrenched interests. Linux is a prime example. Most people don't remember how powerful Microsoft Windows was in the 90s. They still are but at least there are viable alternatives, particularly in the server sphere.
Too bad people can't seem to learn from others.
I see you did smart phone stuff and might feel bad because of the whole 'the road to hell thing'. Well, fun story how I killed people for money (yay). I once had a passion project that reduced waste in an industry, in some cases allowing places providing services to stay open that otherwise would close. When I went to one of the first sites to oversee implementation/learn improvements from the domain experts starting to use it and all proud I was making the world better, I found out that the 'waste' was actually collected and used in desperate communities to save the lives of people that could afford even less than the communities I had helped. I literally at the end of the day and distilled down had ended up killing people in order to save money. And I had spent nights/weekends/alienated my family to make sure it happened! I also saved lives in communities that would have had lost services without the savings, and positively impacted a lot of others. But still, there were people dead over my passion project to make the world better.
Or take my parents who were hippies. I grew up on a commune because they were doing the best thing, anti-capitalism, pro-organic, rah rah. All my parents accomplished living on it was they delayed their lives a decade scrapping bare bones subsistence survival out of the earth, and raised their child in poverty. Again, good intentions, bad results (voluntary child poverty for their own child).
Sometimes we are going to accidentally increase child poverty or kill people for money. And we just gotta say 'Well f*ck that didn't work' and move on and keep trying, keep smiling, keep being kind, and keep helping others.
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.
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.)
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. ;-)
They have stopped doing that. Especially in cases where the government is at fault, but essentially in a lot of interactions. And where there is a conviction, it's either unenforceable, or just outright unenforced. You only see legal convictions and consequences in cases between companies anymore.
The result is a lawless society. Not just on the internet.
Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.
Edit: We violently agree!
Marshall Brain's Manna shows two options for how all this may end: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Brilliant. 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.)
I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as.
If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so.
The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with.
Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.
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.
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.
?! He's the longest-serving member on Meta's board, and is a named partner at a prominent and 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
But yea I'm right there with you. I ignore reviews now.
Yelp has never done this. I have no idea how this myth has persisted this long.
1. original article
2. critique of Yelp
3. your incredible "doesn't mean it's appropriate to use online anywhere english is spoken" take
4. my rebuttal
Why are you writing incoherently like a low-quality bot?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.