Where did software go wrong? (2020)
blog.jse.li
blog.jse.li
This makes a lot of sense. If we want better software (less dark patterns, less loot boxes, etc.) we need to change society rewards. If the companies that earn more profits are the ones that exploit human weaknesses then the world resources will be dedicated to them. If we want better software, or even less software and more other things, society needs to reward those activities. If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I can imagine a future were more resources are dedicated to extract value from people and less to produce products and services. And it is a red queen race. More resources call for more resources to be used, like an arms race it has no end unless there is a society will to end it.
The joke goes that all those PhDs had to find work, and found well-paying jobs on Wall St, created exotic derivatives, and blew up the world. Then we paid hundreds of billions to solve the 2008 financial crisis.
Space-X and its ilk decades earlier? Might not have been too bad...
Except of course half of them might have gone to work for Russia (or those private actors) developing ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. So maybe we'd all be speaking Russian now, praising God-Emperor Putler. (ETA: or Elon or Jeff. But those, probably in English. Small mercies...)
They also paid a full year's bonus for working in December for Y2K, so yes, there is the money.
Even if you have a good PhD, opportunities in physics are very limited. And they don't pay all that well.
Get a job as a quant and it's not remotely hard to earn $500k a year.
A bunch of our brightest spent their energy trying to shove one more ad in your brain.
My country gets this crap all the time.
It’s funny because it’s true.
Another way to look at it is markets are very powerful local optimisers - so if you rely on them exclusively you end up trapped in a rut.
Everyone hooked on naturally produced molecules that activate opioid receptors via your dark reward patterns, or indeed on synthetically produced and injected versions is not necessarily a globally optimal solution.
The job of government is to make sure the external costs, that are not immediately felt by the markets, are applied.
So the cost of addiction is put back on the sources of it, or the costs of pollution makes it's way back to the polluters.
That's what in essence good regulation is.
Obviously centrally deciding what's best for everything is of course doomed to failure - it's a massive under utilisation of talent and too centralised control is far too easy to lead to corruption and stagnation.
The trick is to find the right balance - and the right balance is a pragmatic one - not a clean ideological one - but you have to embrace that complexity, not try to over simplify.
So "wasting" money - with multiple people working on the same thing, or things that fail - is actually essential for innovation - markets work.
But at the very same time, it is important to have the confidence to state the obvious and take centralised action.
So if you leave the dealing of climate change to short term capital markets alone - you are signing up to it being much much worse before it get's any better. Something that you can avoid with collective action.
At their best days, when everything goes right.
One of the tasks of a government is to keep markets that way. Current governments seem not very interested on that task, worldwide.
Curing cancer would be infinitely more profitable than yet another crypto exchange. But humans are greedy. They won't wait for the big payday when a metaphorical marshmallow is dangling in front of them. Even holding out for the rewards of a crypto exchange is more than most people can handle. Most people will indulge in the not-so-tasty treat in front of them as soon as someone offers them a mediocre job.
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments
That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply. If the general public interest turns one way government can step in to ensure that the remaining people are brought into line, but a (democratic) government will not lead the charge.
The problem is the NPV calculations - tying you money up from 15 years before you see a return in a high risk sector ( where most things fail ) - doesn't make mathematical sense.
What makes mathematical sense is to rely on optimists to try anyway and then buy them at the right time when you can get the most return on your investment.
This is what a company like Pfizer does - it goes around buying innovative companies - taking the products and sacking the people [1]. They are extremely successful - but if everybody behaved like that we'd be fcked.
( I over emphasise for effect - but broadly true )
Indeed, that is the likely scenario as humans are greedy. People generally don't have the will to hold out for the bigger rewards, they want instant gratification to quash the feelings of their greed in the moment. They don't have to choose instant gratification, but if they want to then I suppose investment helps ensure that they still work on something useful when instant results cannot be seen.
That is not what most of us want in a democracy otherwise we would never go forward. Our society expects the government to Lead and not simply comply with the current mood. That is the problem we have now when every action is calculated on short term election result and not long term benefit for the whole society. If a democratic government were supposed to only enforce the majority expectations we would never change those expectation and our view of what is right/wrong.
