The former Eastern Block has factory bread that tastes better than most artisanal bread in the West. Same for all other foods.
The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.
And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.
The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.
>For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously.
The 'bread' you get in the Anglosphere is a crime against humanity. Not because it is machine made, but because it comes with a philosophy: looks matter more than taste.
Meanwhile Eastern Europe still uses the old soviet factory bread and the thing tastes like manna when you get it fresh.
>The recent rebuild of a section of the Bay Bridge took 11 years and went 2,500% over budget. Whereas the original entire bridge was built in 5 years, ahead of schedule and under budget.
To use an analogy from heart surgery:
Fixing a car is easy.
Fixing a running car is hard.
There comes a point at which starting from scratch is better than trying to fix the original mess. Which in our business means the company goes out of business and is replaced by something new.
If an earthquake knocked it down somehow people managed to move on until it was rebuilt. The same for the I-85 collapse in Atlanta. Amazingly, traffic was slightly worse but it’s always disastrous so it wasn’t that much worse. Freeway projects should probably shut down the road more often and just get done.
Since we're dealing with fiction, from a Deepness in the Sky:
>The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of "programmer archaeologists":[1] the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental time-keeping system is the Unix epoch):
>>Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
>This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library, hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.
So to answer your question, a mess of standards going back millennia with glue-code everywhere. I blame the separation of documentation and code for the coming dark age.
One of the many interesting things about the Zones of Thought is that all of those problems with software you describe are explicitly there to protect the likes of humans from what can exist on the other side of the singularity.
It's rather depressing. I think it feels like living in the 60s, everyone knows that nuclear war will be a disaster and everyone expects it to happen tomorrow. At least I have a first class ticket on the Titanic.
I know very little about Ada, but googling it leads me to understand that freeing memory in Ada is considered unsafe. If that's correct, safely freeing memory (generally in a destructor, much like C++) might be one advantage of Rust.
>Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.
Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while living.
> Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
Once upon a time there were many profitable business models for selling software.
Then software got big. You weren't selling a thousand copies anymore, now it's a billion.
The economics of software is that the price you "need" to charge goes down when the number of users goes up. If it costs ten million to develop and you have a thousand users, they each have to pay at least $10,000. If you have a million users they only have to pay $10.
If you have a billion users they each only have to pay $0.01.
You can get more than the $0.01 from each user through advertising. What you can't do is get an amount on that scale through payment processing, because the transaction overhead is larger than that.
So now you have a user that the advertiser is willing to pay $0.03 to advertise to. The users themselves are willing to pay $0.05 to not be spied on, but you haven't got any efficient way to get $0.05 from them. It'd have to be much more than that to justify the payment processing overhead, and the user isn't willing to pay that much.
So it's not a matter of the users being unwilling to pay, it's that we don't have an efficient way for them to pay that small of an amount.
Maybe if it wasn't locked to a small area, and had people willing to back it long term, it wouldn't fail?
A common Google problem is that for all that they are a global company, they can't launch shit globally. I was really interested in using Google Contributor, both sides, but limited launch meant that I could only look from far away and never ever encounter a site using it. Hell, I think some of the engineers who worked on it weren't in the very small group allowed to use it.
The real price of software includes the price of delivery.
Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist party and that organ harvester from Moldova.
> The real price of software includes the price of delivery.
The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.
(Well, it's slightly above zero, because all the networking equipment uses electricity, but you pay for your part of that in your power and Internet bills.)
AWS, which charges ridiculously high prices for bulk bandwidth, charges ~$0.15/GB, and half that if you have high volumes. If your software is 50MB, that's less than a penny. Meanwhile, if even this is too much for you, BitTorrent exists.
Point is: it’s important to keep the grand picture in mind and once in a while step back and think - “Shit...what am I doing?” even though you can’t do much about it due to family, responsibilities and other hard realities of life. When building a company, I don’t want to just build something that deceives people, deploy shady tactics and dark patterns. I want to run an honest business that I can reflect back in life and say “yep, it was a struggle but I did the right things.”
The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.
And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.
The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.