Talking about (electronic-)waste, what’s choking is how much resources are required to do the same or less than what used to be possible with far more humble hardware and bandwidth, all that in living memory.
Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.
> it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.
Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.
Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.
I think a basic principle with limited plans that offer the ability to buy extra data is "You should be able to actually load the account platform at the 2G hobbled speeds in order to pay". The heavyweight website/app for the mobile network, combined with the use of a phone number-tied Android login as primary login credential rather than a user account, it meant that the only way to actually get 4G back online was to have access to wifi on the phone in the place & time you needed to re-up; If I did have that access at work, I wouldn't need the data.
Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.
I know at least on att prepaid they don't meter their own websites, if you have completely used your data up you can still access the website at normal speeds to change plans and stuff
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
> That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense
No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse. Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect? This is the economic corollary to that.
> Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
Correct. Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value (that also happens to strongly correlate with businesses remaining solvent and individuals remaining off the streets) that can be used to measure value delivered to individuals, and that there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.
Everything else in your comment is incoherent. "First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset." doesn't mean anything.
>No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get.
As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]
>Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect?
As human being, we can’t avoid to make errors, including in our representations, if that is what is meant here, then we have an agreement on that point. But as sure as there are no absolute total truth reachable in the frame of human existence, it’s impossible for a human to claim absolute ignorance in total honesty.
Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes. In a sense, sure it does measure some human values. Mostly values of dominating classes.
> Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value
Hello, here is an unreasonable poorly-educated person to which class disdain won’t bother them to the point they just keep quite.
> there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.
There are of course many possible alternatives. Actually neoliberal capitalism is a very brief moment in human history, even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2] Sure money can also be used in different social models, but not all models using money try to inseminate in its social members that it’s the one and sole best indicator of human fulfillment.
>Everything else in your comment is incoherent.
Once again, an LLM can give some chip feedback on such a matter, at least at the analysis level that LLMs can operate on.[3]
> As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]
This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)
> even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2]
You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.
> Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes.
Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value). If you respond, I'll do my best to debunk your arguments for future HN readers, but it's useless to try to convince you while your basic mindset is that you're shilling for a particular political point.
>This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do.
Once again, this kind of sentence show a total absence of will to go further than I/you mentality. A wider perspective is hard to achieve, if even possible, without putting the pretence of this/that personality. This is a path that seems as relevant as yelling at a computer when a software bug occurs. That might feel like a way to evacuate the frustration, but the computer won’t work better not matter what profanity is uttered (though it will never be bothered either, unlike fellow humans which have limited patience and have awareness of their own limited time to be alive).
>(an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)
LLM can certainly generate confabulations, but pretending they hallucinate or think is a lie. LLMs can also make totally sound output. Using a tool that can generate summary quickly doesn’t mean it voids the hand crafted answer that point to it.
It’s wise not taking LLMs output as a given regarding truth, but they certainly can be useful to point to considerations that can be falsified on one own preferred means.
>You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.
Once again, this kind of attitude brings zero constructive contribution to the discussion. Everyone can be tired or have a bad day and push easily the "ad hominem" button. Hopefully that’s not an deeply engraved habit, and just taking some rest might be enough to step back and provide more positive prose in a near future.
>Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value).
If anyone that disagrees with some premisses is disqualified of being a good faith debate participant, there is actually not much debate to hold, isn’t it?
> not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value
It makes manifest that this comment don’t take into account what was linked previously, so it’s better stop here, but for those interested in some other way to measure value and social systems:
Yeah, you have nothing, and the absolute drivel in the rest of your comment reflects that. These values are categorically not accepted as a proxy for value in any educated country.
How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
Through the platforms they choose to use. Coarse and inefficient and frustrating? Yes. Effective at demonstrating mass preferences and thereby imposing those preferences on platforms? Also yes.
> That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
Using an ad-blocker is obviously extremely different than what I'm describing here.
An ad-blocker is a composable feature that you can graft onto any particular market.
What I'm describing is a relative prioritization among different features, where one has to rank what they truly value, and sacrifice some of the lower-ranked things for the higher-ranked ones. That's categorically different than just being able to flip a switch and turn off ads and save bandwidth with negligible downside.
> Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
This is irrelevant - see above comment about relative prioritization. Features are one of the "dozens of things to optimize for in software development" that I mentioned above. I can point to many platforms where the bloated ones are winning - because they have the features that users want, and they value those more highly. That's my whole point.
>The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?
> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.
You clearly didn't read my comment before responding, because I very clearly made the point that it's not about users wanting worse performance, but a matter of relative priority. Suggest reading before responding.
> Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
And yet, clearly enough people are getting enough value from the site that it's worth the bloat to them, otherwise Reddit would have reversed the redesign years ago. I also know multiple people who voluntarily use the redesign while being aware of the classic interface.
I can't read your original comment anymore because it's flagged, but rest assured, I read it, and disagreed with it.
Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance. I think every poll they've had on the redesign has been negative.
Regardless, I don't feel like continuing this discussion given your abrasive tone. Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.
You clearly did not, because nobody who actually read my comment and has functional reading comprehension and basic logic skills would have written these responses:
> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?
> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.
And:
> and disagreed with it.
Disagreement is only relevant for matters of opinion. For matters of fact, like this one, there is no opinion - only facts and arguments. Can you not tell the difference between opinion and fact?
> Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance.
OK, now you're just trolling, because I already addressed this point in both of the comments you've responded to.
> Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.
You've proven that you're either unable to read or unable to use basic logic, so it's not even that I've won - you've eliminated yourself. You haven't been able to make a single valid point - you've just misread, misunderstood, and mischaracterized my arguments, and then failed to make any coherent response whatsoever.
I'm not claiming to speak for anybody other than me, although I'd be surprised if using half a gigabyte of metered mobile data would generally be very popular with users on metered plans.
Half a gigabyte if you stay on the page for five minutes, which is a pretty big assumption. If you have a TikTok attention span and are there for 30 seconds, you probably care far less.
(again, I'm not saying this is a good thing - read my parent comment again)
Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.