If that were the case we would let leaders rise up to take the lead instead of calling on representatives to carry our messages to the central meeting place. It may be your dream to be able to sit back to not have to speak with your representative frequently – and fair enough, democracy is unquestionably hard work! – but that sentiment is not at all reflected in the democratic societies that I'm familiar with. Most definitely not the USA, which HN is skewed towards. American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear. Indeed, there are always outliers who don't align with the rest of the society. Hence why we have government to clean them up. Unquestionably there are Americans who don't believe in, or at least don't wish to participate in, democracy, but the individual does not a society make.
There are societies that do expect leaders to take the lead. It is not an unheard of concept and you might even stay it is historically common. But those are not democratic societies.
However looking from the outside, it does look like democracy is failing in the US.
The problem appears to be that it's money, not the people, who have the largest influence on who is elected.
The large amount of money swirling in the system, and the pretty much unregulated use of very powerful persuasive tools - has corroded the US democracy.
Today the technology allows you to surround each and every person in their own advertising bubble online - all data driven to get the outcome the payers want.
And then the effect of the candidates needing money to get elected - and them having to sign up to stuff just to get the money.
Take sensible gun reforms - something that poll after poll suggests there is broad support - is effectively blocked by the arms lobby.
Is it blocked or has society not needed to bring the outliers in line? (Democratic) government isn't there to lead. Government is there only to clean up after society recognizes that some are not falling into line. Society must lead. Saying "Yes, I support gun reforms" in a random poll isn't the same as action, of course. Also looking in from the outside, I don't see any real societal movement on this front.
Funnily enough, in my country where we do find clear societal movement that pushed to move away from guns in our history, and a government that stepped in to clean up the outliers who still tried to wield guns afterwards, it was rooted in society wanting to protect their money from the poor and aboriginals. If it is such that American society is driven by money above people, it is curious that there isn't the same kind of interest in protecting that money from people.
Perhaps money in the USA isn't as important as it appears to those of us only looking in?
Public servants carrying out messages? Really? Like a post office? Is the society which lives up to this noble standard aware of the more modern versions of these servants, such as, gee I don't know, TCP/IP?
Or maybe society doesn't want a constant referendum mode (fine by me, I'd expect it to be a spectacular disaster), and prefers servants to have a bit of built-in intelligence? But it causes behaviors which make them indistinguishable from leaders, e.g.: coming up with new ideas, influencing others, attempting to shape the future. I don't see anyone arguing for dumber representatives (I mean... not explicitly!), so seemingly the majority agrees.
> American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear.
False dilemma. The liberty held dear is the liberty to fire the representatives. A "leader" is not a synonym of "ruler". There is surely a lot of options between "servants" and "rulers taking over" (whatever the latter is supposed to mean).
Treating an illness is even more profitable than curing it though
If you could cure it, you could charge more than treatment - because it's more valuable to the person getting cured. If you had cancer with a 5 year expected survival rate, would you pick (arbitrary round numbers)
$10,000 per year in treatment to manage it but you've still got cancer.
$55,000 paid over 5 years, $5000 more than you would pay to just manage it, but you also don't have cancer any more.
Imagine you invent a way to cure cancer and it costs you 10000$ a treatment. How much do you charge the customer? Two times that? Ten? Twenty? At what point is someone going to stop in and force you to sell at a lower price? How long till public opinion turns against you? What if competition forces the price down? There are lot of variables that might lead to you ending up at 10000$ + a few percent profit margin.
Now imagine you have a medication that's 100$ a dosage. You sell it for 120$. That's 84 doses to cover the cost of a cancer treatment. Assuming the same markup on treatment that's 100 doses.
At this point it's the simple question what the company is more likely to get away with: Many small doses with a profit margin that add up? Or one large treatment with a big profit margin?
Right now reality shows that the small doses seem to work better. An example would be insulin. In the US it costs 30$ a dose upwards. Production costs are at less than 10$. [0] That's a 200% markup.
With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
[0]: https://marketrealist.com/healthcare/cost-to-manufacture-ins...
