People who make addictive social media apps and bureaucratic enterprise software love to glorify their work by lumping it in with vaccines, clean drinking water, and global food distribution in order to claim some of the halo of those obviously beneficial technologies (though claiming “fire and rock tools” is taking that to a hilarious new extreme). I hate to break it to you but you don’t work on any of those things. You work on selling people ads and making it easier for their boss to fire them. That tech is neutral at best relative to these problems you’re claiming and often destructive — ask people in Myanmar about how social media has affected war and violence, for example. Digital technology hasn’t had a demonstrably positive impact on worker productivity let alone mortality, hunger, or war. Start being honest with yourself that working in tech is a lot more like selling carbonated sugar water or making reality TV shows than it is like saving the world.
Can’t wait for the AI-generated “botshit” (to borrow Cory Doctorow’s term) to start killing of social media sites. You can see from the decline of Twitter (and Facebook amongst anyone under the age of 40) how weak some of their hold on their users already is. Hopefully AI’s big “contribution” to tech of empowering spammers will be the thing that pushes them the rest of the way into their much deserved grave.
Another obvious cause I don’t see anyone mentioning: tech simply created a lot less value in the last decade than in any previous decade. Pretty much every one of the big hyped up technologies that was going to be the future of everything turned out to be a bust: IoT, drones, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and on and on. Even the ones that got some traction like ride sharing really were just castles of smoke floated on giant clouds of dumb middle eastern and Asian venture capital money looking for a greater fool. Most of the changes in web development tech have made software slower and more bureaucratic to make in order to support large FAANG-style software orgs.
There was absolutely nothing remotely on the scale of the smartphone, social media, the web, the personal computer, etc from previous decades in terms of actually creating real value for users.
The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.
The write off is based on the cost of creating the show. I think the article is wrong/sloppily phrased in its line about the value of the company. If they remove a show then it will never generate any future revenue so they can write the cost of producing it off as a loss.
The real scandal here is how little viewership streaming shows get and how little revenue they generate off of that viewership. Particularly for how expensive these shows are.
I wrote a couple of comments elsewhere in the thread about some specifics and consequences. But the takeaway is that the last decade+ of super expensive “prestige” shows on streaming has been a huge bubble that isn’t supported by the underlying revenue generated by the shows. In 2022 Netflix spent $16 billion on producing shows [https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...] to generate shockingly few viewing hours (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public). The future of streaming is ad-supported cheaply produced reality TV, ie exactly what niche cable looked like in 2008.
I think the article phrased it sloppily. I think what’s happening is that the studios write off the cost of the production as a loss and they can only do that if they don’t have them available to stream where they could in theory generate revenue in the future. The phrase about “the company’s value” is just sloppy/mistaken here.
The reason it makes sense for the studios to remove these shows for the minimal benefit represented by a lowered tax burden is that the shows generate shockingly little viewership let alone revenue. The mechanism for the relationship between those things is pretty fuzzy in a subscription-based world in the first place, Did a single viewer signup for Netflix or decide not to cancel their subscription because of The Irishman, for example? That movie cost Netflix something upwards of $160 million. It made $8 million in its theatrical release. Is there any world where the remaining cost was made up for by new or retained streaming customers? I highly doubt it.
This is why the whole streaming industry is moving to ad-supported and low cost reality content. And why the services are fighting the WGA demands to release streaming viewership numbers as part of paying writers residuals. It’s not the cost of the residuals. It’s the numbers. If streaming viewership numbers were public Netflix stock would go to 0 the next day.
They explain that the benefit to the companies is the tax write off. The part they don’t explain is how little money shows like these generate that they’re worth less than the potential write off. The big semi-open secret in streaming right now is that viewership is a lot lower than people think and much less correlated with show “quality” (where by “quality” here I mean production cost). This is why the whole industry is introducing ad-supported tiers. Look for that to be paired with shows that are radically cheaper to make and payout less to talent in residuals, ie. reality TV. The last decade of streaming has been a big bubble. The economics are fundamentally unchanged from 2008 basic cable so as these services try to actually become profitable expect the content to look a lot more like Toddlers And Tiaras than Westworld and expect to watch a lot more ads.
