Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.

Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).

Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.

The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).

Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035645

Points: 3

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One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelming with the sheer number of data points. That is indeed the art of visualisation.

But ignoring the signaling going on on various sides would be a mistake. "AI" is for all practical purposes a synonym for algorithmic decision making, with potential direct implication on peoples lifes. Without accountability, transparency, recourse etc the unchecked expansion of "AI" in various use cases represents a significant regression for historically established rights. In this respect the direction of travel is clear: The US is dismantling the CFPB, even more deregulation (if that is at all possible) is coming, big tech will be trusted to continue "self-regulating" etc.

The interesting part is the UK stance. Somewhere in between the US and the EU in terms of citizen / consumer protections, but despite brexit probably closer to the latter, this siding with dog-eats-dog deregulation might signal an anxiety not to be left behind.

Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.

It does all have a bit of Wile E Coyote feel to it. Keep gesticulating wildy to propel forwards before inevitably plunging in the abyss below.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan...

https://www.audubon.org/news/why-do-gulls-have-red-spot-thei...

Theoretically the internet would have enabled the long tail, making tiny domain focused niches viable. In practice discovery is the most gamed algorithm in existence. Unless you have the resources and inclination to spend quality time towards useless "SEO" nobody knows you are alive.

So you cannot "destroy" software. But you can have fast food versus slow food, you can have walkable cities or cars-only cities, you can have literate or illiterate society etc. Different cultures imply and create different lifestyles, initially subjective choices, but ultimately objectively different quality of life.

The author argues for a different software culture. For this to happen you need to create a viable "sub-culture" first, one that thrives because it acrues advantage to its practitioners. Accretion of further followers is then rapid.

This is a beautiful and unexpected connection. Drawing analogies between software and other forms of cultural expression is a long overdue mental shift. The use of linguistic expressions such "tech" and "engineering" highlights the prevailing desire to think of software as some sort of thing apart, less social, less political (and thus something we can profitably pursue with fewer moral qualms).

The switch from the original mentality of software as a product (literally shipped in a box), to the current business model of "user as a product" and software merely being the bait and hook is so profound that we are not really talking about the same industry anymore.

Not clear where the strange and twisted journey of software would lead. The infinite reproducibility at zero cost is not something current economic systems can handle. The enshittification might continue, further enshittifying society or open source becomes the norm.

Solving real problems is hard. Being distracted by snake oil salesmen, whether they sell digital scarcity or AGI only makes things worse.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42888348

Points: 2

# Comments: 2