The lower bound is surely the same as long term treatment, right? No player here would choose more expensive treatment that doesn't cure the patient. Insurers get premiums for longer if you live, and governments rely on having a workforce.
If governments act beyond the bounds of negotiating as a large buyer and legislate, have they not already done that for the treatment already? Is there as much to lose as you think?
> With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?
Because you can charge more. Being cured is better than not being cured. If being ill and getting partially treated cost $100/month, would you honestly not pay $100.01/month forever but be cured?
Your arguments about public opinion and pressure rely people stepping in because your business practices are immoral, but this is what you're already accusing them of without any actual repercussions.
> What if competition forces the price down
If someone has a cure cheaper than your non-cure, frankly you're already fucked as a business. This also means that anyone who isn't the current main supplier has a very obvious reason to release an actual cure because then they'll get all of the business.
Assuming free market, the cost of total cure will probably settle on at least 2-5x of an average life expectation times a treatment cost per year, minus some minor operational expenses.
Are you assuming multiple suppliers for that cure or a single supplier?
Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?
In the case where there were multiple suppliers ( with no collusion between them ) - then the price could be driven down to the cost of production, rather than the value that it brings.
So for example food is essential to live - yet it's cheap.
That's assuming you get to negotiate with every customer. If it's one price for everyone then while what you say is true for each person's max (ignoring the complexity of people looking after others, the same logic applies of "everything you can afford") that's different for everyone so the optimal price can vary.
The solution there is to sell the same thing to different people at differences prices - lots of ways of doing this.
For example America pays lots more for it's pharma drugs than other countries.
Everyone dies of something - you don't save lives, you delay death.
The older people are the more likely they will have multiple chronic things to be treated - diabetes, arthritis etc .
This is one of the challenges that society hasn't quite got to grips with yet - and it's why health care costs are climbing ever upwards.
You have to actually treat it though - if the patient dies, it isn't profitable either. I suppose (all morality aside), the optimal profitability would be in a cure that required an annual installment fee.
I'm interested to know why you think this.
Building stronger morals could also help.
Things like effective altruism seem to be an attempt at redirection, but they have their own problems. Until someone or something succeeds with redirection, having stronger morals will only make the problem worse.
So it is better for me if it is X Corp's stockholders who benefit money wise and I who pay, than some spyware company like Google paying.
The problem is that companies now seem to want to make me pay and still take money from Google et al. Like Samsung's TVs. Or Microsoft becoming like Google in their consumer products.
There probably need to be some regulation in the IoShit space to keep it from eating away all "dumb" spyware free devices.
This is another retreat into passing the buck to a non-entity that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 alludes to in talking about where "software" went wrong. Society doesn't exist in a practical sense, it's just a word that refers to a collection of individuals (and the culture/etc that those individuals share).
Individuals can do things like donate to free open source projects to keep incentives aligned with their users.
Tangentially...
> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.
I'd say governments exist to regulate specifically violence (e.g. punish citizens who use it in an unauthorized manner against each other). Other stuff like interstate highways are cool too, but they're easier to negotiate in a federated way than e.g. regulation of violence between states would be (short of just having states go to war with each other).
Towards the end of regulating violence, surveillance is super useful. And this is why we cannot leave tech decisions in the hands of government either, because they have incentives going to the very core essence of government to build a surveillance state.
We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in productivity. In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people, those individuals have not magically captured any of the productivity gains of the 21st century, in fact they're probably unemployed because the low skill job that would've existed now has been automated.
Trickle down economics is such a farcical scam made by those who benefit from it, it makes me unironically proud of my country's propaganda machine that people are drinking the neoliberal gospel so hard, it'll make the next few decades a lot funnier.
Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 50 years. Real earnings worldwide have doubled since 2001 alone! [1] Of course, most of the growth has happened in developing countries (where, honestly, it's most needed) rather than in rich countries where you and I live. But even in rich countries real earnings are rising, just more slowly. [2]
> In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people
Only in the rich cities, not in poor rural areas. And that's because homelessness is a result almost solely of high housing prices due to political building restrictions, not low incomes (or mental illness or drug use). [3] Increasing incomes won't actually decrease homelessness significantly - higher income just means housing prices will have to rise higher before poor-er people are forced out. The same number of people will be forced out either way, because a fixed number of housing units can accommodate a roughly fixed number of people, meaning that everyone additional person has to leave.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Real dollars and wages have not increased a lot... for the average citizen, but has increased tremendously for those with more skills. Nevertheless, the average citizen does have more purchasing power compared to their rough equivalent ~50 years back. The main culprits of rising costs is healthcare, housing, and education. Housing has performed it's worst effect on the average American over the last 2 years, but before that was quite steady in relative cost to the average income. Food, entertainment, clothing, transportation, and communication are now much more affordable, inflation over the last 2 years has also put a dent into the relative cost to the average income, but nevertheless still better now than previous.
What solutions are there for the average American? Take advantage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, learn new skills and drive forth competition. Stagnant industries will have to adapt or they will die.
I don't think reality is quite so dire. There's not a lot that can convince me, I'm well aware of wage stagnation, I'm well aware of inflation YoY, I'm well aware that the average American is hurting quite a bit over the last 2 years. But in the long run, the average American is doing OK, and will be doing OK. Hopefully, OK turns into GOOD and thriving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
Assuming you are US based, you will notice that the nationalized health services are slowly going bankrupt or worse, losing all their doctors. Even still, the per capita expenditure on health care in Western countries is an exponential. Giving credit to the nationalized systems, they managed to constrain it to perhaps n^1.6 instead of n^2, but it's still not a problem with "capitalism" directly, as it affects health systems with no meaningful concept of private business.
How does progressive thought deal with people wanting to spend enormous amounts of money on increasingly more advanced Healthcare as they age, and those costs being hidden such that nobody realizes how much money that is?
It appears that the American system has replicated the failures of communist planning - nobody know how much anything should cost!
Perhaps the nationalized systems were able to perform better, for a time due to having very smart people trying their best to work it out - but this even is starting to become unglued.
A proper progressive answer to this cannot be to nationalize more Healthcare, as that is failing the metric used to criticize the private system. More slowly, admittedly - but still failing.
If all talk about the way capital markets improve the world is the "neoliberal gospel", there needs to be an answer for these problems that don't rely on sovereign wealth funds or extremely creative central bank manipulation.
It's funny how this is so widely recognized, yet at the same time we like to claim that college, which also started gaining in popularity 50 years ago, will increase your earnings...
Sure, drug addiction is a giant problem in the US, but you were correct to second guess your take. Reducing the most dire portion of the US's housing crisis to drug addiction is flabbergastingly reductive. You should start by trusting information from people who have meaningfully studied housing in the United States.
There's an expansive gulf of misery before you hit the Christian Children's Fund commercial, 5yo w/rickets starvation. I assure you that you have absolutely no clue what it looks like and what you've seen hasn't told you what you think it has.
> Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico.
> Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.
it's hard to even get (direct) fentanyl precursors from China .. but those that have the knowledge in both India and Mexico can start further down the chain and get "pre - precursors" to produce fentanyl to smuggle into the US.
(2022) [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...
(2020) [2] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
Software is just a technology, which can be used for good and bad, like most things.
But then what makes software special is that you can also encode "techniques" in it.
Thus the exercise of trying to understand a program is also "technology"? :-)
that would be true if you had no understanding surplus value. i highly recommend you at least try and read the first few chapters of Marx's Capital, which was quoted directly in the article.
notice profits are skyrocketing while wages are dead? "rising tide raises all ships" economics is dead.
While the rising tide is not raising all ships you at least have a chance to fight to jump to another ship and not being forced to navigate the ocean using rafts.
That said I think it's a utopia and as such (just like many other anarchistic strains) in line with some of 'utopia's defintions it is impractical/impossible bs.
The nature of the reward matters, not everything is about wealth and money. Many geniuses are still willingly working in public labs for a fraction of what they'd earn in a corporate or startup.
Kinda the same implementation though if you don't count boring social democrats to the block. It is probably fundamentally a really really bad idea with authoritarian rule and a central planning system, which is not self correcting and where the authoritarian regime won't admit errors or faults.