Game companies that do “boxed product” releases (eg. giant games that come out on a date announced up to years in advanced that make their money from up front purchases) certainly can be. My company makes Games as a Service games which makes things much less stressful. We ship the game every two weeks so if a feature isn’t ready it just ships two weeks later. The result can be (with the right team culture a much healthier working environment. I’ve had better work-life balance and more time to allocate to skills growth (both my own and to support that of my reports) here than I ever did in traditional tech.
I switched from software development consulting to being a game designer at a large studio. I still use my programming skills part of the time to prototype and build content but there’s a lot more variety day-to-day especially as I’ve gotten to be more senior: writing design documents, working with producers on the game’s business strategy, working with artists and ux designers, managing and mentoring, etc. The biggest difference is that I care about what we’re making in itself. Trying to make a game fun for people is a much more rewarding creative challenge than “get people to click on ads” or “make the website scale”. When I was a software consultant I thought I could find motivation in the pure craft of code. But as soon as I got into games I realized that can’t hold a candle to making a product where you feel creatively invested in the end result.
Bitcoin is not especially anonymous. Researchers have demonstrated techniques for de-anonymizing users through transactions: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/596.pdf
Dead on. Also, the main point when you're getting started with physical computing is not the processor, but the actual hardware you can plug into it, the LEDs, buttons, motors, thermistors, etc. One of the Arduino's really big advantages for beginners is that it is relatively "transparent" in terms of cognitive, cost, and setup overhead in this regard. It gets you to actually plugging things into it and seeing them blink the fastest and cheapest by an order of magnitude.
Oops, you're right it is a PIC not an AVR. Just a typo/brain-o on my part (I've corrected it in my above comment, thanks). Obviously there are steps up from the Arduino in terms of power. Just like there were "real" Unix-caliber mainframe systems available in 1975 when the Altair launched. and likewise, the Arduino-compatible boards are getting more powerful every day, cf the new Arduino Mega as well as the Illuminato. The core of my argument is of the "there's always room at the bottom" type. Without a smooth newbie-to-expert curve, the existence of more powerful and flexible systems is just a frustration to users who are locked out of the whole domain for lack of a starting point. I don't think the Arduino is the Last Word in Physical Computing, I think that for a large class of people what's important about it is that it's the first word.
Ladyada, I think the reason that people compare it to Arduino is not so much because it's in the same category (which it's obviously not), but because it seems to be bringing the "Arduino philosophy" to the low-level ARM/embedded Linux sphere. As someone who went from zero embedded device hacking to some fluency because of Arduino, the Beagle Board seems exciting because it has the chance of opening up that related space to me as well.
Those are all cool boards, but they are dramatically more expensive 3-10x and harder to get started with. I've used BASIC Stamp as well and so am not "making this up either". When I was first getting started with physical computing stuff, I tried to use BASIC Stamp and ran into quite a large number of difficulties. While the BASIC language is relatively straightforward, the installation/first run story is full of bad pitfalls. And BASIC Stamp also forces you to know a lot more about [edit: PIC not AVR] architecture in order to accomplish the basic things. Again, these obstacles aren't that big for programmers/more experienced EE-types, but for regular people they are deal breakers.
Maybe above 10,000 if you aggregate over the entire multi-decade period that the Basic Stamp has been around. Maybe. Also, BASIC the programming language may be simpler than Ruby, it may even be simpler that C/C++ that you program the Arduino in. But it's still much harder to get starter programming a Basic Stamp and much harder to get it to do anything useful. How long would it take an intermediate PHP programmer with no previous electronics experience to build a device that posted a tweet whenever they pressed a button using a Basic Stamp? With an Arduino and the right shields, that project would take less than an hour including downloading the IDE and getting everything configured.
