> That just means that the edge you’re able to retain if you invest $1B is nonexistent.
Jeez. Must be really tough to have some comparatively small group of people financially destroy your industry with your own mechanically-harvested professional output while dubiously claiming to be be better than you when in reality it’s just a lot cheaper. Must be tough.
Maybe they should take some time to self-reflect and make some art and writing about it using the products they make that mechanically harvest the work of millions of people, and have already screwed up the commercial art and writing marketplaces pretty throughly. Maybe tell DeepSeek it’s their therapist and get some emotional support and guidance.
As an aside, I miss the slashdot ability to optionally assign a property to a vote. It would be neat to have some sort of indicator in addition to the greying out of downvoted or flagged comments to show specific types of upvotes. This has obviously proven to be the better system overall, but it has its pluses. Too bad it also had a bunch of swastikas and 4-Chan-esque trolls.
Right, but it was never about doing the right thing for humanity, it was about doing the right thing for their profits.
Like I’ve said time and time again, nobody in this space gives a fuck about anyone that isn’t directly contributing money to their bottom line at that particular instant. The fundamental idea is selfish, damages the fundamental machinery that makes the internet useful by penalizing people that actually make things, and will never, ever do anything for the greater good if it even stands a chance of reducing their standing in this ridiculously overhyped market. Giving people free access to what is for all intents and purposes a black box is not “open” anything, is no more free (as in speech) than Slack is, and all of this is obviously them selling a product at a huge loss to put competing media out of business and grab market share.
I’ve seen that in people though I don’t think it really describes him, specifically. He just really enjoys a lot of things in life the way some people really love getting the most punishing workouts possible, and would probably do it even if there were no health benefits.
He’s pretty hard-headed, but so are his middle-aged sons. These days we’re all grown-up enough to know when to sort of shake our heads and change the subject. My mom has her own way of setting boundaries which seems to work for her but unless she wants to talk about something specific, it’s normally nothing I need to even think about. She feels comfortable enough confiding in me though. To be clear he’s a 100% stand-up guy, doesn’t have an anger problem, and even though he can be frustrating to deal with sometimes, there is never a question about him doing what’s best for his family, even if that means swallowing something he’s annoyed by if it’s necessary.
You’re making arbitrary definitions for those words. Austerity can absolutely lead to misery and some of the happiest times in my life have been some of the most impoverished.
That’s personality-specific. My Dad is like that and doesn’t understand why nobody else in the family gets off on self-imposed austerity. (He’s a great guy by the way — we all have our quirks.) He loves to say it’s a lack of discipline, but it’s not— I quit smoking after a decade-and-a-half of heavy smoking, lost 20% of my body weight on an 800 calorie per day ketogenic diet, worked many very difficult jobs, and did a number of other things that have required sustained discipline, as have others in the family. He doesn’t understand that the difference is that he enjoys self-imposed misery and the feelings of superiority he gets from it, which not only leads to a lack of balance in his life, sometimes strains his closest relationships.
GH copilot code completion is really the only one I’ve found to be consistently more of a benefit than a time sync. Even with the spiffy code generators using Claude or whatever, I often find myself spending as much time figuring out where the logical problem is than if I had just coded it myself, and you still need to know exactly what needs to be done.
I’d be interested in seeing how much time they spent debugging the generated code and and how long they spent constructing and reconstructing the prompts. I’m not a software developer anymore as my primary career, so if the entire lower-half of the software development market went away catering wages as it did, it wouldn’t directly affect my professional life. (And with the kind of conceited, gleeful techno-libertarian shit I’ve gotten from the software world at large over the past couple of years as a type of specialized commercial artist, it would be tough to turn that schadenfreude into empathy. But we honestly need to figure out a way to stick together or else we’re speeding towards a less mechanical version of Metropolis.)
I’m pretty sure they either fall under “useless features that sound sort of useful when you’re booking a room,” or “alleviating your guilt for not getting a cheaper hotel room on someone else’s dime.”
If you remove the factors of environment and incentives then no living thing does anything, ever. We have no less control of this than any other collective human endeavor, and even if individual responsibility alone can’t practically stop something bad from happening, individuals are still morally responsible for their own contribution. It’s very comforting to absolve yourself of responsibility for something bad because everybody else is doing the same thing. Philosophically, it doesn’t hold water. A looter is no less morally culpable for stealing because they had significant incentives to loot a store, everybody with them was also looting the store, and there’s no way their abstinence could have stopped the store from being looted
Most of the hotels I stay at are on the east coast, so that might make a difference because of how much business travel there is there, but even the more family-focused ones in touristy areas have them.
