2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it
2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine.
Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear.
Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture.
JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this.
https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/
Well, too many to have a single website be consistent across browsers.
But as a user I'm using one specific browsers, and I expect all websites be consistent for that browser.
[Rant-Example] The goshdarn ticketing-system hijacks alt-f, so that instead of opening the File menu of my browser, and instead toggles the favorite-status of whatever ticket I happen to be viewing.
What will amplifying its output do?
Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?
Putt's Law: "Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."
I suggest that this law does not give a complete description of what has been happening to software engineering in the past 2 decades:
Putt's Law does not address the (new) phenomena we first saw when 'blog hotness' and minimal effort frameworks permitted practitioners with little practical experience or hard gained knowledge to manifest technical capability and assert technical authority. The minimal amount of 'wit' required was access to a smart phone, wiki, or some blog, and you had complete juniors arguing with seniors about architecture, frameworks. AI is taking that to the extreme.
Putt's Law's relevance here is that prior to the past 2 decades of enabling tech and knowledge bases 'the clueless manager' had the metric of "older more senior more likely to be correct", and clueless juniors didn't have blogs or wikis or frameworks that required a handful of shell commands to install, and spinup a 'demo'. AI has made that even worse.
It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
A combination of trend (minimalism cult masquerading as sophistication), pragmatic trimming down of things to work on tiny screens, dumbing down things in an attempt to reduce complexity, and of course dark patterns, to push users toward profitable actions (like clicking ads or continued ‘engagement’) and away from costly ones (finding support, for instance).
There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management.
By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.
It couldn't exist without engineers.
I want to get rich too. I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. I don't want to just survive. So I can't say I don't empathize.
> I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.
This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed.
> I want to get rich too.
You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.
> Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Things are not looking good out there. Billions of people get by without compromising? Billions of people live in poverty too. Not something I'm looking forward to dealing with, should the great AI replacement ever come knocking on my door.
unfortunately that is the state of our society right now and it is hard to see this changing.
Yeah. At some point you get tired of paying the costs that others sociopathically push onto you and start trying to take at least some of the value for yourself instead.
If society has a problem with that, then maybe it should start demonstrating it by making examples out of all those sociopaths instead of turning the other way and quietly profiting from it while the nobodies seethe impotently about things they have no power to change.
> Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.
I'm a free software developer. I quite literally give it all away. I'm also a doctor in a 3rd world country. I work hard to help people for wages that would make 300k+/year 1st world doctors cry themselves to sleep.
I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.
Sad? No one's sadder about it than me. This existential realization gave me actual diagnosed depression. I literally go to therapy because of this shit. That sort of cold sociopathy is simply not the way I was raised.
The problem is my mind cannot deal with this corrupt world by idealizing it. For my own psychological and financial well being, I cannot continue to entertain ideas of what the world could be, if only people were good. I must interpret the world based on what's real.
You are the society.
> I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.
This is just an awful excuse. People depending on you is the norm, has been for all of history of humankind and remains so to this day. That's literally human life, people depending on each other. Out of all the good people in this world even at this moment who happen to be adult men, I'd wager 80% of them has had a dependent. Historically, it will have been 99.9%.
I'm happy to talk as someone who also has dependents - again, as is the global societal norm for adult men in particular (prime HN demographic) and has been since forever - and who clearly shares your view on many things about modern society, yet doesn't turn it into an excuse to help build the torment nexus.
I'm sorry but this is really basic reading skills. I quoted "have a good life and provide for family", then "both" refers to "have a good life" and "provide for family".
> Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Winning in what? Winning in becoming a disgusting person? Definitely. That tends to be the direct opposite of what people want to become though, for good reason. It's also what causes the most deathbed regret.
Are they? I seriously doubt billions of people earn 200k+ salaries.
It's not looking too good out there. We've got trillionaires bragging to people's faces about how they're all going to be replaced by their AIs. It got to the point someone threw a molotov into one CEO's home.
Source of income? The promise of AI is to literally make all humans economically redundant. In a capitalist world, what is the point of keeping economically useless people alive? People who do nothing but cost society money? Why not turn them all into soylent instead?
If we don't create a post-scarcity society now, I'm not sure we ever will. Choices aren't looking too good out there.
Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.
You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.
The state provides capital, the workers operate the business, make management decisions, and have democratic input like the public does.
You might say, that kind of system isn't a perfect solution, but currently we have a dictatorship of wealthy individuals and businesses who are wholly unaccountable.
Before the more recent wave of successful tech startups (say, from 2010 on), a very large amount of programmers were incredibly sensitive to anything related to topics like (posisbility of) surveillance, privacy, authorities (including government), centralized infrastructures, DRM etc.
In my feeling, the only reason why this mindset shifted is because from this wave on, in the USA, programmers were showered in money.
The interesting question rather is: now that tech companies want to become more frugal with respect to paying programmers, will the mindset among programmers shift back or not?
Of course not. Modern weapons are far more sophisticated. Society does not need to point guns at people to drive behavior anymore, it is sufficient to deploy simple economics. People feel the sting of the economic lash just the same as the literal instrument.
The richer you are, the more you've got to lose. Easy to be a radical when you've got nothing. Nowhere you can go but up. If you're privileged, there's a long way to fall.
Do you think the trillionaires are losing? Do you think you're likely to end up on the judge's bench?
why do I need to make a bet? you mean to make money off this? I have more than I can spend in 4 lifetimes. also personally, betting is a telltale sign of a lack of intelligence so I would never make myself stoop that level where I "bet" on shit, one of the stupidest things humans do
> If you think the trillionaires will fall, then stand against them
I stand against them and would even if I didn't think they will fail.
> Don't take their money and wait for their inevitable fall
I don't take their money, don't do now and never have and never will. I would not work for a company Tesla or Meta if they offered me 7-digit salary.
> Hope you have an answer for their AI powered automated kill bots.
I personally don't but if there comes a time my assistance is needed to fight them I will gladly volunteer to help
Everything is a bet. Buy into something? You're betting it'll succeed. Don't buy? You're betting it'll fail.
You are always positioned. If you could have taken a 7 figure job at Tesla but chose not to, you positioned yourself accordingly. It cost you a seven figure job. What it won you, only you can know that.
Deep down, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I just don't think it's likely.
This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.
I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit.
Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.
And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?
My ADHD brain would love to do this stuff:
"Hey AI, how much is my electric bill this month?" and "Okay thats high. Pay it but remind me next week to order a new AC after researching options for me."
They're still as heavy as language models usually are, but the promise is that they'll arrive at the final result much faster.
Also it looks cool how it shifts words in place until it arrives at an answer.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. In many cases you’d be right. I’m just saying it’s remarkable how much certainty people have even when it comes to things they know they don’t know.