I wonder why coop corporations are not more common. They are essentially "socialist" on a micro scale. There have to be some big drawback.
I think agile has alot of these problems. In most environment it fails due to about the same reasons as it is a authoritarian ideology in practice.
Imagine you have a wallet, and you aren't allowed to take coins or bills out of it, you simply must hand the whole thing to someone else, and trust they only withdraw the right amount. This is what computers are like without CabSec.
In the 1970s, the personal computer started to become popular. Because home computer users didn't share systems, or network them, and data was stored on write protectable floppy disks, the lack of CabSec wasn't an issue.
Think of each floppy disk as a separate "wallet" from the above
It really wasn't a problem in corporate settings, or even in the early years of shareware, etc. Users were technical enough to know what data was going where, and manage things appropriately. Most locations still only had separate computers, and used diskettes to move data, via sneaker-net.
It's when you got to installing software that things started deteriorating. You suddenly couldn't really have a bunch of separate areas to store your data and programs on. It all became one all-important "wallet".
Then the internet came, and internet access became the standard, instead of internet connections. This moved things further out of the control of the users.
It's all worse in each iteration, now everything is out of your hardware, and into a single "2FA" system that is based around your smartphone. If you lose it, you could lose everything. It's the worst possible single "wallet".
> The magic disappeared and our optimism has since faded. > Our websites are slow and insecure; > our startups are creepy and unprofitable; > our president Tweets hate speech; > we don’t trust our social media apps, webcams, or voting machines. > And in the era of coronavirus quarantining, we’re realizing just how inadequate the Internet turned out to be as a home of Mind.
That's a mixed bag of laments about products and sociological phenomena. People using computers and software were supposed to solve all these problems?
> this mess, this tool-assisted speedrun of accumulation and exploitation
This is all of human history. It's a hard course in the frequent application of inhumane principles and failure to understand scale and sustainability. "Software" was never going to change human nature.
> Where did it all go wrong?
So, the OP's question itself is, at best, not an unworthy question but an incomplete question. The software industry was never going to "go right". You may as well ask "where human society went wrong".
Or whether human society has ever gone right, at scale.
In the modern world people seem to criticize things that are not perfect. That is fine to notice those things, but to let them sway your entire outlook is unhealthy and, in many cases, wrong.
Can we do better? Yes, I think so. But I don't think we are doing nearly as bad as the picture you paint.
I think the biggest problem is that the Internet accelerated change to a speed that people are not accustomed to. It might take a couple generations to adapt.
No, we write code under pressure with deadlines for yesterday, multiplying technical debt and making another person who will inherit our project question their life choices.
I think it's wrong to say that software is capital but software and the people who use it certainly follow capital very closely.
Why do so many people use Uber? Because the investors are/were subsidizing the rides (making them cheaper). Why do people use Apple iPhones? Because it allows people to use money-saving apps like Uber. Why do people use Google search? Because its result pages are loaded with products which are subsidized by big investor funding like Uber. Why did Windows become so popular? Because all the big investor money was being spent on building games and programs for Windows (and also, big-money IBM gave them that huge contract). The infinitely compounding wealth of the richest investors decides everything. Most peoples' decisions regarding which software they use is determined by where the big money is being spent. Those who are getting all the big money can afford to lower their profit margins and the monetary surplus can facilitate an entire ecosystem to grow around them. These sometimes poorly designed but well-funded software systems and ecosystems starve funding from better alternative ecosystems and thus starves them of developers which starves them of users.
On one side you have extremely wealthy companies which can sell or lease software solutions which are very cheap and low-margin (because these companies have so much surplus capital coming in from other channels) and on the other side, you have poor consumers who need to squeeze every penny to get by. This is the recipe for a winner-takes all economy.
Just look at cryptocurrency; almost all the developers are working on Bitcoin or Ethereum. Not because they're the best (they're both horrible to develop for and integrate with) - They're simply able to attract developers because that's where the big investor money is and developers and their users are just constantly chasing the money with laser precision.
Also, underlying all this, there is a constant force of peer-pressure which subtly nudges people towards solutions which are backed by big money. Big money can buy both respect and trust.
