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.

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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)

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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.