As far as business investments go, I’d need to see some really solid market research showing enough people were willing to choose a hotel for these amenities in-room rather than a one with a “business center” as many currently have, a coworking space, coffee shop, or even a public library. People wanting specialized private spaces like that don’t generally look to hotels to meet their needs, and considering how quickly hotel room outfitting expenses scale, it really has to be worthwhile. For example, an in-room stationary bike would probably be cheaper and more popular than a good office chair and monitor, but it just doesn’t make sense because enough people will be satisfied with an in-hotel fitness center. I think its really easy to assume our use cases are far more universal than they are.
I’m not sure how what I said could be interpreted as suggesting they are hostile to remote workers.
And I think there’s a very good chance hotels would not benefit from this. Maybe in a tech center, but that’s a tiny fraction of hotels. Good office chairs are designed to be very adjustable, but they do tend to break when people twist one thing too far the wrong way because they don’t know how it works, and it would probably take staff 10 minutes just to figure out it was broken rather than just misadjusted. They’re also expensive as hell, and charging a guest $3000 because their luggage got caught on and tore up the mesh seat is probably not going to fly. Small higher-res monitors are also more expensive than huge TVs, and as or more delicate. The staff would spend more time than is probably worth it telling gran and gramps that they can’t use the “little television” like that. All of this stuff has to be handled with smoothness and grace 24/7 by a desk staff that don’t regularly use these items in their professional lives. You can’t just say “it’s a computer monitor gramps don’t use it” and hang up the phone. Many people also consider office equipment ugly, and how the room visually hits when you walk in is a huge consideration. Some weary overworked travel-worn office drone would probably want to jump out the window if they opened the door to their safe place of respite only to see a the better part of a corporate workstation looking back at them.
Designing experiences can be complicated and difficult, and that’s even more true because many of the most important aspects of it aren’t even consciously perceived by the intended audience. They all just fit organically unto a unified experience.
They know what they’re doing. Most hotels ‘are’ built for work, but they’re built for what most workers use them for: work travel. Though probably common for developers, I’ll bet it’s pretty unusual for the other like 96% of people to want to do deep work in a hotel room. Especially if you’re on the road for work, you’re probably the sort of worker that needs to physically be somewhere remote to accomplish a goal, which makes it even less likely you’re going to be doing deep work in your hotel room. Most have “business centers” where you can bang out a zoom call, rally the troops before a meeting you flew in for, print something out for a presentation, or whatever. I’m sure most professional use cases are far better served by those accommodations than amping up their rooms for the handful of people that need to be in a room by themselves sitting in one spot for long enough for the chair to be a big factor while they travel.
Right. Also, literally every incremental progression in this arms race is good for maybe a few weeks or months for the people that bother engaging while the rest of us have to trudge through deepening layers of bullshit and counter-bullshit to use our basic services. It’s like the entire tech world knows we’re ruining everything the same way we ruined the job finding/hiring process but target fixation won’t let us correct our course to avoid certain misery. Progress!
I've done a lot of back-end and a bit of front end development. You're correctly identifying a crappy outcome, but incorrectly attributing the effect of shitty developers and project management with whole disciplines and common practices within them.
I mean, as a snarky hyperbole about how ridiculous consumer products have become, sure. In reality, I would be very surprised if Oral B decided I needed Internet access to use my toothbrush.
Sure. What strikes me as strange, however, is the attitude that this is the only possible path to starting your own business in tech. Sure you’re not going to start up your own social network, but maybe you’ve got a great idea for some kind of QoL thing that helps people work with these big inflexible systems? Many of these startups seem to be shit at providing expertly personalized or customized services because they’re trying to be a big at-scale corporation from day one. Maybe you devise a way to semi-automate customized solutions for some common enterprise thing too sticky for at-scale services to address specifically so companies have to do it in—house? It seems like there are problems that would be easier to address with a small business like that which could organically grow into something sustainable. Definitely not sexy, and I think people making tech startups currently are often more interested in sexy than anything else.
> less low hanging fruit on the product side. Any given opportunity is more likely to have other, well-resourced, folks chasing it hard.
I think this is the biggest factor that actually affects the fundamentals of selling tech. To my eye, every other aspect is some form of Gordon Gecko business insanity and/or VC people looking to stoke egos by making people with good ideas feel like big shot executives while figuring out how soon they can throw it all in a juicer and extract a bunch of cash.