What we do not have an answer for in capitalist thought, are businesses that rely on human failure - take the five blade razor. We have spent millions and millions of dollars on single use plastic to save a month of occasionally nicking our neck. That is not a failure of a sociological system, that is a failure of humans.
Big money stays big by producing value, unfortunately humans are observed as having stupid values on a near constant basis, yes, even me - especially me!
But mostly by offering no choice.
The big money beats the next cheapest product by a tiny fraction, but that's enough to take them out of the market completely. Then, in the absence of competition, the big money can start to boost its profit margins again.
The median household income in the United States is 45 ish thousand dollars. I made 20 ish thousand dollars a year for a long time, still had plenty of food, paid my bills, was even able to afford a car and to go out a fair bit.
Which also exist on other platforms like Android.
There are many old movies where the plot revolves around "communication breakdown". Some creepy character is following you? Hey just call 911 with your cell-phone. The movie just lost its plot. Even Paul Pelosi being attacked by a crazy Trump supporter was able to get saved by using his cell-phone.
People use cell-phones because it helps them.
This turned out not to be true. The attacker wasn’t a Trump supporter.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/pelosi-attack-suspec...
Do you have any sources for your claim? Some people are spreading misinformation that DePape was a leftist and not aligned with Trump, so maybe you should check your sources on this.
There are a lot of creative people out there. Writing software today is too hard. It takes too much knowledge and too much work. If writing a game was as easy as creating a TikTok video, imagine how much creativity would exist within the realm of software.
Yes, agreed. Software is that magic dust that produces behavior. It's the technology that enables things to react to their environments. All life runs a form of software, you could say. Software will only increase in prevalence and importance as society continues to demand machines to behave in a certain way.
It strikes me that articles like this are more gripes against the development process of software rather than the end product. The end product did not "go wrong" and is in fact at the peak of complexity and usefulness, and this peak will continue to get higher and higher until we reach the singularity.
though, i actually disagree, it's just incorporated by the desiring-machines creating the software. :) pegging "software" to a static entity i think is flawed as it is in fact always changing, even in a simple machine-producing-machine system of a CD pipeline.
There are of course creative ways to do things. I am working with two software companies that have a problem to solve. One tries to fix the problem (a very hard problem) and is unsuccessful, the other knew it was very hard and hacked it in a way that the people got what they needed. Proper genius thinking and a super creative way of getting the solution that is required.
I wonder if there will be another approach or if those approaches will get polished to a workable state.
That has been around for at least thirty-five years. If it were going to lead anywhere, it would have, by now.
> and ai/ML generated code which is young.
I'm expecting more of a repeat than a difference.
The state of software, computing, social media, information availability, human rights on the internet, these are all because we, as in you and me, built something we knew was wrong for a paycheck, or at the very least overrepresented our skillset for a paycheck and delivered crap and swindled our employers and their customers. And questions like "where did software go wrong" are our way of passing the buck to a non entity, it's cowardly, it's pathetic, and every one of us, you and me, should take responsibility for what we have done, I mean literally, specifically, not some general collective truism, if not publicly at least when we look in the mirror by ourselves, and understand our role in the current state of the world, and either decide not to do it anymore or accept what we are.
We don't need the free market of 100 alternative products to have user respecting software. We can just legally mandate it. Right now the software and products we have are extremely good and keep getting better. Tech companies aren't just sitting on a legacy of old stuff collecting rent, they are actively investing and keeping their status by simply being the best.
So said another way, 'corporations decided monopolies are a good thing'.
TBH I would have just downvoted this if I could. If you're scanning comments before reading, don't bother with it.
I can quickly see if the article is written with me as the audience or if someone else is the intended reader.
If you find the right technologies - starting up a company to do whatever "should" be done has never been easier.
Software is capital? I don't even get this at all... why shouldn't startups be rewarded if they produce something people want?
This article is written for people way smarter than me. I don't know who he's trying to convince.
It's really, really not.
I don't flag much on here, but I flagged this one.