You got it exactly. I'm not arguing that the Arduino is going to be sitting on office desks or pants pockets everywhere, but that whoever invents the thing that is will have cut their teeth and learned what works on an Arduino.
I definitely agree that the BeagleBoard is really interesting as well. I've got some friends working on a building an incredibly simple OS that would be used for education and tinkering. However, if you don't think the barrier to entry of having to build a board from scratch and jump over all the other proprietary hoops for working with PIC keeps out lots of people -- from programmers and other non-hardware geeks to artists, designers, kids, teachers, etc. -- you need to work on increasing your empathy with people who aren't you.
You sound exactly like the people criticizing the Altair when it first arose. How many elementary school kids or design students or Ruby programmers ever hacked the Basic Stamp? Whether it be historical coincidence or simply passing some minimal threshold of price/ease-of-use, these small improvements sometimes result in dramatic epochal changes.
Oh and freQvibez, it would be totally awesome if you wrote up a post explaining in more detail the options for sound creation and configuration. At this point, I've pretty much been mainly copying existing sounds and tweaking them. As far as I can tell there's no comprehensive spot with all of the options listed out.
Hey! Sorry about the delay on moderating your comment. For some reason MT didn't notify me about it being there. I've approved it now so it's up on the actual post. And thanks for the awesome tunes and your work on Bloops!
Hackety Hack was demoed at Art and Code as promised. Supposedly, _why's just cleaning up bugs and what not to get it presentable before throwing it out there. I had a friend who helped out with the Art and Code demo and he said it's functionality was really impressive but it was still a bit buggy. I think _why really wants to make a splash with the launch and so is being somewhat conservative with the release.
If you're evaluating Scarry's thought, before dismissing her as utopian (not that that's what you're doing) it's worth reading The Body in Pain as well which is about the grounding of political and other varieties of authority in the physical destruction of the body. It's a deep and serious book.
On Beauty, on the other hand, is definitely utopian. It's a poetic invocation of the power of beauty to connect us to the world. That's specifically why I thought it would be a good recommendation for programmers. As Scarry so eloquently outlines in this book, the ethical power of beauty specifically transforms aesthetics from something that's 'just a matter of subjective taste' to something core to the importance and meaning of what we do.
I'm working on that part. I'm going to setup a Sinatra app that can respond to the GitHub service hook API and which I can then poll from my local box to check for pushes.
It would be much much much easier. Possible, in fact. Markup is the most rigid part of the system. For it to change in a useful manner means that every tool from my browser to my xhmtml parsing tools must change to adapt before I can work with it in a way that doesn't degrade my development environment. Javascript, on the other hand, is the most flexible part of the stack. It is a dynamic programming language whose behavior can be altered by inserting additional code into my particular copy of the running page.
If they switched from FBML to JS for providing that stuff, I would go from not being able to view my app at all until it is deployed to being able to stub out all of their calls to return test data (and even do interactive UI actions) so that I and my designer could see it pretty much exactly as it will look once live.
Have you followed the rise of social entrepreneurship at all? Under its banner there are quite a lot of startups taking on problems exactly like the malaria dilemma you describe in the piece. They come at the issue from the opposite side of the spectrum: they're reacting to all of the waste and inefficiency in the old fashioned non-profit world, where something gets done because a millionaire's brother's wife is interested in it and done badly because she's not very good at solving the problem. So, they're trying to harness the power of market forces and the attendant efficiencies and motivations that go with them in order to solve these big intractable social problems. The social entrepreneurship movement encompasses everything from micro-finance -- which was pioneered by Mohammed Yunnus at Gramin Bank (for which Yunnus just won the nobel prize) -- to a revolution in funder logic and an increased focus on effectiveness metrics.
I'd be curious to read your thoughts on social entrepreneurship from a startup point of view.