klum
This is all without mentioning the fact that articles with drivel like "the AI messed up and then lied about it" implies a reasoning ability which, as far as I understand, is not there at all. But writing this way shapes people's perception of how "AI" works.
(But yeah, as someone else mentioned, many of them probably demanded a special fortitude of those who chose to live in them.)
But these architects seem to be more interested in the experience you get when _visiting_ the house in its environment, rather than the experience of actually living in it, and these houses are famously often impractical, hard to maintain, and in need of constant repair. That makes them less interesting to me.
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
Few of those might be actively looking at graphs and deciding to make the product worse for the sake of short-term revenue increase. Yet every act of enshittification takes people to make it happen. Those who "just work here", who may be slightly uneasy with adding another popup or displaying more ads but still do it, actively contribute to the problem. That's a decision they make. Even if those employees feel they are doing this only to keep a roof over their children's head or something along those lines, it's worth pointing out there's a choice being made.
This is especially worth mentioning as I think there are rarely actual evil masterminds — most enshittification is a result of tens, hundreds, thousands of people incentivized to repeatedly do things that are just a little bad.
The first version of OS X I used was Mavericks. In hindsight, that was the last great version of OS X for me — the last version where it seems the priorities of the people deciding the direction of development where somewhat aligned with mine.
Many have written about the decline in usability and attention to detail in OS X since then — I guess Apple Intelligence represents this shift in focus perfectly: a black-box interface that may or may not do something along the lines of what you were intending.
"Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.
The drivers, incredibly skilled as they are, will also frequently do things like go on the radio during races and complain about their car to their team, i.e. the persons responsible for said car. Not offer any constructive input, just... complain. Often. On the other hand, that's one of the few times they actually show any emotions or say what they think, with all the media training and endless PR events and making sure the sponsor logo on their hat is clearly in view in interview after interview after interview... Yeah, I'm ranting. But it's all just so incredibly blatantly commercial. Again, like any sport once it grows big enough.
(Another commenter wrote about the interesting technical side of the sport: I agree that there would be so many more interesting stories to tell there: about car development, strategy, manufacturing... but whenever these things are touched upon, it's done in a very shallow way, to prevent people quitting their subscription in horror at having to digest some actual information. Instead we get things like PR events with drivers having to pretend they enjoy whatever ridiculous competition they're put in against their teammate as part of their contractual obligations. It seems there could be so much more there... but perhaps this way is more profitable.)
What if a business actually takes a long-term view: investing in standards and fostering it's ecosystem instead of trying to outmaneuver competitors using any short-term tricks available? What if a company makes a great dishwasher and only change it when they can improve it? Will they inevitably be driven into extinction or bought up by more short-term profit-hungry enterprises? Maybe... but is that really inevitable?
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.
* a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment
* a richer country has access to more efficient technology
* on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.
The reality is that science, described here as "keeping the whole system of technical improvisation from falling down", is eradicating extreme poverty and disease on an incredible scale. It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth). It seems likely to me that the hits taken by the economy in these circumstances will be felt harder in poorer countries, slowing this positive progress for a while.
The author actually notes that the earth holding close to 8 billion people is only made possible by science. He describes this as "unnatural and unstable". This, combined with the fact that further scientific progress is required for all these people to be healthy and well-fed makes me tend to agree with the poster reacting the the novel Aurora and noting "we don't have anywhere to go back to".
As I understand utility-first CSS, changing the classes as in your example is very much what you might do. Why would this make sense? Because the situation where we want to "change how this component looks in the sidebar, but keep it the same as before in the footer", or "show this component slightly differently in a new context, without changing its appearance in its old contexts" is much more common than the situation where we want to change the look of a component everywhere it appears. In this case, utility-first CSS makes it very easy to make all these small, "one-off" changes.
I think utility-first CSS has its benefits as well as it's drawbacks, but just regarding the statement above: wouldn't you say that when naming things for the purpose of targeting them with styling, what they look like is indeed what they are?
As in, referring to, for example, ".comment" and ".testimonial" in your CSS, when those classes have been added purely for the purpose of styling the elements as what is commonly called a media component, could be considered less semantic than just naming them according to how they look -- as that's the reason for naming them in this case?
(I think these are two different ways of looking at the issue, none of which is clearly the right or wrong one.)
(I know I'm trivializing the question; I'm not in your situation and I don't know the perfect model for your product. But I disagree with just lumping together "paywalls" and "advertising" in the same category of "non-desirable things".)
I don't mean that in a cynical sense. If you view business and making money as a "necessary evil", a taint on the face of your pure artistry, then you're probably going to be miserable trying to make a living. I prefer to think about it as finding a way to create value for others through what you like to do.
Don't get me wrong; I don't think there's any point in making new programmers jump through arbitrary hoops because "programming should be hard". But I think that today, programming is necessarily intertwined with computing and problem-solving in general, and all the Dockers and specialised positions in the world don't change that. To be a good developer, you need to have some idea about the systems your code will be running on. A program doesn't just exist in a bubble. (This is more true for some kinds of applications, less for others, of course.)
As you mention, sometimes action is required, and that doesn't preclude an understanding viewpoint.
I think in most (all?) situations when there's a movement among people in a direction which seems blatantly wrong to you, the worst thing to do is to dismiss everyone taking part in this movement as stupid and/or evil. You're not going to improve things and you'll probably contribute to make them worse.