Is it angry with code or capitalism or the human condition? You get the impression all three. Solutions? never looked at
It also ends with the ultimate cop out:
Q: What is the solution? (paraphrased)
A: I don’t knowIs that intentional, or is something going wrong with my browser? Directly above the video preceding the "Who does software benefit" heading.
Ownership over software is scarce and transferable. The thing that lets you use software as productive capital is the exclusive right to it. That right is entirely manmade.
Just because you copied the cookbook doesn't mean you now own a restaurant.
Especially in compute-intensive activities such as neural nets/ML, capital is very much a factor.
It is also by people. History proves we are pretty flawed bunch. We bat around .500.
Software is also a means. It is not an ends. It's misguided to expect a means to miraculously accomplish some ends.
The ends is a function of the people utilizing the means. Did I mean we are a known to be flawed bunch?
I think we probably will end up treating software as legal text (it will likely be as impactful) and the changes that will wrought are interesting ...
It also implies a much vaster realm of "software thinking" filled with things like uxntal and colorforth than currently exists in the world. Instead, most people (myself included) spend the majority of our time writing corporate memos in passive voice.
The meaning of "computer literacy" is further diluted with each passing day. An equivalence: Imagine if the meaning of "literacy" was reduced to being able to use the Taco Bell menu to place an order, given the assistance of accompanying illustrations.
I recommend reading this if you have not already:
https://citejournal.org/volume-2/issue-3-02/seminal-articles...
This is so, so, so, so true. It's rarely how software is implemented, though.
I mean, look at this:
- He thought the internet was going to get rid of "hateful" ideologies, to which I say, "lol what?"
- He thought Trump tweeting things is proof that software is gone wrong
- He complains about "Capital" at the end of the essay
The whole essay seems to be a typical incomprehensible leftist terminology filled mumbo jumbo. I remember reading this kind of material when I took "Communications 101" in University, where nothing ever made sense.
I guess I'm surprised this essay has so much engagement on HN.
There are many things wrong with software and the startup culture; this essay doesn't even remotely touch any actually substantial point what those things are.
Imagine a world where everyone starts with exactly the same resources and access to identical education. There are no parental differences. Even in this scenario, because of the variability in humans, some will be predisposed to save money while others spend it right away, some will study hard while others spend all day hanging out with friends, some will be natural leaders that organize people and others will be followers.
There is no such thing as equality - none. No two people are equal and no system, even an absolute authoritarian nightmare, can enforce equality. Inequality is natural and expected.
Capitalism is the natural order - it's an emergent phenomenon. People save money, invest it into other good ideas, they get more money, they reinvest it, and on and on. Eventually giant pools of money form to reduce risk, smooth returns, and enable professional investors to act on behalf of less-sophisticated ones. This results in pension funds, sovereign wealth, and a small number of individually rich people.
The best you can do is forcibly take money from people and businesses and redistribute it. The best and fairest way to do this IMO is a straightforwards flat tax, but the tax code always and everywhere results in a Gordian Knot of favored industries, tax breaks, arbitrary taxes to attack some perceived enemy, and on and on.
There will never be a permanent revolution against capitalism, just temporary fits like in Cuba and Russia that eventually die off. Capitalism is a reflection of human wants - the innate desire to own your own stuff. Everything else fans out from the fundamental desire for private property.
No shit sherlock. Nobody is asking for a magical world where everyone is the exact same god fearin' american as the last -- the point is to create systems that aim to create as equal OPPORTUNITIES as possible. Nobody is asking for equal outcomes. If you want to parrot talking points, you need to brush up on what you're stuffing the scarecrow with.
Solution: make money expire after e.g. 12 months.
I often wonder how people can’t understand how that is one of the most important things it takes for something to be considered “money”. Once it loses that people will immediately exchange it for something else and society will just use shells as a medium of exchange.
Also your “solution” is for the “problem” of people deferring consumption. I honestly can’t see how anyone would see that as a problem.
> Yes, very nice. But it needs an update on structured documents (tree-like, as in HTML). And, ideally, it should be accompanied by work that addresses collaborative editing in such structured documents.
