Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> But I don’t want to ask Meta AI about the best history podcasts or ask about k-pop, I want to find the video of the trained raven I saw a couple weeks ago. I want to perform social keyword search. And on Whatsapp, I want to talk to people on Whatsapp directly, without a chatbot in the middle.

It's getting increasingly evident that tech companies have stopped caring about what their users actually want to do, and instead are nudging/funneling them into doing what they want their users to do. For a while it was voice assistants. "Use Siri!!" "Use Assistant!" "Use Alexa!" "Use Cortana!" "No, really, please use it!" "We're begging you." "OK, we're making it more prominent so you accidentally use it." "We're now removing the other options so you have to use it!"

I expect the same cycle with AI. "PLEASE, USERS, you have to use this AI product! It is the current fashion, after all. We pay $billions for GPUs and the salaries of hundreds of engineers, and it's expensive. You simply must use it for everything!"

I find this to be true in many areas of life, esp. in recent years. My perfect trail running shoe was made in 2006. My perfect car was made in 2008. Those products are no longer made, and the new ones are not "better", just "different". (Often worse tbh)

We get to buy the product someone is willing to make, not the product we want to buy. The product is often not "better" for the user, but for the company making it. And as a user you can just FEEL it dripping from every new thing. It's not appealing at all to me.

There must be an economics term that describes this. I've taken to calling it "supply side rules everything around me"

I'm holding on to my iPhone 12 mini and BOSE QC 35 II for dear life. It is rare these days to find a product that just works for you, and you always know that it's gonna be replaced by a crappier, more expensive model as soon as it breaks.

A thousand times this. I distinctly recall going to a Columbia store to get a new basic fleece jacket years ago and all they had were jackets with that stupid breast zipper pocket which I didn't want. It clearly seemed like the new style as anything without it was nowhere to be found on the floor.

I begged the sales person who dug one up in a box in the back room without the pocket.

My guess is slapping an extra pocket on there let them justify increasing the cost and margins because "you're getting more!"

Jokes on them, I just won’t use the tool, or I’ll spend tens of my potentially revenue generating hours trying to get it working in emacs

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