Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later?
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
Knowing that GTK $n-1 will soon be obsolete is enough reason to not put effort into learning it.
Incidentally, this is how you can distinguish between a good CS curriculum from a bad one. A good one focuses heavily on principles; the particular technical trappings are mostly just a medium, like Latin used to be in academia, now replaced by English. You pick up what you need to do to the job.
The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)
I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.
Government bonds already do this for absolutely everything. If I can put my money in a guaranteed bond at X%/year then your startup that's a risky investment has to make much better returns to make it worth my while. That's why the stock market is always chasing growth.
> Used to be, you had to find a customer in SO much pain that they'd settle for a point solution to their most painful problem, while you slowly built the rest of the stuff. Now, you can still do that one thing really well, but you can also quickly build a bunch of the table stakes features really fast, making it more of a no-brainer to adopt your product.
Yeah, and will be done by somebody else. I think this is the main problem, and if you get rid of it, you'll have a completely sensible strategy. I mean there are many government contractors who, through corrupt connections, can guarantee that work will be awarded to them, and very often doing just that.