Right — I totally understand why things are the way they are using the tech industry startup model. But using that model is relatively new, and adopting it not a prerequisite to starting a tech business, even if that’s the only way people do it these days, generally. Becoming a monopoly immediately in some market is the goal of someone that wants to become the monopoly immediately in some market. It’s neither a requirement of, nor mutually exclusive of having a good idea that you want to turn into a business. That business goal might be easier in technical businesses, but it doesn’t seem to make better or more sustainable companies. “That’s the way it is done” is usually the worst reason for doing something. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but it definitely doesn’t mean it’s good.
I don’t think the idea of starting a business in tech these days commonly exists independently of the modern tech conception of “doing a startup.” And with the hiring part, the idea was that you’d do the work yourselves and only hire anyone at all when you couldn’t do the work anymore, or you got a big enough contract/sale/etc that you could pay them. The fact that the exit strategy/investment/initial expensive hiring messiness exists is the symptom, not the cause. What I don’t really get is the cause, and I suspect it’s cultural rather than logistical. Not doing something unless you can ramp it fast enough to start worrying about paying anyone other than the people that decided to do it is a deliberate choice. In a restaurant, it’s not. You literally can’t do it without the initial investment. My dad was a mechanical engineer in a startup making industrial paper handling equipment in the 90s— one of the first hires after the handful of founders worked themselves to design and fabricate the first machines securing them the contracts to afford more employees.
I have absolutely no insight into their operations or requirements, but when I see someone forcing traffic to their servers, I immediately think they’re looking for metadata, or training NN models on your data. NN generating 3D models is pretty valuable at the moment, and taking users data to train models without informing them is for some inexplicable reason considered ok even by many people that get foaming-at-the-mouth-mad over other privacy violations. Like I said, I’m just spitballing and have no knowledge of this operation, but it would give me pause before using it as a professional 3D artist.
The way friends approached startups in the .com era seemed to be more like “hey, [friend]… we know how to write code, and we think we can address [thing] in [some market] better than [incumbent], so let’s spend nights and weekends hacking together a working proof of concept.
It might not be representative, but the people I’ve known that wanted to start tech businesses in the past 15/20 years approached it the way people start restaurants. You can’t slowly ramp up most restaurant concepts with a DIY budget— you need to invest a lot upfront, and you need a lot of existing expertise for even pretty trivial concepts. (And before people say food trucks and catering and private chef and the like— catering and private cheffing are totally different businesses with very different processes and institutional knowledge, and in most places, food trucks aren’t dramatically cheaper than opening a small restaurant.) Folks seem eager to start acting like a CEO and delegating things to people paid with investor money rather than making something themselves and getting it off the ground. Maybe that’s what the business requires? Maybe in software markets, customers aren’t interested in scrappy small players anymore, perhaps worried about lack of support, shitty UX, them going out of business or whatever.
Just speculation. Not even going to pretend I’ve got broad non-anecdotal knowledge on this.
I have to say — I’m kind of amazed that anyone would expect privacy out of chat bot companies and products. You’re literally having a “conversation” with the servers of companies that built their entire product line using other people’s professional and personal output whether they approved, or even knew about it or not. Less a “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” sort of thing than a “we’d rather just not ask and be pretty cagey about it if they ask, and then if they prove it, tell them they tacitly agreed to it by not hiding it from us even though they had no way to know we were looking at it“ sort of thing. Frankly I’m astonished that open ai, specifically, promises as much as they do in their privacy policy. Based on their alleged bait-and-switch tactics quietly swapping out models or reducing compute for paying customers after the initial “gee wiz look at that” press cycle, I can’t imagine those privacy policies will have much longevity when the company gets a more stable footing… and whooops looks like they figured out how to extract the training data from the models! And it’s different data since we extracted it from the model so the old privacy policy doesn’t apply! Haha sorry, that’s business and we’re building a techno utopian society here, so you should feel honored to be included! You think Altman wouldn’t sell that in a heartbeat to try and fund some big moonshot product if they get clobbered in the marketplace? Never mind the sketchy girlfriend-in-an-app-class chatbots.
Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely think the privacy SHOULD be there, but I’m just shocked that anyone would assume it was. Maybe I’m being overly cynical? These days when I think I might be, in the end, it seems I wasn’t being cynical enough.