But it lacks the historical dimension. Capitalism is a historical and technological phenomenon. One of the replies talks about it emerging in the Late Middle Ages. Of course it existed previously, in the form of a landed aristocracy, but the potential for concentration of capital didn't exist.
With the industrial revolution concentration of capital created the order we live under today. To describe it as natural is an unhappy choice of words. It is certainly engaged in the large-scale subjugation and destruction of nature.
Concentrated capital turns the machine up: it exponentially increases inputs and outputs, ramps up the engine, increases production, consumption, everything. It is a system that may be completely unsustainable.
You deal with the benefits of the system: good ideas, smooth returns, sophisticated investors. I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.
There may never be a permanent revolution against capitalism: it will simply be impossible to sustain.
Regarding the environment, every single action a human does, from building huts to skyscrapers, affects the environment. I don’t see the earth as a living creature, I see it as a ball of rock. If humanity went extinct, in the blink of an eye all the damage and changes we did to the earth would be meaningless. I want to keep the environment amenable to humans only because I want humans to exist - the earth is not a goddess, it is unthinking and unfeeling matter.
Regarding developing countries, more people in the last 100 years were lifted out of poverty than in all time, and that was directly because of capitalism.
Marx was a good philosopher and historian. However I fundamentally disagree with the labor theory of value, because all value is subjective. There is no direct mapping between labor cost and value to the consumer, labor is simply an input cost. You can create something with enormous value with very little labor.
How is capitalism increasing inequality over what came before? There is more environmental damage now because there are a lot more of us with a lot more powerful technologies. But humans have always altered their environments to make them more suitable. One could argue that we (and our hominid cousins) became an invasive species once we started migrating out of Africa.
And if the developing countries are developing, it sounds like the people are becoming less immeserated over time.
Capitalism would be fine with private monopolies for instance, but from a market economy perspective that would be bad.
So is war and taking things by force. The strong prevail and the weak perish.
Prime example of a "deepity".
Can we, without changing the environment we are embedded in, without changing capitalism?
Under capitalism, all economic activity is increasingly subsumed by quest for increasing capital -- and under neo-liberal capitalism, all activity is increasingly economic activity, to better serve the quest for increasing capital (to open up more places for investing capital).
I think we can and should resist it, that's fine. I think it's good to recognize and point out what we're losing, and to urge resistance, as OP does, I'm not critisizing OP at all.
It's just to have any chance of success, we probably have to talk about the system we are embedded within and how to change that too, not just limit ourselves to software production as an imaginary closed system.
A different tack: I suppose for software production to escape becoming nothing more than capital intended to benefit people who own capital while reproducing capital -- software production would have to try not to be an economic activity, since all economic activity in our system ends up the former. Software production that was not economic activity was the original fantasy of many involved in original open source software production, I think literally exactly that. That... is now how it's gone. Why not? Would be a starting point for extending the locus of focus from software production on it's own to the social-political-cultural system of capitalism it is embedded in.
Which is quite successful, so this can't be it.
Software deserves much better than this myopic nonsense.
for example, imagine how much MORE comfortable and wealthy we would be if all productive activity was channeled straight back into public projects, instead of through the business owners and then ostensibly downward?
Either way, there will be corruption and losses. The question then arises, which is better off on average for society, and which is better on average for _me_. If the two align, I vote for what is better for society.
What do you think governments are?
How do you get people to even contribute to those projects? And who decides what good projects would be?
Why should the flawed concept of a planned economy suddenly start working for software development specifically?
Then why is it increasingly difficult for humans to _use_ a computer.
And no, Android and iOS devices are not computers, just like the washing machine is not a computer. They are toys.
And the computer software that did survive has to do rent seeking (SaaS) because investors love it.
Why?
Because all those extra niceties cost money that Microsoft can pay programmers to work on instead of hacking on arduinos or whatever else they'd do in their free time.
SaaS is just patreon that works. You pay the organization that builds it money every month, and you get a constant stream of updates and support.
I think you misread the GP. As I read it, it didn't say that "investors love SaaS".
Investors don't love SaaS; they don't really give a shit about software architectures. Investors love rent seeking. SaaS just happens to be the current means to that end.
I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up.
At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.