| Counterpoint - I think it’s going to become much easier for hobbyists and motivated small companies to make bigger projects. I expect to see more OSS, more competition, and eventually better quality-per-price (probably even better absolute quality at the “$0 / sell your data” tier). Sure, the megacorps may start rotting from the inside out, but we already see a retrenchment to smaller private communities, and if more of the benefits of the big platforms trickle down, why wouldn’t that continue? Nicbou, do you see AI as increasing your personal output? If it lets enthusiastic individuals get more leverage on good causes then I still have hope. |
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| ▲ | Terretta 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with you, however: One of the qualia of a product is cost. Another is contemporaneity. If we put these together, we see a wide array of products which, rather than just being trash, hit a sweet spot for "up-to-date yet didn't break the wallet" and you end up with https://shein.com/ These are not thought of as the same people that subscribe to the Buy It For Life subreddit, but some may use Shein for a club shirt and BIFL for an espresso machine. They make a choice. Maybe Fashion was the original SEO hack. Whoever came up with the phrase "gone out of style" wrought much of this. | |
| ▲ | fainpul 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > When it became cheaper to … did the quality go up? No, but the availability (more people can afford it) and diversity (different needs are met) increased. I would say that's a positive. Some of the expensive "legacy" things still exist and people pay for it (e.g. newspapers / professional journalism). Of course low quality stuff increased by a lot and you're right, that leads to problems. | | |
| ▲ | samiv 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well yeah more people can afford shitty things that end up in the landfill two weeks later. To me this is the essence of "consumerism". Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap. | | |
| ▲ | helloaltalt 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | But in the context of softwares, the landfill argument doesn't fit exactly well (well, sure someone can argue that storage on say, github might take more drives but the scale would be very cheaper than say landfill filled with physical things as well > Rather than think in terms of making things cheaper for people to afford we should think how to produce wealthier people who could afford better than the cheapest of cheapest crap. This problem actually runs deep and is systemic. I am genuinely not sure how one can do it when the basis of wealth derives from what exactly? The growth of stock markets which people call bubbles or the US debt crisis which is fueling up in recent years to basically fuel the consumerism spree itself. I am not sure. If you were to make people wealthy, they might still buy cheapest of cheapest crap just at a 10x more magnitude in many cases (or atleast that's what I observed US to do with how many people buy and sell usually very simple saas tools at times) | | |
| ▲ | samiv 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert! Maybe my opinion is just biased and I'm in the comfortable position to pass judgment but I'd like to believe that more people would be more ethical and conscious about their materialistic needs if things had more value and were better quality and instead of focusing on the "price" as the primary value proposition people were actually able to afford to buy other than the cheapest of things. Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits? | | |
| ▲ | helloaltalt 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Re software and landfill.. true to some extent but there are still ramifications as you pointed out electricity demand and hardware infrastructure to support it. Also in the 80's when the computer games market crashed they literally dumped games cartridges in a hole in the desert! I hear ya but I wonder how that reflects on Open source software which was the GP request created by LLM let's say. Yes I know it can have bugs but its free of cost and you can own it and modify it with source code availability and run it on your own hardware There really isn't much of a difference in terms of hardware/electricity just because of these Open source projects But probably some for LLM's so its a little tricky but I feel like open source projects/ running far with ideas gets incentivized Atleast I feel like its one of the more acceptable uses of LLM in so far. Its better because you are open sourcing it for others to run. If someone doesn't want to use it, that's their freedom but you built it for yourself or running with an idea which couldn't have existed if you didn't know the details on implementations or would have taken months or years for 0 gains when now you can do it in less time It significantly improves to see which ideas would be beneficial or not and I feel like if AI is so worrying then if an idea is good and it can be tested, it can always be rewritten or documented heavily by a human. In fact there are even job posts about slop janitor on linkedin lol > Wouldn't the economy also be in much better shape if more people could buy things such as handmade shoes or suits? Yes but also its far from happening and would require a real shake up in all things and its just a dream right now. i agree with ya but its not gonna happen or not something one can change, trust me I tried. This requires system wide change that one person is very unlikely to bring but I wish you best in your endeavour But what I can do on a more individualistic freedom level is create open source projects via LLM's if there is a concept I don't know of and then open sourcing it for the general public and if even one to two people find it useful, its all good and I am always experimenting. |
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| ▲ | Telemakhos 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up. When it became cheaper to mass produce sneakers, tshirts, and anything, the quality of the individual product probably did go down, but more people around the world were able to afford the product, which raised the standard of living for people in the aggregate. Now, if these products were absolute trash, life wouldn't make much sense, but there's a friction point in there between high quality and trash, where things are acceptable and affordable to the many. Making things cheaper isn't a net negative for human progress: hitting that friction point of acceptable affordability helps spread progress more democratically and raise the standard of living. The question at hand is whether AI can more affordably produce acceptable technical writing, or if it's trash. My own experiences with AI make me think that it won't produce acceptable results, because you never know when AI is lying: catching those errors requires someone who might as well just write the documentation. But, if it could produce truthful technical writing affordably, that would not be a bad thing for humanity. | |
| ▲ | dpoloncsak 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up?
...yes? It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality. It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time. | | |
| ▲ | samiv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc) In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money. | | |
| ▲ | dpoloncsak 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints Isn't this the exact point I was making...? I get you're arguing it's only a single factor, but I feel like the point still stands. More hobbyists, less financial constraints |
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| ▲ | Draiken 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before? If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point. If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not? As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers. Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software. |
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| ▲ | FrustratedMonky 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think for 'technical' writing, there is going to be some end-state crash. What happens when all the engineers left can't figure out something, and they start opening up manuals, and they are also all wrong and trash. And the whole world grinds to a halt because nobody knows anything. |
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